Your ecommerce website may now be ranking differently within the Google search engine.
On August 1st, Google confirmed that they had just released a broad core algorithm update, that seems to have resulted in some large shifts in search rankings for some businesses. This update aims to readjust the rankings of pages that were previously under-rewarded. By now, the change should be fully rolled out and rankings should have stabilized. If you’ve noticed that your rankings have changed dramatically in the past week, this algorithm is likely the reason why.
Google is not keen on sharing what sites can do to reverse any negative impacts of this or any other broad update, simply suggesting “to remain focused on building great content” and that “there’s no ‘fix’ for pages that may perform less well.” Similarly, Danny Sullivan of Google echoed that great content is key to increasing your rank and if there was something specific that could help a site’s rankings, he would share it.
In terms of what Google considers to be great content, Sullivan also pointed site masters to documentation which describes in detail exactly what Google looks for to determine the quality of a website.
Some sites saw bumps as a result of this update, but if you’ve noticed that your rankings have dropped recently, it’s not necessarily a cause for alarm. Unfortunately, it just means Google feels there are other pages that should be ranking higher than they previously were.
To climb back above these new risers, focus your efforts on areas like site speed, mobile friendly pages, and tackling more technical SEO issues, while also making a continued effort to produce quality content. More generally, continuing to optimize both your site and ecommerce experience for the user is key to ensuring you can weather any of Google’s algorithm changes, including this latest one.
