Recently Google’s Danny Sullivan announced that they are rolling out a new update to its algorithm on 4th May 2020. It’s called a “core” update since it impacts a large number of the websites as it’s a big update.   

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Google update 4 May 2020. You can take a look at the image above from Semrush to get an idea of how major the update is. The image shows the movement of Google results from April 9 till May 7. You can check the chart, when it is green there is not quite a movement taking place in the rankings but when it turns red, that means there is high volatility.

So, you must be thinking what exactly about your website rankings?

In case you haven’t checked yet, you must go ahead and check the ranking of your website to get to know if the traffic has gone down or up. You can also sign in to your Google Analytics account and check the traffic to your site.

What were the most affected industries?

Google's May 2020 Core Update: The Winners and Losers

As you can check the image above, the Arts & Entertainment, Online communities, Business & Industrial and Games were the biggest losers of traffic and saw huge fluctuations in the rankings. No question all industries were affected by Google’s algorithm update, but the ones at the bottom were just slightly affected.

There is one big misbelief among people who are new to SEO that if your website has a good domain score, you can check the Backlink checker and you will get more web traffic o your site and there will be no effect on your website due to Google core updates. That is incorrect.

Update Website content regularly

It is suggested that you should publish a minimum 4 blog articles per month for retaining the site traffic. You can schedule a specific day like Wednesday or Friday, and post it on that every week.

There is no fixed guarantee that with regular posts you will be able to increase the site traffic, the key is to keep the content relevant and informative to your audience as much as possible and make sure the content is better than your competition.

Work on your thin content

Google crawls website extremely fast and it checks the URLs for any kind of SEO errors. One of the most common errors in the website’s pages with thin content (word-count low). Thin content is considered as a big OnPage SEO issue with no added value.

The majority of sites PPC with thin content are 3 times more likely to be affected in a negative way by Google’s algorithm updates.

Rectify SEO errors on your site

One more interesting thing to notice here is that the website with more SEO errors gets affected greatly. So, it does not imply that if you have a lot of SEO errors you can never rank your site or you will get impacted the most by the Google algorithm updates.

The errors that hurt most of the sites are related to issues such as duplicate title tags and Meta descriptions. Therefore, when there is a large number of pages who have duplicate meta tags, that is a problem then.