So what's a "Core Update" anyway?


Basically this is the way Google keeps spam sites out of its top results. Because Google is the most popular search engine, websites that get high ranks there will get clicks and visits. And so Google is subject to relentless pressure from criminal and borderline criminal enterprise websites that are trying to figure out how Google ranks websites and what they can do to game the system and get high ranks they don't deserve.


As you may guess, this happens pretty often, and so Google releases a "core update" about once or twice a year to rid itself of websites that are engaging in questionable practices to inflate their organic search visibility.


No system is perfect, of course, and so whenever Google makes a core update, it's rare but not unheard of for a relatively normal website that doesn't get involved in shady tactics to get "hit" by a core update. This vulnerability is due to the mind-bogglingly large number of websites in Google's index. No matter what kind of standard they apply, there are going to be marginal cases that get impacted.


Were You Hit By a Core Update? Try Matching Your Analytics to Google's Calendar


You can tell if your site was hit by a Core Update if your organic traffic and rankings saw a significant, sustained drop within 24–72 hours of an official Google algorithm announcement. Go to your Google Search Console account and check there. Very often, Google will put an official announcement in its notifications that a core update was rolled out on such and such a date. Next, check your "Performance". If your site was affected by the core update, you will see a 25-75% drop in organic clicks within a couple of days after the core update rollout was announced.


That's something else to know as well; the core update doesn't happen all at once. Core updates are "rolled out" over a period of two to four weeks. Google has a large number of data servers all over the world, and so they will launch the core update on a selected number of these servers to test how the update is affecting their results page. If things go well, they'll "roll out" the core update onto additional servers, until finally all of their data servers have the new core update instructions. Google might tweak the update during this rollout process if they don't like what they see.


Diagnose the Scope of the Core Update Impact

One of the things you want to look at following a core update is whether every page in your site saw a big drop in organic search clicks, or whether it was just a couple of pages. This is another important "tell" for your website. If it was a core update, then basically every page in your site will see a drop in rankings and traffic.


Check your site's most important pages (home pages, popular pages, etc) and determine how much, exactly, traffic dropped after the core update. If you see that some pages dropped and other pages stayed about the same, then your site wasn't impacted by Google's update, and the change in organic presence might be the result of a new competitor, or a change in user behavior, or something else.


Did Google's Update Change What It Wants to See?

If the evidence you have so far gives you a feeling your site was affected by an update, one thing you can do is check the search results for your most popular keywords. As I mentioned earlier, it's possible for sites that aren't engaging in any bad behavior to get affected by an update.


Why is this? Why do bad things happen to good sites? It's because Google is a business, and they are continually evaluating how they make money, which is by delivering a good search experience. Google may decide, for example, that it prefers pages with videos for your most popular keywords, instead of article pages, and the update will revise search engine results pages to show this preference.


So hey, this may be an opportunity to revise your content and improve the experience of your own visitors. Check the top pages in the search results and ask yourself if you can make changes to your content so that it's in-line with the contents in the top pages.



E-E-A-T and Content Quality: The Usual Suspects in Core Updates

E-E-A-T means "Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness". E-E-A-T is a metric that Google applies to the web pages in its index; they want to make sure that their top search results for a keyword demonstrate all of these things.


Very often in a core update, Google changes how they determine E-E-A-T, and websites might see a drop in clicks because of that revision, not because they were engaging in underhanded spammy practices.


One of the websites I managed, for example, saw a 25% drop in organic clicks for all pages. This was a vitamin supplement website, and all of their practices were above board. I checked the news and found out that a core update was launched within days of the site's drop in clicks. When I looked closer at Google's comments about the core update, I saw that they had put a new emphasis on E-E-A-T. Since the website I managed was related to health, it made sense that they were affected by the update, because an authoritative site on people's health should demonstrate expertise, trustworthiness, and experience.


So the new guidelines that Google required to satisfy E-E-A-T were a wakeup call to the site owners. Previously, they were getting along okay in organic search with semi-sourced claims about their products, but the latest core update put websites with definitive health information on top of the search results.


Why There is No "Quick Fix" for a Core Update


When a website's traffic goes down after a core update, it will be some time before the clicks go back up. How soon they go back up will depend on a lot of different things, including how many competitors there are, Google's expectations for website content, user search behavior around that keyword, and so on.


With the vitamin supplement website I mentioned in the last section, another factor affecting their traffic was the sites that linked to them. Even though the vitamin dupplement website didn't engage in bad practices, some of the sites that linked to them did, and Google devalued them all with the core update. This meant that the vitamin supplement website had less authority from its backlink portfolio, in addition to Google's new content requirements defined in the update.


At the same time, Google is monitoring the search results following a core update, and very often they will revise the algorithm as the update continues to roll out, just to make sure their results are useful. Google usually announces the expected completion date of the rollout when the core update launches, so keep those dates in mind as you work through the effects of the core update on your website. It's not unheard of for a website's organic clicks to fall in the immediate days following a core update, but then slowly return to their expected clicks as the rollout finishes.


How a Professional SEO Video Review Identifies Your Specific Recovery Path



While a generic checklist can tell you that a page is "missing a meta description," it cannot tell you why Google suddenly decided your competitors' content is more authoritative than yours. After 22 years in the SEO industry, I’ve seen that the most damaging hits from a Core Update aren't usually technical glitches; they are nuanced shifts in how Google perceives your site’s expertise and trust. A professional video review can cut through the overwhelming data of Search Console to show you exactly where your content fell short of Google’s evolving standards, providing the human context that automated tools consistently miss.


The path to recovery starts with a clear, prioritized roadmap of what to fix first, rather than a scattershot approach that wastes time and resources. My video-first reviews are designed to be your diagnostic "second opinion," identifying the specific "quality signals" that triggered your drop and outlining the exact steps needed to win back your organic visibility.


Don't let another update cycle pass while your traffic continues to slide. Click here to book your $50 Professional Video SEO Review and get a veteran's eyes on your site today.