Google is known to roll out core algorithm updates regularly throughout the year. This November, 2019 core update coincides with the Google BERT update and is causing a lot of confusion in the SEO community. Despite many webmasters claiming that they are following Google’s own guidelines and doing nothing but improving pages and content quality, many sites seem to lose rankings and traffic indexes.

Major websites have reported as much as 40% decline in their overall traffic and rankings. Some sites that were ranking at top search results positions for their main keywords have now disappeared in the 4^th or 5^th pages. This has raised speculations about Google’s intent to deliver clear and concise experience for users and webmasters. However, digging deeper into the matter, it becomes evident that the core problem might be at the most hit website’s end.

Quite simply, Google’s recent BERT update is not to blame for this ranking decline for many websites. It may be caused by their core update that changes ranking algorithms yet again.

What You Need to Fix

Google stated in one of their official statements that fixing things will not help recover websites back to their former rankings. This probably (most likely) means that traditional list of fixable things SEOs usually relate to including technical SEO may have very little to do with actually fixing your ranking hit website. This update is very likely mainly about relevance of content to user intent.

You will find many SEOs relating this ranking drop problem to all sites that they audit with technical SEO factors. However, this statement also falls short of light when you consider the fact that most top-ranking sites are not doing the best with technical SEO factors.

Page Load Speeds

Yes, page speed is important. Yet, even Google’s John Mueller has said officially that it is one of the many SEO ranking factors. Yet, many of the other ranking factors are more important than page speed. Upon a little self-research, you can easily see that top-ranking sites aren’t Usain Bolts when it comes to loading speeds at all.

Even some sites that are optimized solely for speed are now being outranked by slower sites. A question asked from Google’s John Mueller regarding why some top-ranking sites still load slower in mobile got this response:

Google has a lot of different ranking factors. Websites simply don’t have to get everything perfect. A combination of many ranking factors can provide top ranking. He also said that Google says page speed is important but some top sites are not the fastest, so it must not be as important as some webmasters have interpreted. Page speed is definitely important for best user engagement but it doesn’t mean you should compromise on everything else in favor of it.

Popularity signals, content relevance and many other ranking factors might outweigh load speeds. Google pays a lot of attention into what user wants to see. However, load speeds are and always will be important as this boosts time spend by an average visitor on site boosting rankings in many ways.

404 Errors and Missing Pages on Site

As big of a crime this may sound like for professional business websites, this occurs a lot more than many people expect. Websites often have missing pages that is usually the case with retail product sites and others that have hundreds of pages. However, John Mueller had a different response to this when asked about 404 response pages.

He said when Google checks URLs and finds out about a server error or finds that a Page Not Found error, they will highlight this in the search console. He also added, it is fine for websites to have missing pages. According to his reply, this is not something webmasters need to worry about. How does it affect page or site ranking then?

Well, the answer is quite simple. Visitors click on a website looking for answers to their queries. If they see a page Not Found error, they will simply leave the site instead of browsing other pages. This shortens their time spent on a page or site. Google notices this and takes it into account when awarding raking points.

It may be indirect but 404 Errors and Page Not Found Errors are quite substantial and yet might even be outweighed by relevance.

Spammy Links – Disavow Them

It is not a hidden fact that Google ignores paid and junk links. The more important factor for Google is if a page on a site answers search queries put in by users. If the page has relevant content regardless of its link situation, it will still be ranked.

Paid links do boost a regular site for a short while. However, these paid links tend to stop working in a matter of days or months. This drops the target site back to its original ranking position. This is also how Google ignores links. A site gets penalized when it reaches a certain defined threshold of many different spam signals.

If a site gets thousands of keyword-optimized anchor texts for sites all over the internet, it will raise flags. This will put it under a hand review. Google simply ignores off topic not so relevant keyword-optimized anchor text links from such spammy sites. Their relevance can simply not be counted on for the link.

Yet, building a number of links has worked for many years and spammy link builders have also taken advantage of this. However, upon reaching that defined threshold, site in target will be flagged and will come under an extensive review. Google can also rank sites that have spammy links yet. John Mueller has said that:

Google tries to focus on the overall ranking situation and not just one factor. Some sites do some things really well and some sites don’t do those things well. A site that does keyword stuffing in a really bad way can still be ranked high because users love it because of content relevance. Links alone do not reduce a site’s ranking much significantly.

That said, spammy links still do put a lot of good effort to waste and contribute in lose of rankings to a significant amount. An easy solution to these is the Disavow Tool from Google. Use it and get rid of such down pulling links and anchors for your site.

Why Did Sites Lose Ranking?

In the latest BERT update, the main focus was to understand English language in search queries better by about 10%. This is about relevance and to match sites and pages that have relevant content. Google change the nofollow attribute from a directive to a hint only because it is about relevance. Google’s Gary Illyes said that the reason for this was that they want to use the nofollow signals for relevance improvement.

Google is trying very hard to understand search query relevance and to match it best with content on pages and sites. The best thing you can do to your website is to optimize its content according to relevance in search queries.

How Can XpertSol Help?

Officially, Google’s new BERT update is said to affect 10% of search queries. This includes featured snippets and other forms of content. XpertSol in the UK provides professional SEO services and optimization for your websites. Our Certified SEO Experts optimize your website’s content exactly according to search intent making it as relevant as possible to most searched terms.

XpertSol optimizes your websites to their best potentials. We help build your website’s best linking profile and optimize it in loading speed department. Contact now to get all website errors removed and professionally optimized business websites in the UK.