How much attention do you pay to the impact of Google core updates on your sites?

[MichaelCorfman]

Earlier today GPWA member newcusomeroffer started a thread about Google's announcement about a new core update in twitter earlier today in the following thread:

Google Core Update Incoming

As noted in that post, Google stated the following in their twitter feed here: twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1460970568128385031

Later today, we are releasing a broad core update, as we do several times per year. It is called the November 2021 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates is here: What site owners should know about Google's core updates.

So, for today's poll I ask how much attention you pay to the impact of Google core updates on your sites. Do you make a special point of monitoring the performance of your site when updates are rolled out by Google?

Besides voting in your poll, please share in a post what type of monitoring you do on your site. Do you monitor traffic to your site with respect to specific search terms? Or do you monitor your overall traffic without paying attention of specific search terms? And assuming you monitor traffic to your site in some fashion, how does that influence the work you do on your site?

Michael

[chaumi]

Ha, They've got us all salivating like Pavlov's dog at the sound of the words 'core update' (or shi***ng ourselves, depending on your point of view and.or what you might have been doing )


The reality is there is no point in constantly checking after those words are uttered. What happens now, happens. You can't control or influence it.

But really, the extent to which you monitor I think depends on what you've been doing for the preceding x months..........

If you've been lobbing along semi-normal, adding pages, tweaking odd bits of content, ordinary day to day stuff etc etc...then you're at the mercy of the changes/algorithm. Up or down is essentially luck and/or what others have done.

If you've been trying out new stuff like various forms of optimization, link structuring, schema, improving EAT in general, positively working on other external influences, site structure, etc etc...then now (hopefully) is the time when some of that might bear fruit.

But it's not really what happens now that's most interesting (although it's obviously good/bad nice/not nice to see a wild rise or precipitous drop). It's understanding why, what they did, what changed, whether you did anything that helped or hurt you. Because understanding all of that may help in future.

Unless they make a change that's truly fundamental and wide-reaching, then most impacts will likely be seen because of weighting distributions in ranking factors, or maybe even new ones.

So...you may have got 'lucky' by having implemented something that they now give more weight to.

The longer term potential benefits come from understanding what happened and why after it's all done and dusted. Although knowing that still doesn't give any guarantees, because next time they could reverse or step sideways. But still will give useful clues.

[datstheguy]

I **** my pants EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. We run clean operations and publish great content across our gambling and non-gambling sites yet, here we are, shaking at every single announcement.

Why? Collateral damages. These happen, and we have no recourse to fix anything as nothing's broken. What's even more stressful is that if we indeed got hit severely by any core update, we would have to let go of team members and that's hard to swallow.

Now, it is what it is and so far so good, but I feel for those affected by these updates if they haven't looked for trouble.

[newcustomeroffer]

I keep an eye on GSC to see if there's anything obvious that's happened to impressions and clicks, although if and when you do see something there it's probably already confirming what you'll be experiencing through clicks and FTDs on affiliate accounts.

I'll tend to have a flick through the various SEO forums to get a feel of what others are experiencing, there's a dedicated thread to this core update on the webmasterworld forum for instance but it's currently a little quiet so far - early days I expect.

[Nownow]

I try to focus not on everything and look at new updates

[nsa10]

I was affected by the worst