Jesus Mendez, the SEO Director at MailOnline, which operators DailyMail.co.uk, has admitted publicly that the site took a massive hit by the June 2019 Google core update which began rolling out June 3rd. He said the site “lost 50% of daily traffic” because of this Google update.
It is very rare for a publishing site that large to admit they were hit by a Google update – extremely rare to see a post about it in a public forum. But the transparency is clear and honest, which I do love. It launched in 2003, and according to Wikipedia it is/was “the most visited English-language newspaper website in the world, with over 11.34m visitors daily in August 2014.” Heck, I even wrote how smart they were when they hid an easter egg in their robots.txt file to hire a savvy SEO for their publication.
But now, the site lost 50% of its traffic, with an additional 90% drop in their Google Discover traffic – which can hurt big time for a publication that size.
Jesus Mendez wrote in as Google Webmaster Help thread “The day after the broad core algorithm update (June 3rd) we saw a massive drop in Search traffic from Google (lost 50% of daily traffic). This was a drop over the course of 24-hours and we have not made any changes to the site. Further, we saw our Discover traffic drop by 90% and has not improved. This is across all verticals, devices, AMP and Non-AMP. “
Here is a screen shot of the full post (click to enlarge):
There are no responses to this post – but wowza. We know this update can be big for some sites but the DailyMail really felt it!
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.