After a Google update: what to check

When a traffic drop lands in the same fortnight as an announced Google update, the update becomes the obvious suspect and the site becomes the thing to change. Google’s own pages are more careful than that. They say how to date a drop against a rollout, how to judge its size, and what to leave alone while the picture settles. Our overview, diagnosing a traffic drop before acting on it, covers all the causes in brief. This article goes deeper on this one, and assumes you have already checked that the drop is real.

Where Google announces ranking updates

Google publishes notable ranking changes on its list of ranking updates, which now sits within the Google Search Status Dashboard. Its help page says the dashboard shows issues that affect many sites or users and the latest ranking updates relevant to website owners, and that when an update is noted there is often no action needed.

The ranking history we fetched mixes core updates, spam updates and a Discover update, and one entry from August 2024 that is an incident and not an update. Google also says smaller core updates happen continually and are not announced because they are not widely noticeable. A drop with no entry nearby is therefore not proof that nothing changed at Google, and an entry nearby is not proof that it was the cause.

Dating the drop against the rollout

Google’s core updates page says a core update has to finish before analysis starts. It tells owners to check the dashboard for the start and end dates, wait at least a full week after completion, and then compare that week with the week before the rollout began.

This matters because rollouts are not instant. In the dashboard history for 2024 onward, the core updates run from about six days to 45 days. A fall that starts a week before the announced start cannot be this update, and one in the middle of a rollout cannot be judged yet. In our reading, the useful record is the date the fall began, the rollout start and the rollout end, side by side.

Small drops and large drops get different advice

Google’s traffic-drop guide and the core updates page agree on a split. Review top pages and queries and ask whether the drop in position is small, such as 2 to 4, or large, such as 4 to 29. For the small drop, Google says there is no need for drastic action and recommends avoiding changes to content that is already performing well. For a large, sustained drop across the site as a whole, it asks for a self-assessment of the whole site, not just individual pages, against whether the content is helpful, reliable and people-first.

Google also says that if you suspect an update there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with your content. It describes core updates as broad changes that do not target specific sites or pages, and compares them to re-ranking a list of favourite restaurants as new ones open: those that move down are not necessarily bad, because others now fit the list. The helpful content guidance supplies the questions, and suggests looking at which pages were most affected, and for which searches, against them.

Telling an update from a technical, security or site-move cause

The debugging guide sets out the other causes with their own checks. Technical issues can be site-wide or page-wide; a noindex tag depends on recrawling, so traffic falls more slowly. Security problems can bring warnings to users. Spam violations can lead to manual actions. A move that changes URLs causes fluctuation while Google recrawls, and Google gives a few weeks as a rule for a medium-sized site.

None of those pages offers a test that separates an update from these causes, so what follows is our reading, not Google’s method. Three questions help. First, timing: does the fall begin inside the rollout window, or on the day of a release or a URL change? Second, scope: is the loss across a wide range of queries and pages, as Google describes for a large drop, or confined to a template, a section or a set of redirected URLs? Third, evidence in the site’s own reports: does the Crawl Stats or Page indexing report show a matching spike? We deal with those in technical causes of a traffic drop, traffic drops after a site move or release and security and spam problems.

Spam updates ask a different question

Google’s spam updates page says these are improvements to its automated spam-detection systems, shared on the same list. Sites that see a change should review the spam policies, because violating sites may rank lower or not appear at all, and improvement may come if the systems learn over a period of months that the site complies. For a link spam update, it adds that making changes might not bring an improvement, because any ranking benefit from spammy links is lost once their effects are removed and cannot be regained.

The page does not mention disavow files. Our reading is that filing one because a drop coincides with a spam update, without having found links that breach the policy, is a guess and not a remedy.

What not to change, and how long to wait

The core updates page lists cautions. Avoid quick-fix changes, such as removing a page element because you heard it was bad for SEO. Make changes that serve users and are sustainable. Deleting content is a last resort, for content that cannot be salvaged. Changes may take effect in a few days or take several months; the traffic-drop guide says you will likely want to wait a few weeks before checking Search Console again, and the core updates page says that if nothing has moved after a few months it may mean waiting for the next core update. There is no guarantee of a noticeable effect.

The helpful content guidance adds warning signs such as changing dates to make pages look fresh, and adding or removing large amounts of content because of a belief that it will make a site seem fresh, which Google says it will not. Our reading is that three habits follow from this: no site-wide rewrite on the strength of a timing coincidence, no mass deletion, and no reverting a release without evidence that the release caused the fall. Each also makes the next result harder to read, because several changes at once leave nothing to attribute it to.

Where this fits at Cultured Digital: keeping the update question separate

An update is one hypothesis among several. Our SEO audit is a focused investigation that finds the cause, then says what to do first: we read the site, form a hypothesis, test it, and write findings your developers can act on in order of impact. That sequence is why the update question is kept apart from the rest, so that real problems are found instead of symptoms being treated. The technical areas are covered under Technical SEO, and the Measure guide under SEO Strategy covers measurement design and reporting that answers business questions. Where content decisions follow, Plan the content covers what to create, merge, update or remove. We do not promise rankings or traffic numbers; we set out the opportunity and the evidence, and measure against it.

After a Google update: what to check and what not to change