Eight Overlooked Reasons Why Sites Lose Rankings In Core Updates

There are multiple reasons why a site can drop in rankings due to a core algorithm update. The reasons may reflect specific changes to the way Google interprets content, a search query, or both. The change could also be subtle, like an infrastructure update that enables finer relevance and quality judgments. Here are eight commonly overlooked reasons for why a site may have lost rankings after a Google core update.

Ranking Where It’s Supposed To Rank?

If the site was previously ranking well and now it doesn’t, it could be what I call “it’s ranking where it’s supposed to rank.” That means that some part of Google’s algorithm has caught up to a loophole that the page was intentionally or accidentally taking advantage of and is currently ranking it where it should have been ranking in the first place.

This is difficult to diagnose because a publisher might believe that the web pages or links were perfect the way they previously were, but in fact there was an issue.

Topic Theming Defines Relevance

A part of the ranking process is determining what the topic of a web page is. Google admitted a year ago that a core topicality system is a part of the ranking process. The concept of topicality as part of the ranking algorithm is real.

The so-called Medic Update of 2018 brought this part of Google’s algorithm into sharp focus. Suddenly, sites that were previously relevant for medical keywords were nowhere to be found because they dealt in folk remedies, not medical ones. What happened was that Google’s understanding of what keyword phrases were about became more topically focused.

Bill Slawski wrote about a Google patent (Website representation vector) that describes a way to classify websites by knowledge domains and expertise levels that sounds like a direct match to what the Medic Update was about.

The patent describes part of what it’s doing:

“The search system can use information for a search query to determine a particular website classification that is most responsive to the search query and select only search results with that particular website classification for a search results page. For example, in response to receipt of a query about a medical condition, the search system may select only websites in the first category, e.g., authored by experts, for a search results page.”

Google’s interpretation of what it means to be relevant became increasingly about topicality in 2018 and continued to be refined in successive updates over the years. Instead of relying on links and keyword similarity, Google introduced a way to identify and classify sites by knowledge domain (the topic) in order to better understand how search queries and content are relevant to each other.

Returning to the medical queries, the reason many sites lost rankings during the Medic Update was that their topics were outside the knowledge domain of medical remedies and science. Sites about folk and alternative healing were permanently locked out of…