A few days ago, Google warned publishers that change was on the horizon. The search giant was tweaking its algorithm, and it wanted to let publishers know that they may notice a shift. The company said the change (dubbed the June 2019 core update) wasn’t huge–but any algorithm change will likely affect the websites that rely on accruing search results.
The new algorithm was launched this past Monday, and some publishers are already taking a big hit. Most notable among them is the Daily Mail, which reportedly complained about losing up to 50% of its daily search traffic as a result of this update. The SEO director of the website even seems to have taken to Google’s help forums to report the huge drop, as spotted by the blog Search Engine Roundtable. He added that they saw their “Discover traffic drop by 90%” and it “has not improved.”
External numbers confirm that some sites have seen big drops over the past few days. A new report from Search Engine Land cites data from the SEO tool provider Sistrix, which indicated that many sites saw big drops in search visibility once the algorithm change went into effect. The Daily Mail was indeed listed on Systrix’s list of losers, along with NFL.com and Vimeo.
There were some winners, too–sites like the Mirror, the Sun, and HuffPost have reportedly seen big gains in search visibility as of this week.
The rollout is still ongoing, so these findings are quite preliminary. It’s unclear what exactly was changed to cause certain spikes and drops, but publishers do seem to be feeling the tweak. We’ll keep an eye out to see if more change is on the horizon because of Google’s never-ending updates.
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