After several days of analysis of what happened (most specifically with our site), here are some of the patterns I've been noticing thus far, but all that can change in coming days or weeks.
But here's quick back story first – We have been on a steady upward trajectory and almost always benefitted from all the minor and major quality updates. At the very least, we never got hit and just sustained our rankings and traffic for the last few years. We did get hit a bit in May 2014 with Panda and then saw a 100% recovery that following September 2014, although we made little to no changes, and have been good ever since while adding content and organically growing traffic (FYI: we're a U.S. consumer review website + editorial content reviews on products and brands of various niches).
This last Florida 2 update was when we felt we got hit for the first time since May 2014. At first I noticed that some KWs dropped 1-3 slots down on average. I thought to myself, “No big deal”, although on the morning of March 13, real time stats were lower than I would've liked to see for that time of the day/week. All that followed by Google confirming that there was a core update began to spark some confusion and possibly minor panic.
Throughout that whole day as well as the next, as I'm manually checking SERPs for dozens upon dozens of KWs that I was personally attached to monitoring for years, I began noticing that we would slip a slot here and there for many of them, while still staying strong of other KW terms.
Factoring that in with lower real time traffic and Google update discussions, I then thought to myself, “Did we actually get hit?’ It felt surreal, but I had to keep my head up not to allow myself to go down a rabbit hole of worst case scenarios. As humans, it's so easy to allow our minds to go down insanely dangerous avenues of assumptions (especially at night when we can't sleep for whatever reason, unless I'm just speaking for myself here).
So to get more specific, here is where it gets interesting, and quite frankly, inspiring, at least for us. And anyone here can disagree with what I'm about to say if they'd like.
As a review and editorial content site, we have neglected to make systematic and persistent efforts to keep our editorial content up to date. We all already know that a lot of types of content naturally gets outdated and becomes obsolete for Google and users. Over the years, in my opinion, we have always strived to refine our editorial and investigative approach when it comes to writing the content, but that was mostly just applied to brand new written content moving forward and not so much going back to rewrite/update our old content. What seemed of high-quality to us 2-3 years ago, today will seem like a joke, and we ask ourselves, “How the heck did we ever allow this piece to get published?”.
Before, we included no authorship, no dates, and let the content that once performed really nicely just stay in that state for years, assuming we'll rank there forever. Yes, we were in the comfort zone without any sense of urgency.
Meanwhile, as we are hiring better talent, refining our editorial policies and standards, sure, naturally we're producing better content (at least in my eyes, and anyone can beg to differ, of course). Instead of content that sounds like it was written by a bad-grade junior high-school student, we now are writing content at an advanced high school student level, or even college (depending on subject matter of course, and no one wants to read academic literature type of content, unless you're publishing some governmental clinical studies or articulating case law for attorneys). Naturally, we feel that our content over the years has improved tremendously compared to what it was in prior years. (No I'm not here to throw a pity party for myself, I'll explain why in a moment).
So with all that said, back to the March 13 update, when it comes to our rankings, we remained strong or even grew in content that was published more recently (in line with our new standards) and/or written by better and more talented authors (no I'm not referring to only E-A-T, just craft and investigative approach skills of writers).
When in comes to older, thin, weak content that was ranking atop, that is where I noticed the biggest loss in rankings after this update (not too catastrophic, but as mentioned, on average 1-3 slots down).
The problem in our case is the fact that a good chunk (if not the majority) of our content was published a while ago, has not been updated and some of it is weak. And maybe, finally, Google realized that with respect to our site. Because again, what we think is our good, and more recent content actually still ranks prominently after this update.
But because we were relying on so many other KWs of older and weaker pieces in addition, we felt the effect of this update. Additionally, for KWs of older and outdated content that we remained rooted in for strong positions after this update, after re-reading it, it does appear to be on the stronger side with 50/50 argumentative points and clear-cut takeaways for the targeted readers, rather than just regurgitation of the info that’s already on there for the targeted subject matter/KW.
With respect to our site, I personally don't feel that this is a penalty of some kind, but definitely a “course-correction” and a wake-up call. We’ve always understood and appreciated the importance of having high quality and updated content, but just always deferred to actually doing it “some other time”. Perhaps, this is a wake up call…? This is unpleasant, but it’s no surprise. We were riding the wave up until this point.
And of course, amongst this whole content quality issue observation on our part, there are other onsite technical and infrastructural things that need major improvement and refinement. It’s been on our books for quite some time, which also, was neglected on our part.
We have our takeaways and believe we know what needs to be done. I don’t expect everyone to agree with this observation, of course. Excited to hear everyone else’s thoughts.
EDIT: I forgot to include the fact that we also just have a ton of old, thin and dead weight content that you can't even rewrite because they're for old products and brands that no longer exist. We need to prune our content. There's a substantial amount too, which can, among many other things, contribute to the negative effect of this update. Also, for the KWs, that we did lose positions for, we are getting outranked by sites that I would call more established and reputable, most of which, according to SEMrush experienced a very nice and noticeable boost beginning March 13.
All this analysis of our KW positions for various subject matters, to me, implies that we aren't necessarily suppressed or algorithmically penalized but were rather put on Google's course correction. I believe if we do nothing about this, at the very least, will just remain where we are now and not recover OR even continue to plummet, at which point, I cannot guarantee that I'll have as much energy or optimism as I do now. So it's best to act now!
[edited by: HereWeGo123 at 9:30 pm (utc) on Mar 16, 2019]
Google Florida Update 2 March 12, 2019
