The pre-announced June 2019 broad core algorithm update started rolling out on 3rd June to datacenters worldwide and Danny Sullivan of Google Search Liaison confirmed in a tweet on 7th June that it had completed.
Although it's still early for definitive conclusions, there have been some indications of winners and losers following this latest update. So, what do we know so far?
Analysis by Sistrix found that news sites and YMYL (“Your Money, Your Life”) sites were among those affected. YMYL sites were also impacted in the previous core updates. In their blog post on 5th June, Sistrix said
“It is noticeable that in this round, the breadth of affected domains is wider. News media sites are noticeable among the visibility winners of the update along with a few retail sites, health-related and images sites.”
“Among the losers we can see many from the “Your Money, Your Life” category. Again though, news media and retail are included which keeps the field wide.”
The Daily Mail was one of the early big losers, with a reported 50% drop in search traffic after the update.
Source: Google Search Console Help
RankRanger, writing on 10th June, said initial data analysis
“...showed the Gambling niche to have been hit pretty hard while the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) niches did see more rank fluctuations than niches like Travel and Retail. That does not mean Google was targeting YMYL sites, as evidenced by the Gambling niche being hit far harder than the Health and Finance niches.”
Source: RankRanger
Another big loser was the cryptocurrency news site CCN, which announced it was shutting down after a 71% drop in traffic and an over 90% drop in daily revenue following the core update.
In a response to a question on Twitter, Danny Sullivan reiterated that updates were routine and that there was no particular thing anyone needed to do with them "other than have good content". He said most sites would generally not be affected.
Separate site diversity update
Meanwhile on 6 June, Google announced the release of a separate update to promote more diversity in the search results. This means in most cases Google won’t show more than two results from the same site, but may still do so “in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search”.
Google said the site diversity update was unconnected to the June 2019 core update.
