Early data around the Google June 2019 core update shows some winners, losers

  Marketing, Rassegna Stampa, SEO
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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:

The community

I asked on Twitter what the SEO community is seeing, here are some of those responses:

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:

Danny Sullivan from Google said this update will 100% be “noticeable.”

Gary Illyes from Google said it is not done rolling out yet and can take some time to fully roll out:

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.

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