Google’s John Mueller answered a question about site-wide impacts on a site with ten pages that lost rankings in the March/April 2024 core update and subsequently experienced a site-wide collapse the place in May.
Can 10 pages result in a site-wide penalty?
The person who asked the question on Reddit explained that they had ten pages (out of 20,000 pages) that were affected by the Useful Content Update (HCU) in September 2023. They subsequently updated the pages that eventually got their classification and traffic. Things were going well until the same ten pages were hit with the core March/April update. The exact date of the second downgrade event was April 20th.
Up until that point, the rest of the site was fine. Only the ten pages themselves were affected. That changed on May 7 when the site experienced a sitewide ranking drop on the website’s 20,000 pages.
His question was whether the ten problematic pages caused a site-wide impact, or whether the May 7 collapse was due to the site’s reputational abuse penalties that were announced on May 6.
A note on diagnosing ranking drops
I’m not commenting specifically on the person who asked the question, but… the question seems to be correlating rank drops with specific parts of the announced algorithm updates.
Here is the exact wording:
“Our website has about 20,000 pages and we found that HCU hit about 10 pages in September. We updated these articles and saw traffic pick up, but after the basic March update around 20 April, the same pages were hit again, probably due to HCU.On May 7th, we saw a sharp drop in rankings across the board, and we suspect a site-wide classifier may have been applied.
Question: Can an HCU hit on 10 pages cause a site-wide ranker for 20,000 pages? Or can the May 7 reputation abuse update have an impact?”
In general, it is reasonable to assume that a ranking drop is related to a recently announced Google update when the dates of the two events coincide. However, it should be noted that an update to the core algorithm can affect several things (for example, the relevance of query content) and it should be understood that the HCU is no longer a single system.
The person asking the question is following a pattern I often see is that they are assuming the rank drops are due to something wrong with their site, but that’s not always the case, it could be changes in how Google interprets a query search (among many other potential reasons).
The other potential mistake is to assume that the problem is related to a specific algorithm. The person asking the question is assuming they were hit by the HCU system, which is something that no longer exists. All elements of the HCU were fed into the basic classification algorithm as signals.
here’s what Google documentation says about what happened with the HCU:
“Is there a single ‘useful content system’ that Google Search uses to rank?”
Our work to improve the usefulness of content in search results began with what we called our “useful content system” that launched in 2022. Our processes have evolved since then. There is no system used to identify useful content. Instead, our core classification systems use a variety of signals and systems.”
While Google is still looking for usefulness in content, there is no longer a useful content system that lowers the ranking of pages on specific dates.
The other potential evidence of a faulty correlation is when the Redditor asked if the May 7th site collapse was due to penalties for abuse of the site’s reputation. Penalties for site reputation abuse were not in effect on May 7. On May 6, it was announced that manual site reputation abuse actions would begin sometime in the near future.
Here are two examples of how it can be misleading to correlate site ranking anomalies with advertised updates. Update diagnostics is more than just correlating traffic patterns with advertised updates. Site owners and SEOs who diagnose problems this way run the risk of approaching the solution like someone who is focusing on the map instead of looking at the road.
To properly diagnose problems, you need to understand the full range of technical issues that can affect a site and the algorithmic changes that can be made by Google (especially unannounced changes). I have over 20 years of experience and know enough to be able to identify anomalies in the SERPs that indicate changes in the way Google approaches relevancy.
Complicating the diagnosis is that sometimes it’s not something that needs to be “fixed,” but rather that the competition is doing something better than the sites that lost the rankings. More right can be a wide range of things.
Ten pages caused site-wide “penalty”?
John Mueller responded by first addressing the specific issue of site-wide ranking collapse, noting that he doesn’t think it’s likely that ten pages will cause another 20,000 pages to lose rankings.
John wrote:
“The issues most people post with core updates tend to be site-wide and not limited to a small subset of a site. The last core update was March/April, so the changes that you would see from May would be unrelated, not sure how that helps you now 🙂 but I wouldn’t see those 10 pages as indicative of anything you need to change in 20,000 more pages.
Sometimes it’s more than the advertised updates
John Mueller didn’t offer a diagnosis of what’s wrong with the site, that’s impossible to say without actually seeing the site. SEOs on YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook routinely correlate ranking drops with recently announced updates, but as I wrote earlier in this article, this could be a mistake.
When diagnosing a drop in rankings, it’s important to look at the site, the competition, and the SERPs.
Do:
Inspect the website Review a number of keywords and their respective changes in the SERPs Inspect the top ranked sites
No:
Assume a ranking drop is associated with a recent update and stop your research there.
Google’s John Mueller alludes to the complexity of diagnosing ranking drops by mentioning that sometimes it’s not even about SEO, which is 100% correct.
John explained:
“Based on the information you posted, it’s also impossible to tell if you need to improve/fix something on these 20,000 pages, or if the world has just moved on (in terms of their interests, their expectations, and the relevance of your site) .
You seem to have found things to make more “useful” in these 10 pages, maybe there is a pattern? This is something you need to work out: get to know your site, its content, and its users better. This is not an easy part of SEO, sometimes it is not even SEO.
Look at the road ahead
It’s been a trend now for site owners to focus on recent Google ads as clues to what’s going on with their sites. It’s a reasonable thing to do and people should 100% continue to do it. But don’t make it the limit of your gaze because there is always the possibility of something else happening.
Featured image by Shutterstock/vovan
Read the discussion on Reddit:
If HCU reaches 5-10 pages, can it cause a classifier to be applied to the entire site?
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