25.03.2019
For a few days now, SEO specialists have been discussing the most recent Google algorithm update. It’s worth emphasizing that this is a core update, which means a change in the core search engine algorithm. Google have a habit of notifying such changes in advance, and so they did this time as well.
Experts gave it the working title ‘Florida’. Many also claimed that it’s Medic update #2 (with the first one implemented in August 2018) for YMYL pages.
The update considerably affected Polish search results. In SERP Weather, we’ve been observing big changes.
History of changes in search results over the recent weeks. Source: new.senuto.com
It’s evident that the first shifts in search results began in February, and since March 13 we’ve been experiencing quite extensive changes (just to remind you, the change index. is a metric showing how many websites underwent a change in visibility by at least 20% over a week. The index presents an extent of shifts in search results).
I’ll try to answer some questions in this article:
With the last update to Senuto, we’ve been able to implement the classification of websites and keywords. All keywords and websites are classified into 403 categories (IAB standard), which allows us to analyze thematic categories of the websites* instead of the entire index.
*applies only to Polish market.
Was it the end of the Medic update?
To verify that, I analyzed the following:
The table below presents an analysis of websites which had 200–5000 keywords in TOP10 before the update, but lost around 15% of their visibility after the update.
Let me explain what individual columns represent:
Table 1 – not found
Conclusions drawn from the analysis are pretty obvious. As far as small websites are concerned, it wasn’t a Medic update. Health categories weren’t the ones to note the most substantial drops. Let’s see how it looks like in the case of highly visible websites, meaning those which are supposed to be rich in content.
Here I analyzed websites with more than 5000 keywords in TOP10; they also noted a considerable 15% drop in visibility.
You may observe that a majority of big websites which noted a drop are classified into Health categories. When their visibility was on the decrease, they lost 23% of their keywords on average, which translated into an average number of over 18 thousand keywords. There’re also such categories as Pregnancy and Upbringing which were considerably impacted by the update as well – nearly 7% of the websites that met the pre-defined criteria.
Who’s capitalized on the situation?
When someone loses, there’s someone who gains. Let’s reverse the situation and analyze the same two scenarios, yet in reverse – websites that gained at least 15% keywords in TOP10.
Table 3 = not found
Here things get very interesting. We noticed that only big websites had noted a drop in Health category. In this case, you can observe that their place was taken by multiple small websites; they gained even 35% of keywords on average, which translated into an average increase of 222 keywords in TOP10 per website. In total, they gained 111 thousand keywords in TOP10, that is over 30% of the drop noted by the big websites from the same category. The remainder of the keywords was picked up by tiny websites visible for a few dozen keywords.
An example of such a website is czytelniamedyczna.pl, which increased its visibility post-update by 55%. What’s interesting, this website (like many others) had previously noted a visibility drop with the August 2018 update (Medic #1); I’m going to cover it later in this article.
The greatest shifts here were also noted in Health category. However, it needs to be mentioned that websites on the increase weren’t as visible as the ones on the decrease. If you divide the number of websites by the former total of keywords in TOP10, you’ll see that each of the websites that noted an increase was visible for 10 thousand keywords in TOP10 on average, whereas those websites that noted a drop were visible for 124 thousand keywords on average. This proves that small and medium (in this case) websites took place of big websites.
We analyzed the last update by category, now let’s do it by website. Let me show you who’ve won the most and who’ve lost the most on a few specific examples.
When it comes to big websites, Health category exhibited the most drastic drops. Let’s take a look at the most significant decreases.
This table shows additional data, explained below:
The following conclusions can be arrived at:
I analyzed small and medium websites separately. Below are listed 10 websites in the category that noted the biggest drops.
Only few websites among those that dropped the most went back to their condition before Medic #1. Most of them have been getting ranked lower for quite a long time now and the recent update only sped this process up.
Here the hugest drops without any category filters are taken into account.
As you can observe, 5 out of first 6 websites that noted a drop are classified into Health category. Those were the most spectacular drops, which I’ve mentioned earlier. You’ll find here a couple of websites which regained their visibility level from before Medic #1.
