Google ushered in the new year by throwing Smart Offices web developers a curve ball the 2nd weekend of January 2016, there was a core Google algorithm update confirmed by Googlers. Website rankings of thousands of websites across the nation have been affected by the change. I will try to shed some light onto what happened and share some really interesting facts that can help you understand the nature of this algorithm a little bit better.
Looking at the biggest losers from January 10th 2016 in a software suite we used called SearchMetrics, we can see that most of the websites hit are news websites. This led some of the SEO specialists to form a theory that this algorithm change was news related. This diagnosis is definitely wrong though. There is a larger pattern behind all the drops and it clearly points to the conclusion that this algorithm change was actually related to how Google ranks brand-related queries.
Google is now showing completely different search results when we search for brands. Therefore now, when you search for “CNN”, you will be presented with results that better (in Googler’s eyes) respond to your search query.
The impact of this Google core algorithm update in terms of search results and visibility was huge, the impact on actual traffic might not be as big. There are definitely things we’ll need to figure out over the coming weeks / months though, like what the importance of site structure and URLs are. Interesting times!
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