Google’s Latest Algorithm Update Will Probably Hurt Your Search Ranking
If you’re a musician, artist, engineer, producer, songwriter or label owner, nothing is worse than looking at a Google search and finding your not right at the top. Even worse, maybe you’re down the page or, horror of horrors, not even on the first page. That’s why SEO is so important and luckily some of the most basic elements of it are now easy to implement. No matter how hard you work on it though, every year or so Google throws us a curve with a new algorithm update that upends all that hard work, and that’s what just happened again.
Google just confirmed it’s rolling out its latest update (see the graphic at the top of the page), and as usual, isn’t telling us exactly what it’s updating. Even worse, it’s preparing us all for lower search rankings in a statement.
“Several times per year, we make substantial improvements to our overall ranking processes, which we refer to as core updates. Core updates are changes we make to improve Search overall and keep pace with the changing nature of the web. While nothing in a core update is specific to any particular site, these updates may produce some noticeable changes to how sites perform.”
There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor been subjected to a manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those guidelines. In fact, there’s nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites. Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better.”
What Google is saying is that your website will probably take a hit in its search ranking due to the algorithm update, but it’s not your fault and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The good news is that these new rankings are usually temporary until the new algorithm has some time to learn what it needs to in order for things to go back to normal.
In other words, hold tight, don’t freak out, and check everything again next month to see where your website is ranking. Odds are that it will be back where it is today.
