Thread by @RusToffee

May Core Update Website Penalty and Recovery

Disclaimer: These are my views and analysis of the May Core Update based on the first-hand data experience and observations of many websites affected by that update.

Let's get started! 👀👇

#SEO #googleupdate #featuredsnippets

What Happened?

Based on my observations, this update appeared to be driven by the goal of improving the accuracy of information provided by featured snippets.

This is how they planned to accomplish it:

1. Significantly decreased the number of SERPs that were generating FSs.

2. Used Google raters to clear out as many untrustworthy websites as possible through manual reviews so they had no chance to claim featured snippets.

How I Made this Conclusion

Many (incl. tools) noticed the lack of featured snippets in SERPs in general after the May update.

Many websites were also manually reviewed by Google raters, which led to them losing their featured snippets shortly.

My website was also affected by this.

On May 25th I recorded a visit from raterhub.com and shortly after all my featured snippets were gone.

I had more than 350 featured snippets at the time. I lost around 25-30% of my traffic as a result.

Looking back and after thinking this through, I believe I deserved that "penalty".

Although my content wasn't touching YMYL topics, a lot of articles were missing author boxes.

There were some relevant author profiles on my website, but none were present for the article evaluated by a Google reviewer.

This made me an easy target for them and they likely marked my website as untrustworthy which resulted in a loss of all featured snippets.

But then something controversial happened... I received another penalty which took 80% of my overall traffic.

I was devastated but decided to wait till the update stopped rolling out.

People started posting their traffic graphs and one thing really piqued my interest...

The graphs looked identical to each other. There must have been something in common among all of these sites.

I started asking around and the majority of website owners confirmed they had at least one visit from the raterhub.com platform.

The correlation was there.

I started analyzing my rankings and they made 0 sense. This was something that hadn't happened before.

I decided to ask John Mueller but he refrained from giving a proper reply and just made a smart-ass comment.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1554447016440340481

He basically insulted the majority of SEOs who regularly analyze rankings to assess content performance. Anazyling rankings is an integral part of SEO.

So let's look at the rankings to understand that this pattern is absolutely abnormal.

Keyword Distribution

Before the update, 50% of the tracked keywords were occupying #1-3 positions. ~30-35% were in #4-10 positions. The rest were ranking somewhere between 11-100 positions.

But looked what happened after the second penalty.

I lost around 70% of #1-3 positions and almost 100% of #4-100 positions.

So I only had keywords ranking in the Top 3 and that's all.

This is what made this second penalty controversial.

I'd never seen anything like that before so I started theorizing.

1. A major bug in the algo.
2. A suppressing mechanism that prevented you from appearing in SERP.

Whatever was true, I have enough reasons to believe Google raters made a big impact when they provided initial feedback that then triggered this chain of penalties.

Last Friday the website recovered (was allowed to appear in SERP again) and it actually returned stronger than it was before the May update.

Higher positions for many keywords across those two ranges (#1-3 and #4-10).

How it was possible?

If you look at the very first graph in the thread, you'll see that the website was on an upward trajectory, and some of the content I published in May didn't reach its potential.

So while the website was penalized, the algorithm was still calculating rankings in the background.

And the website actually kept growing, but the suppression mechanism wasn't letting it appear in SERP for its keywords.

Once the website got released from its jail, it started showing up for all its keywords and in higher positions on average.

The traffic over the weekend was very close to the pre-update level and this is without featured snippets (yes, they haven't come back yet and I don't think they will until at least the next core update when I expect a Google rater to review my website again).

How to Recover From the May Core Update

Here are some of the things that I did back in July to position my website for potential recovery.

Disclaimer: There is no proof these actions helped to recover my website, but I knew I needed to improve the trust signals of the website.

1. Technical Audit

I conducted a technical audit to be sure there were no major technical issues that were holding the website from getting indexed (btw, all the pages were indexed all the time and ranked.

This audit came clean. No major issues.

I was also passing CWVs scores.

2. Improved Reviewed Page

I knew that I needed to improve the trust signals on the page that was manually assessed by a Google rater.

I added a relevant author as well as added a bunch of references (sources) at the end of the article to support some facts.

3. Associated all Articles with Relevant Authors

As I mentioned, a lot of articles were missing author boxes so I finally added those to all affected articles.

4. Added About Us Page

Yes, this was lazy of me not to have this page for so long. That's on me.

5. Better Categorization

I only had 3 categories on the website. I ended up with 10 categories (main clusters) and moved content under their relevant categories.

6. Improved E-A-T for YMYL Topics

I had a few articles that could be considered YMYL at a stretch.

I double-checked all the facts and made sure to reference authoritative resources. I also provided some quotes from subject matter experts.

And I strongly suggest you do the same if you have YMYL-topics on your website.

7. Editorial Process

I added information describing our fact-checking, reviewing, and publishing processes.

8. Reworked the Homepage

I made it look more like a media publication and less like just a list of articles.

This is my take on the May Core Update and how I tackled it to position my website for recovery.

You may disagree with my thoughts and this is absolutely fine.

I just want to wish that all your websites recover from this controversial update soon!

P.S. I forgot to add one item to my action list

Disavowed Toxic Links

The more our websites grow the more they accumulate those toxic links.

I did backlinks audit in @semrush which showed a bunch of toxic links that I added to the disavow file and submitted via GSC.