On January 13th 2020, Google began its January Core Update. Google defines a core update as “significant, broad changes to our search algorithms and systems”.
The purpose of these updates is to ensure that Google presents relevant content to internet users, which means sub-par SEO metrics may see your site suffer on the SERPs (search engine results pages).
If your website was unlucky enough to suffer from the January Core Update, there’s no need to panic. You can revert your penalty, the same way you would after any update. You just need to know where to start…
Find the Winners
To revert a Google penalty, you must first understand where you went wrong. The easiest way to do this is to examine the areas in which other websites have succeeded as a result of the update.
The goal here is to find and copy the winners. An easy way to carry this out is to Google your own target keywords in order to find the pages that are now ranking above you.
According to a report by Moz.com, the websites that experienced the highest fluctuations in rankings – that is, websites that were most affected by the update – fell into these categories: health, family and community, beauty, finance, internet and telecom, vehicles, and law and government.
The same report revealed that the overall winning website – the site with the largest number of gained rankings – was verywellhealth.com, while the most unfortunate website – with the highest number of lost rankings – was the travel site orbitz.com.
Compare Competitor Pages
Now you’ve found the most successful websites after Google’s January update, you need to understand how they achieved that success. As well as conducting an audit on your own website – which we explain in more detail below – you’ll need to inspect your competitors’ web pages.
In doing a competitor audit, you’ll be able to examine each website’s informational structure (the internal linking), loading speed, keyword use, user experience, and much more.
By examining your competition, you should enable you to emulate their winning formula and help you on your way to redemption. But first, you’ll need to compare its results to those found on your own pages…
Audit Your Own Site
Before you get all high and mighty judging other websites, you need to take a look in the mirror to understand what went wrong. That’s why you’re in this predicament in the first place – you’ve been penalized!
The audit on your own website will review the same areas as it does on your competitors’ pages. Except this time, given your penalization, you’re likely to find more on-page errors – whether it’s broken links, slow page-loading speeds, or too few backlinks from trusted sources.
Once you have the results from both your competitor audit and your self-examination, you’ll be able to compare that data, which should help you to create a plan to get your website back into Google’s good books.
Implement Your Findings
Now you know the January Update’s do’s and don’ts, you need to implement your site improvement plan. The actions you take will depend on the issues you found on your website.
Is your site loading slower than you more successful competitors’? You need to cut the excess fat. You should compress your images, remove unused characters from your code, or reduce the number of redirects to your page – among other refining tactics.
Got more broken links than those now ranking above you? Bring out the fine-tooth-comb and update or remove all of your broken links. You’ll find these types of links if the website is no longer available, the web page was moved without a redirect, or if the URL structure was changed. Raventools says search engines view links as a vote for a website’s quality, which means low-quality links will make your website appear, well, low quality.
Too few backlinks? Then you’ll need to build up your site’s reputation. First and foremost, you need to improve the overall quality of your content, which will then generate organic backlinks from other trusted sources.
You can also reach out to other authoritative sources and discuss guest post opportunities (when you write for another website while including a link to your own site) to help bolster your backlink portfolio.
Take Preventative Measures
With algorithm updates hiding around every corner, you need to ensure your website doesn’t receive more penalties down the line. Examine the data from your SEO audits – were there any recurring themes? In other words, were all of your web pages making the same mistakes?
To implement your changes – and to ultimately revert any incurred penalties – you might need to enlist an extra pair of hands for your SEO team, or you can use tools like GoDaddy’s Search Engine Visibility to help you create SEO-friendly sites.
Roundup
Like all big algorithm shifts, Google’s January Core Update adversely affected many different websites. But there are ways you can get yours to bounce back.
First of all, you need to find out who ‘won’ – i.e. find out which websites benefited from the update in terms of SERP rankings. Secondly, you should run full SEO audits on your own website and the ‘winner’ websites to identify why you’ve been penalized.
Lastly, you need to swiftly implement your findings to ensure your website falls not in rankings, but back into Google’s good graces.