Recently On May 4th, Google started to roll out a major update to its algorithm. They call it a “core” update because it’s a large change to their algorithm, which means it impacts a lot of sites.
The chart tracks Google on a daily basis and when it shows green or blue for the day, it means there isn’t much movement going on. But when things turn red, it means there is volatility in the rankings.
Now the real question is, what happened to your traffic?
You should also log into your Google Analytics account and check to see what’s happening to your traffic.
Hopefully, your traffic has gone up. If it hasn’t, don’t panic. We have some information that will help you out.
Let’s first start off by going over the industries that have been most impacted…
So What Industries Were Affected?
As you can see, travel, real estate, health, pets & animals, and people & society saw the biggest fluctuations with rankings.
One big misconception that we hear from people new to SEO is that if you have a high domain authority or domain score, you’ll continually get more traffic and won’t be affected by updates. That is false.
Fix Your SEO Errors
Now, this doesn’t mean that if you have a ton of SEO errors you can’t rank or you are going to get hit by an algorithm update. More so it was one type of error that hurt sites more than others. It was sites with duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.
One thing to note was that many sites have duplicate meta tags, but when a large portion of your pages have duplicate meta tags, it usually creates problems.
Most of these sites didn’t get much traffic in general, but for the 363 that we could dig up that generated at least 1,000 visits a month from Google, 151 saw a decrease in traffic by at least 10%.