There’re also websites which didn’t manage to restore their condition from before July 31, 2018, but they’ve been on the decrease for a long time and the update only accelerated it. What’s interesting, polki.pl, zdrowie.gazeta.pl and wylecz.to – in spite of considerable drops – are still more visible than prior to Medic #1 – they were growing rapidly over that period of time.
Here it’s no secret that Google made adjustments after August 1, 2018. Virtually all the largest websites that gained on this update, lost on the previous one. On the other hand, only few websites were able to get back their full visibility. This means that Google made an adjustment, yet it didn’t concern all the keywords. It’s as if the formerly used algorithm was improved.
In this case, it’s even clearer that websites which capitalized on this update are those (all of them) affected by the update of August 1. In principle, only 2 out of 10 regained their full visibility after Medic #1. Therefore, it’s only a mere adjustment this time as well.
This is also an interesting situation. The websites on the increase include several sites of Onet, which noted a drop in October 2018 and which have begun to regain some of its visibility now. There’s also rossmann.pl which wasn’t migrated well enough, and the update somehow sped up its return to search results. Basically, only two websites from this list were affected by Medic #1; increases were noted not only in Health category (only 4 out of 10).
We analyzed the biggest winners and losers, now let’s have a look at two specific cases and try to find the cause of their drop.
This is a website which was second to lose the most on this update, right after books.google.pl. When you look at the visibility chart, you can notice a drastic decrease in the number of keywords in TOP3 and TOP10. As far as a percentage loss of visibility is concerned, it doesn’t stand out when compared to others, but it definitely lost the most in terms of figures.
Visibility chart for polki.pl; source: new.senuto.com
You may observe a drop of over 120 thousand keywords in TOP10 and over 70 thousand keywords in TOP3. I started with an analysis of the sections of polki.pl – the website which discusses health topics, but not only; I wanted to be sure whether it had been those topics precisely that had suffered post-update.
The screenshot below contains certain information:
Drops across the sections of polki.pl
It’s evident that polki.pl suffered the most severe traffic loss in the /health section, which is the website’s largest section without a doubt. There’re also the /family and /diet-and-fitness sections that also can be classified into Health category.
Subsequently, I analyzed keywords lost by the website.
A few examples, translated into English for convenience of the reader:
I noticed an extremely important thing: in numerous situations, when the website was on the decrease, the URL was changed as well, for instance:
Herpes zoster:
Depression:
Looking at those articles, one may observe that long and really informative articles were replaced by their shorter and worse versions, which naturally contributed to the drop.
There’re as many as 22 thousand similar cases! Therefore, the website fell prey to its own poor architecture of information. That’s the reason why so many great articles lost their visibility just like the ones described below.
Articles in Health category at polki.pl which lost the most
There’re articles that lost around 5000 estimated visits.
Conclusions
Now a positive example – zdrowie.radiozet.pl; it’s a website which lost its visibility because of Medic #1, but managed to get it back and even increase it by 5%.
Let’s analyze the following sections:
Analysis of the growth of zdrowie.radiozet.pl by section
The website gained the most in the /diseases section – it noted a visibility increase of as many as 300 thousand visits.
Below are listed the most frequent common words within key phrases that noted an increase.
Typical diseases, as you can see. For example, there’re 45 key phrases that include the name the name “rwa kulszowa” (sciatica in English) gained by the website, which generated 18 thousand visits overall.
I also checked whether the increases were caused by changes in the URLs (like in the case of polki.pl). There were only few similar situations, so the increases weren’t caused by them.
For good measure, I analyzed if the website gained new keywords or if it was rather the old keywords that went back to their place. I tested a 200-keyword sample and got the following results:
Clearly, the old keywords returned, but got ranked 5 positions higher on the average. The website based its growth on them specifically.
Final conclusions
Whatever name we could give this update, there’s one thing certain – it’s made quite a commotion. One may arrive at a few unambiguous conclusions:
As evidenced by the data, the update is still rolling out and further shifts are probably yet to come. We’ll monitor the situation and get back to you in a week or two.
What are your thoughts? If you have something interesting to share about the recent update, leave a comment down below!
Meet Senuto in 1-hour online training. Free.
