It’s that time again: Google is making changes to their core algorithm. It is the third time, this year, where changes have been officially confirmed. The changes to the SERPs seem (as of today) quite manageable.
After the large updates in March and April, Google has now officially confirmed the third update to their core algorithm this year, via Twitter:
Only marginal changes across the board
Looking at the daily Visibility Index values for the UK (it looks similar in Germany and Spain), there is not really a large shift within the results. Looking across the board of all domains, we do not see more changes than usual.
Sensitive topics show movement
Something that is noticeable for this update is that a more-than-average amount of domains, that did see changes to their rankings, deal with sensitive topics. This is especially apparent with health and finance sites, but other, similar topics are also affected.
In their Google Quality Rater Guidelines, such pages are called „Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages“:
Some types of pages could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users. We call such pages “Your Money or Your Life” pages, or YMYL.
You can very nicely see simultaneous changes in the visibility in this example of three domains from the health sector:
They are not alone. Numerous other domains from this and similar sectors have gained or lost visibility at that point in time. In the image below, taken from the Toolbox, we show the winning domains for the UK and then for the USA:
Winning Domains in the UK
Winning Domains in the USA
Conclusion
After seeing massive SERP-displacements in the two previous updates in March and April, the impact of this update can only be called modest, at the moment. The majority of changes can be seen for YMYL-sites and even there we generally only see an uplift or loss of a few percentage points.
