The pre-announced Google June 2019 core update that started rolling out this past Monday is starting to be felt by SEOs, publishers, site owners and webmasters. Let us be clear, it is incredibly early to be talking about the true impact of this update. That being said, we want to share some early data and industry conversation around this new core update.
Data providers
So far we we have some early data from SEO toolset providers including Sistrix, RankRanger, SearchMetrics and Moz. These are data providers that have huge datasets around Google rankings and thus they can sometimes see patterns. Keep in mind, the Google index is massive, and these tool providers generally have a small snapshot of the overall index size when measuring these changes.
Sistrix. Sistrix wrote a blog post sharing the data from the past day. They said “today’s data clearly shows the impact of the core update. In the daily Visibility Index of the Toolbox you can see changes from 05.06. on 06.06.” This data is from Google’s UK index. Here is a visual representation of this change for an example site:
Sistrix published the winners thus far from this update:
They also published the losers:
Johannes Beus from Sistrix wrote “Not only did Google pre-announce this update for the first time, but also the field of affected domains seems to be wider in this Google Core update than in previous updates,” said Steve Paine from Sistrix. “We are seeing many YMYL websites but there are also classical news sites, retail and many others. It appears that this Google Core Update is broader than the last updates. Importantly, there are significant changes after just 24 hours which means we can expect more as the week goes on. I can update you again if you need more.”
RankRanger. RankRanger sent us some data via email and posted a summary on Twitter. RankRanger measures the US search results and Mordy Oberstein from RankRanger clarified this update is still rolling out and they want to run the numbers again next week. But here is the early numbers from them.
“The gambling niche was hit hard as were the health and finance niches (though the update was/is impactful across the board),” Mordy Oberstein from RankRanger said. According to their data, it seems that while many sites fluctuated up/down the search results pages tended not to move a massive number of positions.
SearchMetrics. Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics told us while he is still working on the data “my preliminary analysis is that parts of the core update from March were reverted.” He added that this was “not systematically. It seems though that Google changed some factors to brand/authority too much in March and this is what was reverted. Especially in the medical space like a webmd.com or verywellhealth.com that lost, gained back their visibility.” This is something he said he predicted when he saw the update in March. “But in some other areas like UGC or Q&A I’m not seeing the same pattern of a rollback,” he added.
SearchMetrics will have more data later on and we will do another story once the dust settles with updated data.
Moz. Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz shared some early data on Twitter:
Seeing big gains for a few health sites yesterday, including Healthline and Verywell Health. More losses for Dr. Axe.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) June 4, 2019
No major shifts in SERP features, including Medical Panels.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) June 4, 2019
High flux across verticals, but unusually high for Health (114° vs. 70° for previous 30 days) and Food & Groceries (109° vs. 75°). Keep in mind that MozCast is split into 20 verticals, so this reduces the sample size quite a bit.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) June 4, 2019
The community
I asked on Twitter what the SEO community is seeing, here are some of those responses:
Sadly, my site @web_trickz is impacted by this update. Hate it. pic.twitter.com/LnikKE6YAY
— Mayur Agarwal (@mayurjango) June 5, 2019
One of our clients now ranks 1 for all of their major keywords. They are in the roadside assistance industry. pic.twitter.com/Og2q7JwyxC
— Moe Shahzad (@shazy85) June 5, 2019
Not sure if massive coincidence… we got hit with medic update at the same time as we changed menu structure. But big recovery today… pic.twitter.com/jWglfeGwMa
— Rick Talbot (@rtalbot55) June 4, 2019
Maybe just a case, one of my sites (low volumes) saw a traffic increase of 30-40% in the last two days pic.twitter.com/YJIawnrj9Q
— Andrea Crispino (@AndyTheDonk1) June 5, 2019
A site of mine tanked from top 10 results to positions 90+ for every keyword from the march 2019 update. Then on June 3 rankings snapped back to normal. I was literally going to abandon the site. Not now 🙂
— Stephen Hockman (@StephenHockman) June 5, 2019
Core update cont’d: As an example of hourly trending, you can see this site started dropping at 4PM on 6/3. Always interesting to see the hourly impact from a broad core update like this. More to come as I dig deeper. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/STiHIixVEw
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 5, 2019
Looks like one of my sites increased while the competitor is dropping. Mix bag of results and a bit early to tell but it is interesting the flux pic.twitter.com/XFjwqjNQvM
— William Rock (@WilliamRock) June 5, 2019
In addition, I posted tons of quotes on my personal search blog about what the community is saying and seeing within the online SEO forums and discussion groups. A lot of people have seen 30% changes in their traffic thus far.
What Google is saying
But what about Google, what is Google saying about this update. Of course, Google announced it:
The June 2019 Core Update is now live and rolling out to our various data centers over the coming days.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 3, 2019
Danny Sullivan from Google said this update will 100% be “noticeable.”
That’s about updates in general. The quote suggested I said that about core updates. Those are definitely noticable. That’s why we confirm them.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 4, 2019
Gary Illyes from Google said it is not done rolling out yet and can take some time to fully roll out:
That’s utterly hard to estimate. Out can go anywhere between 1 day and a couple weeks, depending on factors like data center health, network congestion and quality, etc
— Gary “鯨理” Illyes (@methode) June 5, 2019
It’s Early
It is still very early, Google is still rolling out this update to all their data centers. But we wanted to share some early data we have found about this update. Our advice is to remain calm, let the dust settle over the next week or so and then take a deeper look at your analytics. If you were hit by this update, then you need to step back, look at your site and evaluate if you want to make substantial changes to the content and structure of the site.
We will have more on this topic at Search Engine Land, so stay tuned!
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.