How Algorithm Updates Have Affected SEO in 2019

Google has released some significant broad core updates to its user search algorithm in 2019, with varying effects on webpage rankings.

12:36 20 February 2020

A handful have been confirmed by Google, while others still remain guesstimate findings from SEO marketers and experts.

Let’s take a look at the updates that have actually been confirmed, and have had a noticeable impact on SEO in 2019.

The Purpose of Broad Core Updates

When Google issues a broad core algorithm update, it’s not necessarily trying to “fix” anything or actively solve a specific issue. These updates are implemented to fine tune Google’s process overall:

• Helping to better understand user search queries
  
  
• Crawling webpages for context, quality, and authority
  
  
• Generating rankings based on relevancy to user search queries
  
  

Sometimes, broad core algorithm changes have little effect on search engine page results (SERPs), rankings, and user traffic for specific websites. But there are times when one small update can cause big waves for internet marketing companies, and can either make or break a business.

March 2019 Core Update (Florida 2)

The March 2019 Core Update has also been nicknamed “Florida 2,” calling back to Google’s first Florida update several years ago. SEO marketers started calling the March 2019 update Florida 2 because it was released near the time of the Pubcon Florida SEO conference.

Why Florida 2 Felt Like a Google Rollback

A “rollback” negates changes that a previous algorithm update made. Many experts in the SEO marketing industry saw a rollback-like flux in Florida 2 that reversed the “Medic Update” of August 2018.

Econsultancy said the Medic Update “largely affected websites in health, fitness, and wellness-related verticals.”

As a result of Florida 2, 75% of sites that experienced a boost in their rankings had been penalized by the Medic Update, and possibly other previous algorithm changes.

And yet, there was evidence of negative results for Black Hat marketers, as those utilizing automated link building loopholes, exact-match links, and other low-quality links were “trending downward,” according to the Search Engine Journal.

June 2019 Broad Core Update

The effects of the June 2019 update were much more obvious, and directly related to their E-A-T algorithm, which was introduced back with the Medic Update in 2018. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and it’s now a key aspect in how Google crawlers are evaluating webpage content to create SERP rankings.

Apparently, Google judged many webpages as untrustworthy in June 2019, as well-known and authoritative websites like the UK’s Daily Mail and Coin Desk (a bitcoin site) suffered in their rankings.

Google’s Cure to Poor Rankings

The blanket cure to poor rankings due to credibility issues seems to be, according to its Quality Raters Guidelines, a focus on creating quality content. While this is important for gaining user traffic, it’s also crucial to note that Google’s algorithms don’t rank for quality content alone with E-A-T in mind. They rank most effectively for content that is relevant to user search queries.

September 2019 Broad Core Update

The September 2019 update continued to reinforce their goal of rewarding quality content, while penalizing low-quality content, specifically through low-quality linking.

In the spirit of improving relevancy and credibility, sites that sketchily and irrelevantly used 301 redirect links lost both rankings and user traffic. Black Hat marketers reported similar losses once again.

Is Proper Linking Important?

Basically, Google is increasingly demanding quality content, as well as quality linking signals. As evidenced by the September 2019 update, it’s also continuing to weed out the imposters and improper linking schemes used to try and “trick” the system. Earn your backlinks as organically as possible to avoid being penalized by search engines.

October 2019: Google BERT Algorithm Update

We finally come to the Google BERT algorithm update, which undoubtedly has created the most buzz in the SEO industry since October. This is probably because BERT marks the biggest change Google has made to its algorithm since the debut of the Google RankBrain algorithm of 5 years ago, released on October 15, 2015.

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and it is impacting 10% of searches in the United States, or 1 out of 10 user searches. The new algorithm works to improve Google’s way of understanding language and more natural, conversational search queries. It has been directly and noticeably impacting what pages are ranked on featured snippets.

As Google’s Vice President Pandu Nayak explained, “BERT models can therefore consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries.”

You can bet that Google is taking cues from voice-based searches made with voice assistants, such as Siri and Alexa. SEO marketers have responded to this new way of user searching by developing voice engine optimization (VEO), but there’s more to the BERT algorithm.

BERT evaluates the nuance and context for interpreting the user intent of search queries, and this makes the question-answer language process of Google search more accurate than ever before.

What this Means for SEO in 2020

The original SEO tactic of direct matching keywords for rankings is rapidly coming to an end. Pages that are written poorly, or contain low-quality links, just won’t cut it for SERP rankings.

What Google broad core updates have taught us in 2019 is that quality content is still the best way to gain user traffic, better rankings, and improve your brand’s credibility.

The focus topic of a webpage needs to be specific and apparent. You can accomplish this by creating clearly structured data: use headers in your copy to emphasize importance, and to establish a hierarchy of how your content should be read, viewed, and understood.

Incorporate internal linking to help Google recognize context within your content. Its crawlers will gain a better understanding of the information, and will be able to pull from it for relevant search queries.

Organizing your digital content through the lens of user intent—what questions people want answered—will also be instrumental in developing, or adapting, your SEO strategy in 2020.