What theories do we have so far on what Google changed with the May core update?
This early into the rollout, all we can do is speculate however, as we’ll share at the end of this section, Google has given us very specific advice when it comes to recovering from core update hits.
Several people wondered whether sites with “domain authority” (a Moz metric to approximate PageRank) seemed to be outranking more relevant pages. I’m not sure if I agree that this is what is happening.
L.E. McArthur thinks this was a “further shift towards brands and authority.” She said, “I noticed one of my large sites, (an authority in its space), has seen a nice lift. Everything is up EXCEPT one of the five primary categories has seen ranking declines. That category is highly relevant, aged, and intertwined with the rest of the content. But perhaps the problem is that it’s considered YMYL. It touches on psychology and health a little more than the rest of the site.”
We think she has hit the nail on the head when explaining why so many sites are no longer allowed in featured snippet ranking positions:
“And I think they may be more rigorous on these points for FS because those results are published on Google proper. They don’t want to risk showing snippets from sites that haven’t crossed their invisible trust line, because it makes them look bad, even worse than poor results.”
Ultimately though, Google has already told us what we should be focusing on when it comes to core updates.
Content and E-A-T.
Google says to focus on offering the best content you can as this is what their algorithms seek to reward.
They follow this paragraph by listing 20 questions you can use to evaluate your content. Here are the first three.
They also tell us to get to know the quality rater guidelines and E-A-T. “Reading the guidelines may help you assess how your content is doing from an E-A-T perspective and improvements to consider.”
