Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 01/05/2026

Google Core Updates now roll out with even more frequency. Now, most might pass, and you may not see much change in your business’s normal organic traffic levels.

However, sometimes a Google core update can rock the boat so much that you’re now worried about how to regain all of that lost organic traffic.

The majority of the time, we see new clients say they have experienced a decline in sales in the past due to link issues or content marketing quality issues.

That’s because Google uses “EEAT”; for those familiar with the work that we publish on our blog by now, they will know that Google’s algorithm is very good at weighing up how useful and how well written content marketing is.

If it’s good quality, packed with useful advice, spot-on in every regard, well, people all over the globe will likely be reading it for long periods (contributing to high dwell times).

This contributes to what we SEO boffins call good “user engagement metrics”. Plus, Google will know whether the content quality is good from the first index.

 

Google’s quality standards

Okay, so we’re not going to waffle too much about Google Webmaster Guidelines, or Google EEAT, or the practically countless Google updates that have already been rolled out, such as Panda, Penguin, and BERT, that were meant to improve the quality of Google’s search results.

It can all get a bit technical.

Plus, there’s only so much information we can pack here, but do note that quality pays dividends when it comes to writing blog posts and the main page content for your company website. So, don’t cut corners, don’t use AI, don’t duplicate, don’t write rubbish work.

But, if it’s too late for that, and now you’re looking for solutions, rather than us hammering home that there is a problem, here’s what we would do:

 

Confirm there has been a Google Core Update and then hold tight.

Okay, so before you go making changes, confirm that there has been a Google Core Update that’s been rolled out.

Therefore, look for official notification on Google’s own blog that they are rolling out an update or have already done so.

However, here’s the tricky thing, well, sometimes they don’t give any notification!

They, well, just do it!

Therefore, there’s the brilliant Barry Schwartz (https://www.seroundtable.com/).

We have followed Barry for years, and he write regular posts which give us notifications when a major Google update is rolling out.

Therefore, if you are in any doubt, you should check there, as it often mentions whether a Google update has rolled out or is rolling out.

The next bit of our advice would be not to make changes to your company website just yet during a Google update. You need to wait a bit;

Google updates take some time to roll out, sometimes weeks.

During that time, the Google algorithm rollout causes what’s called “ranking flux”, which basically means, well, everything all over the shop in terms of a business’s rankings for a bit.

One hour you could be 8th, then you’re 1st; the following day you’re on page 2. These substantial changes in where a business ranks organically mean you do have to let the algorithm update roll out, then take stock later on.

 

Which pages have been affected?

Okay, so you can use a tool like Ahrefs or Google Analytics to see which pages are flatlining in terms of organic traffic. Now, what you might find is that certain blog posts and pages are flatlining, and there has been a notable drop-off in organic traffic.

Then you can start figuring out what the problem is. For example, it could be because someone in-house has been copying and pasting sections of other people’s work onto your website, leading to duplication issues!

It could be someone using too much AI.

It could be because, well, on reflection and with adjustments to Google’s algorithm, Google thinks that the work is not good enough when compared to the direct competition.

It could be this reason as well, and this doesn’t get enough conversation in our view, that is “user engagement has been poor”. When you talk to the best of the best agencies, and we believe we are one of them, we believe that Google’s algorithm monitors bounce rates, dwell times, number of pages visited, etc for each and every page on your website.

Therefore, if the page has failed to date to gain much interest, well, this could be why it’s dropped further in the organic results.

 

Content quality is just not good enough.

There are so many reasons why the content marketing does not cut the mustard.

Here are some of the main reasons that we can think of, from the top of our heads:

 

Does not meet search intent

So, basically, some businesses keep punching out content marketing, sometimes even daily posting on their own blog section.

But in a nutshell, well, no one sometimes is reading it. It’s just content marketing that’s being written, well, for the sake of it. It doesn’t address any of the real questions people have when purchasing your goods or services, its just well, a bit of marketing waffle.

The best quality content marketing really understands the questions the customer has and wants answering. Then it addresses it with such expertise that people are drawn to read it for longer and longer (high dwell times, low bounce rates).

 

Outdated, thin or just a lot of AI text has been used!

