SEO: Core Update November 2021

By now, anyone who has even the slightest connection to SEO knows that algorithms are constantly evolving. They periodically receive improvements and adjustments to make them more effective or, at least, to make them do their job from the point of view of the companies that develop them.

Google is particularly active in this regard. Those of us who have an online store positioned, fear these changes because they can make our rankings that are generating sales get worse. It is true that not everything is going to be bad: sometimes they benefit us, weighting better our website.

But as it is still a lottery, it is important that we are attentive to everything that happens to -at least- understand the changes in behavior and take corrective measures when possible.

To better understand what is happening, it is worth looking back, specifically to last summer. For whatever reason, Google seems to have a predilection for that period of the year (one still remembers August 2018 update, which was among the most important).

Between the months of June and July, there were two consecutive Core Updates or, to be precise, the same update in two phases to release part of the functionalities as they became available. In this case, it stood out for incorporating the Multitask Unified Model (MUM), which we talked about at length in the post we linked and which you can check for more information.

Before the Core Update, at the beginning of the month, an anti-spam update was published to "disable" the relevance of unnatural links. It seems that they were already paving the way to clean up the SERPs for Christmas campaign.

After that summer movement, we lived a period of relative calm. SERPs remained stable for almost six months... but November arrived and, just before Black Friday, Google announced the release of a new algorithm update that, this time, would take up to two weeks to be 100% operational.

This was announced on November 17 and from that moment on, volatility in SERPS skyrocketed.

If you have noticed that your rankings and, consequently, your traffic has dropped in the last few weeks, chances are that you have been affected by the algorithmic change.

In any case, keep in mind that this type of updates do not penalize, as other specific filters do. That drop in relevance is simply because other competitors are being weighted better, and that is why they appear in a higher position.

If you take a look at the losers, which is always something to guide us a bit, it seems that those who have suffered the most from the rigors of the update have been online dictionaries, knowledge bases and sites selling stock images... Sites that have a huge amount of URLs with a bare content.

In principle, there is nothing broken that you need to fix, but they do recommend that you ask yourself some questions to optimize your site (especially in terms of content):

I understand that it may seem somewhat subjective, but it is necessary to make this reflection to adjust our website to Google "wishes".