What are Google Core Updates?

A Google core update is a significant, broad change that Google makes to its search algorithms and systems. These updates are designed to improve Google’s ability to present helpful and reliable results to searchers. They are not penalties for violating Google’s spam policies and don’t target specific pages or sites. Instead, they improve how Google’s systems assess content overall. Google typically releases these core updates a few times a year.

When a core update impacts a site it can have devastating effects. These can sometimes be reversed, but in the last few years, most sites impacted by core updates struggle to recover. In many cases, I’ve found that sites that are impacted are often ones with good SEO knowledge. As Google’s systems shift to use more AI to predict what’s likely to be helpful, SEO becomes less helpful than truly being a quality resource that people trust as a go-to source for your topics.

The March 2024 core update represented significant changes to Google’s core ranking systems. They brought in new signals and systems. The helpful content system was abolished and now helpfulness is assessed using a variety of signals.

Recommended read: The March 2024 core update. What to know and how to adapt.

Quick facts

  • Purpose The main goal of a core update is for Google to get better at presenting relevant and authoritative content to searchers.
  • Frequency Google tends to release two to three core updates most years.
  • Impact If a site is affected by a core update, changes often start within 24 hours of Google’s announcement. These updates can cause significant fluctuations in search rankings, leading to traffic increases for some sites and decreases for others.
  • Identification You can determine if your site has been affected by looking at your Google organic traffic in Google Analytics. If there’s a noticeable change in the trajectory of your site’s traffic around the date of the update, it’s likely you’ve been affected.
  • Not a Penalty A core update hit is not a penalty. If you have a manual action from Google, you’ll see it in Google Search Console. Core updates are algorithmic filters, and you can’t file a reconsideration request after an algorithmic drop.
  • Relevance and Authority Core updates involve Google’s assessment of the relevance of a site overall, more so than issues like spammy links.
  • E-E-A-T Core updates represent Google’s efforts to improve its ability to determine which content is most likely to be helpful and relevant to searchers. Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) are key components in this assessment. Google’s perception of what E-E-A-T is can change from update to update, with factors like “experience” potentially being more heavily considered in some updates.

If your site experiences a drop in traffic following a core update, it indicates that Google’s algorithms have determined that other content is more helpful and relevant than yours. The key to recovery involves improving your E-E-A-T and the quality of your content.

Google Algorithm Update List

Recommended Reading

Have Marie assess your site

My process in assessing sites and working towards recovery

1. Assess keyword after keyword and compare your page to those that Google is ranking well.

2. Consider E-E-A-T. In some cases sites can see improvements by making changes to improve how Google views your business and its legitimacy and popularity. For example, some sites might benefit by adding expert authors (really, not in name only – like have them actually write and edit your content), improving author and site recognition across the web, and improving site popularity. For others, improving E-E-A-T may mean doing more to demonstrate experience within the content you are writing. There is no one change that will help here. The goal is to send Google signals that help it understand that you are a legitimate business that people know, trust and like. My helpful content workbook walks you through many things you can do to assess and improve E-E-A-T.

3. Consider how well your pages meet searcher need as compared to those that are ranking. Google’s helpful content system, introduced in 2022, was a machine learning system that is continually learning the characteristics of content that searchers tend to find helpful. In March of 2024 Google made significant changes to their core systems, bringing their assessment of helpfulness into the core, and abolishing the helpful content system.

Their primary goal is to put helpful content in front of a searcher. For each keyword, put yourself in the shoes of a searcher and ask yourself whether, after a searcher has already read what’s currently ranking, they would find your content original and helpful.

4. Consider relevancy. We want to always be writing for our audience first. Still, there are things that can be done to improve how relevant your content is to the topic. I am doing more testing on my theory on writing content that is people-first but uses an understanding of vector embeddings and their possible use in search. I am studying this as I review sites impacted by the recent core updates and  hope to publish more information soon.

5. Consider originality and insightfulness. This is the most common culprit I see for sites impacted. The content is essentially no better than what currently exists online. Read this patent where Google talks about giving an information gain score and ranking pages according to how much additional information a searcher is likely to learn by reading your page.

5. Make significant changes in quality across your site. Improve content, do more to demonstrate real world experience, become known for your topics, create incredibly helpful content, focus on creating content that your audience is actively seeking out rather than trying to reproduce what others have already written on, improve user experience (not so many ads!), make it easy for searchers to find the answer that they’re looking for, use more images, start playing with adding video of real people talking. Your goal should be to truly become the most helpful resource that people seek out for your topics.

6. Wait until the next core update runs. While you might see incremental improvements along the way, you will need to wait until Google runs another core update in order to see significant recovery.

Hire a consultant

You can hire me to assess your declines, or, I’ve put together a list of incredible people whom I trust to help as well. The following people offer traffic drop consultation.