Google’s communications department gets an A+ this week with clear messaging on the core rollout and diversity update.
The News
Google’s June core updated finished rolling out to the web over the weekend. The total impact is still being diagnosed by the SEO community, but massive sites like Daily Mail and CCN have publicly confirmed that they were hit with huge traffic drops. The update started June 3rd and ended June 8th, so make sure to timestamp this period in your reports to see if it’s effected your own SEO performance.
Google announced another, separate update that ran from June 4th to June 6th. Known as the Diversity Update, this change was focused on reducing the amount of times a single domain would rank for a given query. According to Google, no more than two pages from the same domain should rank in the top results. If your domain owns multiple spots for a single keyword, you made find yourself losing real estate (and getting less traffic). On the flip side, if you’ve been pushed to the bottom, or completely off page 1, due to a competing domain set, you may see some performance improvements. Another good bookmark for performance reports.
A recent AMP bug might be impacting traffic from AMP URLs to your site. Right now, if you visit the Google AMP cache version of a page from search, the link to visit the main URL of the site doesn’t work. Google is looking into this bug.
SEMrush released a larger, accelerated backlink database, with over 6.7 trillion backlinks and a crawler maxing at 200k URLs per second. This puts SEMrush at (or near) the top of the SEO software pack.
Google reminds us that the HTTPS ranking factor is still an important ranking signal. Go secure people!
Another helpful reminder, Google makes it clear that updating content over time is useful! Duh. But also a nice datapoint when discussing content marketing ROI.
Mary Meeker’s annual internet report found that over 50% of the world is online, (growing from 24% in 2009). However, total social media growth is cooling, expanding just 1% between 2018 and 2019. Within the social media slow down, Instagram and YouTube maintain impressive growth. This is useful information to help coordinate and prioritize your social+SEO+content ecosystem.
