21 Dec Google Core Update – November 2021
Google rolled out the new core update, called the November Core Update 2021 on 17th of November 2021. This is the third update rolled out this year, the other two were released in the months of June and July 2021.
What are Core Updates?
Google’s core updates include broad and significant changes in the search algorithms that are designed to adhere to their mission, which is to provide the right content to the users of the search engine.
Although Google keeps introducing certain changes on a daily basis with the aim of improving search results, most of the changes aren’t distinguishable, but it definitely has an impact on the results.
The reason why Google announces core updates prior to roll out is due to the potential impact these changes would have to rankings.
The November Core Update 2021
The November Core Update was released on the 17th of November, which is the third broad update of the year 2021. The update was rolled out two weeks before the Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the two most popular online shopping seasons.
Data provided by SEMRush shows that the most recent core update had a hard hit initially whereas it slowed down rapidly.
As compared to the previous core update, the November update was more volatile on desktop search results, by 12% and by 23% on mobile search results.
The health sector was identified as the one major sector that showed a greater volatility, both on desktop and mobile. This was shown in significant changes in the rankings, with almost 16% of the URLs ranked in the 1 to 20 position were ranked poorly, before the November 2021 core update.
The drops or gains in the rankings don’t have anything to do with the pages, and it doesn’t mean that Google targeted specific sites or pages. It is just a change in the way Google assesses the content, to provide relevant search results for the users.
Focus should thus be given to providing quality content to deal with the significant impacts of such broad updates.
The July Core Update 2021
As mentioned above, there was no specific focus that Google gave to the July Core Update, which was released on 2nd of July, 2021.
The update was a broad core update that was aimed to make changes in the way the system assesses the content to provide the best and relevant results for the users.
Just after the release of the core update, a high volatility was experienced, with high fluctuations in the ranking. Interestingly, one industry that saw a huge fluctuation in the July core update was the Real Estate category, with the least seen in the Food & Drink category.
The June Core Update 2021
Google’s first core update of 2021 was rolled out on the 2nd of June, 2021 which was followed by the July 2021 updates. As the developers couldn’t roll out the entire changes in one go, the June core update was launched as a two-fold update, with a few changes to be introduced in the month of July 2021.
A few sites which were negatively impacted were the ones that had thin-content or the ones that offered content on sensitive topics, like, education, finance, health, recommendations and reviews. Google has categorised these websites as YMYL, ie, ‘Your Money, Your Life’.
These are considered to be the websites which are typically affected negatively due to the content presented, most of them are inaccurate and deceptive. This will have a negative impact on the lives of the people reading such content.
It was also observed that a few sites which were negatively affected as a result of the previous update, were able to gain visibility during the June 2021 core update. This would have happened as Google would have removed a few factors that had previously led these sites to lose their ranking and visibility.
