What We Know So Far About Google’s June 2019 Core Update

Google Announces a Core Update for the First Time

Google announced the June 2019 Core Update with a simple tweet from the Search Liaison Twitter account on June 2. This marks the first time Google has ever announced a core update prior to rollout. By the time Google posted on Twitter, they had planned to roll the changes out by the next day, though the update did not complete rollout to all data centers until June 8.

Tomorrow, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2019 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this tweet for more about that:https://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 2, 2019

How to Interpret June’s Google Updates

Though the prior announcement led to a of speculation that Google planned to target certain black hat SEO practices, this update seems to target general content quality, authority and trust. Because this update coincided with the Google’s domain diversity change, we are still trying to sort out some of the changes in visibility we are seeing. Expect more information from us about the domain diversity change later this week.

After the core update, some websites lost traffic that had been thought almost immune because of their presumed authority. Examples include a well-known UK news site called The Daily Mail and a Crypto website called CCN.com, or Crypto Coins News. CCN reported such damaging losses of revenue that they had considered shutting down. In that announcement, they also mentioned that Coin Base, an important American crypto website, had also suffered ranking and web traffic losses.

It’s still not clear that any of these sites lacked authority or other ranking factors that might have caused the new update to lose trust with them and drop their ranks. The Daily Mail has a reputation for sensationalist headlines. On the other hand, it’s also the recipient of many British press awards and the second-most popular source of news in the UK.

How Did CS Marketing Clients Fare in the Core Update Shake-Up?

Because we steer our clients to focus on fresh, quality content and avoid black hat strategies, our clients came out ahead in the field. Even major sites that have great content, but lack trustworthiness suffered in the immediate aftermath of the June 2019 Core Update. Meanwhile many CS Marketing customers saw visibility gains ranging between 4 and 12 percent. Those gains are likely to last as competitors who saw a decrease in rank scramble to undo bad practices and replace bad SEO gimmicks with proven, sustainable SEO approaches.

What is a Broad Core Update?

If you’re fairly new to SEO, you may not understand what Google or search engine optimizers mean when they refer to Google core updates. Google’s search algorithm uses its own internal logic and hundreds of ranking signals to deliver search results for each query. While the search engine giant tunes their algorithm frequently, only a few dozen changes qualify as broad core updates.

For each of these updates, Google may tweak the relative weight, order or value that their system gives one, a few, or several signals. Broad core updates also tend to refer to changes that don’t narrowly target one or a few particular factors. For example, the famous Penguin and Panda updates focused largely on reducing SPAM and improving content quality.

Naturally, Google won’t come out with details of exactly what they changed because that opens the door for bad actors in the SEO community to jumps start their attempts to game Google’s system. Also, Google wants webmasters to focus on site quality and not on manipulating search engine results.

What if the June 2019 Core Update Impacted Your Website?

There’s no “fix” for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 12, 2018

As always, Google suggests studying their Quality Ranking Guidelines to understand how they define quality. In short, keep publishing quality content and finding ways to improve your site’s performance and usability. You should also keep track of search results for your website topic because the best way to understand how Google has changed is generally to study how the search results have changed.

Though there are lots of ways to handle SEO on your own, if you saw a substantial decrease in visibility last week, you should reach out to a professional SEO firm like CS Marketing to help you fine tune your strategy.