SEO: June 2021 Core Update

If you have been in this search engine optimization for a few years, you probably remember the small earthquake that happened in the summer 2018 with the so-called Medical Update. A very significant number of pages were affected and not necessarily within the healthcare sector. In fact, its effect proved cross-cutting across multiple different segments and content types.

After that, core updates in the algorithm have been happening with a certain regularity with more or less impact and different frequency, but always two or three times a year.

This summer, SEO has registered a lot of movement in SERPs, and it is because they have undergone double change in the updates that, to make matters worse, have been very delayed in its operation, being almost two months of launch.

When this happens, the natural thing to do is to rush to Google's official Twitter account to find out. And indeed, on this occasion they published a message communicating the deployment of a "routine" core update to improve the performance of the core algorithm.

What is striking is that, despite this air of normality, they also communicated that a second update would follow once the June 2021 update had been fully deployed in the following two weeks.

Said and done: as soon as July 1 arrived, in the same Twitter thread they announced the publication of a new one which, in a display of imagination, they baptized as: "core update July 2021".

It is not at all usual to find two updates in such a tight time frame. For this reason, many specialists claim that it is a two-phase update.

But it does not end there, because between one and the other, a third one called Page Experience Update and two specifically oriented to penalize spam have been published.

What happens with such a large number of updates? Well, the analysis becomes very complicated. It will be virtually impossible to determine the reason(s) for a fall or rise in the rankings.

In the case of those labeled as "core", there is no measure that can be taken to improve. These do not penalize as such: what they do is to give more relevance to other pages of greater importance based on the new criteria.

However, the other updates do act specifically on more actionable factors.

We have talked at length in this blog about the so-called Core Web Vitals and their impact on e-commerce SEO.

Page Experience Update is based precisely on using metrics such as those you can find in the linked post (LCP, FID or CLS). All of them are very focused on the loading speed and the user's browsing experience). 

It is highly likely that you have not detected a drop even if you have low Core Web Vitals indicators. It is true that the impact has been relatively low or very low, but the last word has not been said yet. Google has announced that they are still going to work on it for two and a half more months, which is plenty of time for you to be in for a shock if you do not update your performance.

This is a fight as old as SEO itself. Some professionals look for a vulnerability and manage to exploit it until Google fixes it. In these sweeps often fall many pages that occupy very important keywords because they are the ones that generate more potential revenue.

If you had a lot of bad guys among your competitors, you probably noticed an improvement in rankings for some keywords. Legitimate content, which adds value and does not attempt to use any kind of scam or deception, has a good chance of improving - or at least not seeing their rankings worsen.