A Different Way of Thinking About Core Updates

The advice from Google and the industry alike has evolved gradually over time in response to changing Quality Rater guidelines, varying from the exceptionally banal (“make good content”) to the specific but clutching at straws (“have a great about-us page”). To a degree, I suspect Core Updates and the accompanying era of “EAT” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) have become a bit of a Rorschach test. If your search competitor makes a bunch of improvements to their site, then when a Core Update comes round, under this model, you will suddenly drop. The other missing piece of this puzzle is that Google acknowledges its updates as tests: This sounds, at face value, like it is incompatible with the refresh model implied by the quote in the previous section. The below chart is the one from earlier in this post, showing the impact of each Core Update on the visibility of www.reuters.com (again — only among MozCast corpus keywords, not representative of their total traffic).