Recovering from the August 1st Google Update aka The Medic Update (Progressive Updates).

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past month you probably know about the Google's recent Core Algorithm update on August 1st. The reason why it being called as The Medic Update is because this Algo update affected the rankings of the health industry the most. Image courtesy of Seoroundtable.com

I am not going to get in to detail about whats the update all about because if you are reading this you probably already know and are trying to find a way out of the pit.

Disclaimer: I am not claiming that this is the full proof solution to get you back on the first page. The findings in this blog is based on what I have experienced over the past month while working on my websites.

Before I begin, let me just give you a little background information about what went down when we got hit by the update. I work with various affiliate websites and before August 1st we were cruising with a daily organic traffic of 35,000.

But as soon as the update rolled out my team noticed a sudden drop in our organic traffic.

But it wasn't as lethal as it was with other websites. People reported a drop of over 50% of their traffic. Which was quite scary! We waited out till the update completely rolled out, which took about a week. After that we concluded that we had lost 15- 20% of our traffic in a week's span.

The Action Plan

Our first step was to go through the Google Search Quality Guidelines which was updated in July 2018.Which was 10 days before the update, I guess Google was sending us signs about the impending update :)

The Search Quality Raters Guidelines has mentioned a term E.A.T (Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness). In this algo update, google has basically rooted out all the untrustworthy information websites. And it has effected YMYL (Your Money Your Life) websites the most. These are pages that could effect " the future happiness, health, financial stability and safety of the users". My website in question here, somewhat falls in this category.

Like I mentioned before we didn't get hit as bad as others did. This is because we were doing the following from the Start:

1. Building content based on user suggestions.
2. Creating topical relevancy
3. Getting Authority Backlinks with content that we were creating
4. Improved the page speed score of our sites both desktop and mobile
5. Improving the user experience of Mobiles users because of the Mobile First Indexing Guidelines.

These steps all sound so basic but they align well with the guidelines Google has provided and this is why we didn't get hit as bad as others.

The steps we took for the Keywords that were hit were:

1. Identified our writer with the most authority and made him the author of our main articles. Google's guidelines states that the author of the writer should have credibility. Luckily we have a great content team and we just picked out the one with the most authority. If you don't have a writer with enough credibility then I suggest that you start building it. Treat the author of your website like a brand. Your author's credibility is just as much important as your website.
2. Made a detailed About Us page and an Author Page. This is pretty self explanatory just get a page for each author linking to the articles they have written on your website.
3. Made our authors more active on social media. I don't need to emphasize how much importance content marketing has in our business and I believe the best way to market your content is to make our author promote the content which they wrote. They should be linking back to your website. The goal here is to get social proof.
4. Creating Topical Relevance. This is the most important part. Lets say you want to rank a page about "How to train your dogs?". You will need to create more content around this topic. This should be related to training Dogs and it can't deviate to "Dog food". The internal linking should also be linking to similar topics so that when the crawler crawls your page it will only find information related to your parent keyword. This will in turn increase the relevancy of your page.
5. Getting Mentions and links from high quality RELEVANT websites. No matter what anyone says, you can't get ranked without proper off page. And Google made it tougher since they are now emphasizing on E.A.T. Building E.A.T takes time you will have to create quality content and then outreach to other websites. Our team works very hard to achieve these links and I am not talking about blog and forum commenting. Those links have their place but they are not nearly as effective as the contextual links you get from authority websites. Jennifer Slegg just covered Google’s new creator reputation from the latest quality rater guidelines released in July. I recommend reading her post to get a solid understanding of what Google is doing on that front.

From this point onward I will now be discussing the steps that we took for each keyword. Note: we are still working and experimenting on them. I am not claiming that these steps will take you to page 1, position 1 overnight. I am just stating what worked for me and what didn't through data.

Keyword 1

This is our "Money Keyword"after the medic update it went from 4th to 10th. This was a big blow for us and to bring it back up was our top priority. We took the following steps:

1. Updated the post with our top Author's name
2. Analyzed the competition for their anchor text distribution
3. Updated the Meta title in order to get better CTR
4. Updated the content with Google Suggestions
5. Content reach out to influencers

It took a while for google to cache all these changes but once it did we went back up to 4th.

Keyword 2

The second most important keyword was from our reviews category. After the update it went from 4th to 10th. We needed to bring this back up again and for that we took the following steps:

1. Added a new angle to the content piece in order to get more traction
2. Audit of unnatural Links
3. Anchor distribution Analysis (Onpage and Offpage)
4. Made a few more design tweaks
5. Fixed the UX on mobile
6. Sent a PR
7. Worked on topical relevancy of the whole category.

It took us 14 days after the hit to get back to a decent spot. We are still working on making on-page improvements in order to break in to the top 3 of the serps.

Keyword 3

This is a keyword which hasn't budged. I am only sharing this so that I can prove a point that the same working strategy can't always work for every keyword. We have gone through the same steps as I have mentioned before to bring this up but unfortunately it hasn't brought in good results. Our findings as now is that we need to build topical relevancy and improve it's on-page.

Keyword 4

This is perhaps the most difficult and the most interesting keyword that we have been working on. This keyword is one of three keywords ranking for the same page. Before the update we were ranking on 5th but after the update we took a fall and went to 10th. The page its ranking for is our gold mine and its integral that we remain ranked on all three keywords. We needed this keyword back in top 5 whereas the other two keywords are already ranking in the top 3.

We had followed the same steps as I have mentioned above. The problem here was anchor distribution. Since we weren't building enough anchors of this keyword we lost our rankings. We had to be really careful while trying to rank for this keyword as we didn't wnat to go overboard with the same anchor while doing our off-page. We wanted to create a harmony with the other anchors being built during our on-page and off page optimization. This is what were doing, 35% Brand kw anchors, 40% Primary kw anchors and 25% anchors of the kw in discussion

So far this has worked for us but we can't be sure unless we see some stability for the next few days.

We are currently working on over 275 keywords and unfortunately I can't write on all of these. I am more comfortable talking about then writing. As you may have noticed, writing is not one of my strong suits.

Other than what I have already mentioned I would like to recommend that you go through the Google's search quality guidelines. I can't emphasize on that enough! It really helps and will help you understand what exactly you need to do. Also from what I have heard there is another updated rolling out in October end, its best you prepare yourself for it.

Also, work on your mobile UI and UX. Mobile First Indexing is no joke, if your sites aren't optimized and have low page speed score then you are going to have a hard time ranking for it.

This was me adding my two cents. I hope you find it useful.