Google Search is the most visited website on the web. With the word "google" becoming a verb and a noun, websites that wish to improve their visibility, should be on the search engine's good side.
And among the ways, include having an SEO campaign, appealing content, and an active website. And most importantly, they need to adhere to Google's algorithms that follow the trends the markets have to provide.
But sometimes, even the most obedient of websites can still fail to follow Google's recommendations. Others may violate some of Google's policies, do extreme and unethical campaigns, or others that will make their ranks suffer.
Those that cannot recover will eventually fail from the competition itself.
Everything can go south from there, as everything plummets.
While gaining visibility on Google Search is already a challenge, core updates that frequently happen can make things worse even more.
But Google has a way out of this.
Read: The Reasons Why Websites May Lose Rankings, According To Google
According to Google’s John Mueller, SEO is not going to be obsolete. And this is why he said that websites can recover from Google' core updates by improving their content.
He said that websites that work on improving their contents, rather than implementing technical fixes, can recover even from even the most affecting broad core algorithm update.
It is said that websites can suffer a drop in ranking after a core update, when Google thinks that the websites are losing relevancesfor the queries they are targeting.
For this reason, it's unlikely for them to improve the relevances of their website by focusing on technical fixes and neglecting the on-page content.
This is because there is nothing wrong with their site.
Google just dropped them from its top pages because the trends changed, not because the websites changed.
Mueller revealed this during a Search Central SEO office-hours hangout on October 8, 2021.
At that time, a website owner asked about recovering from a core update, and said that he addressed all technical and user experience issues, but his rankings still aren’t back to the level he’d like them to be.
According to Mueller:
So it’s not that we would switch back and say oh, it’s like the issue is fixed, and we will change it back to the previous state.
But rather, you’re saying well this is a better website now, and we look at it and say oh it’s a better website. It’s not the same or comparable to before, so it would be kind of tricky to expect that it changes to the state it was before. But it’s a new website, it’s a better website.
I think, especially with core updates, when you’re talking about recovery, it’s not so much you’re recovering but rather Google is seeing that you have a better website and reacting to that."
What Mueller is trying to say is that, websites that were impacted by Google's core update, may not regain their previous rankings, because Google sees the sites differently.
Google won’t place them back to where they were before, simply because they are no longer comparable to their previous selves.
About how to improve content, Mueller said that:
And that can include things like the usability, and the ads on a page, but it’s essentially the website overall.
And usually that also means some kind of the focus of the content, the way you’re presenting things, the way you’re making it clear to users what’s behind the content. Like what the sources are, all of these things. All of that kind of plays in.”
Mueller said that websites can actually improve their rankings by improving user experience and changing everything else.
But the efforts may only help them to an extent.
This is why he stressed the importance of working on content in order for Google to see the websites better than they were before.
[...] think about where might there be low quality content, where might users be confused when they go to my website— and is that confusion something we can address with technical issues? with UX changes? Or do we actually have to change some of the content that we present?"