This leads nicely from our last point: some businesses, well, they get caught on that hamster wheel of writing content each day or on a very regular basis. The work therefore is just quantity and not quality.

What happens then is that content marketing can quickly become outdated, sometimes even totally obsolete as well if its not kept updated.

For example, an article about “The best e-bikes of 2018” is no longer relevant now because new models are coming out all the time.

Therefore, here’s the thing that a lot of businesses don’t get, plus marketing agencies sometimes, that content marketing needs to be maintained and kept up to date.

All of the pages on your website, and blog need to kept up to date, whether that’s the advice contained within the text, the outbound links that are pointing to further advice, or, let’s say, the products on the page. As if a shopper is spending time clicking on broken links, this is a surefire way to increase the bounce rate!

 

Your competitors are simply doing a better job

Everybody likes to say that search engine optimisation is the most complicated thing to do!

However, when you break it down in terms of what it is all about, well, it’s just not.

Google’s purpose is simple, it want to supply the best answer to any given query.

Therefore, if you provide the best possible answer and give it some time, you can rank number 1 for that question.

This means more organic traffic.

Which means more sales.

Therefore, it’s not that complicated; it’s just about providing the best possible answer to your customers’ questions.

Therefore, this leads us to this point: a reason why a business may see a sudden drop in organic traffic from Google after a core Google update is simple. The reason is that, after a period of revaluation of all the new content marketing that’s been indexed by Google, that answers that question, your work could be not as good as the new work that’s been written by the direct competition.

It could be that the bar has been set higher, well, much higher.

 

Google EEAT

Okay, so you might be asking yourself, as a marketing manager, well, why are there so many Google algorithm updates made each year?

And what’s Google changing in terms of its algorithm to make the order of businesses change so much in the SERP’s?

Well, one thing’s for sure: Google’s core updates are all centred around this: E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

However you slice and dice it and change the importance of over 200 Google ranking factors, they’ll be reordered and adjusted based on EEAT.

Therefore, there’s no real substitute for quality.

If you can supply the best possible answer, and in that answer, show that you have the most experience, the most expertise on that matter that your writing about, that page will rank higher.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re discussing diamond quality or how to choose the best electric car on the market; if it’s clear you know what you’re talking about, and you’re able to retain the reader’s interest for longer, these are the pages that do really well.

 

Are there technical SEO issues holding your website back?

We have actually seen this: a customer had paid a previous agency to do some work; they have been writing blog posts during the contract for about a year. Yet none of the work could get indexed. This means Googlebot, which Google uses to read pages, couldn’t crawl and index the page, which means, well, it had practically no chance of appearing in Google’s organic results.

 

Indexing and crawlability issues

Therefore, do keep a close eye on your business’s Google Search Console account and see if there’s a rise in pages that can’t be indexed. This could be, for example, due to a hosting issue, such as the hosting going down on a regular basis. It could be because a no-index instruction was left in the robots.txt file where it shouldn’t be. There’s a whole range of reasons why work can’t get indexed, but it can hamper SEO performance if you do want those pages indexed, and they can’t get indexed.

You also need to consider Core Web Vitals, broken links, wasted crawl budgets, and fixing other technical SEO issues.

 

An increase in spam links / low-quality links

Okay, so let us dispense some of our best advice here, with SEO, some of the less experienced marketing companies, and those businesses implementing search engine optimisation themselves, well, sometimes they don’t understand or appreciate what we are about to say next.

That is, sometimes, you can implement bad, low-quality search engine optimisation and, well, the direct negative consequences of ranking lower on Google doesn’t happen straightaway. However, it’s when a Google Core Update is rolled out that things can go wrong, and massively wrong.

If you have been going overboard with building spam links, a manual or algorithmic penalty can sometimes hit you at any time. However, it’s during a Google core update roll out that such a penalty could also hit your websites seo.

Therefore, someone might have gone link building crazy; it’s just that when these major updates are rolled out by Google, well, then the business gets hit by a link penalty or then suddenly sees a drastic drop in the keyword positions. It’s then that the major drop in organic traffic can be due to the website sometimes being “de-indexed”, which is as serious as it gets in SEO. It means websites were removed from Google for creating link spam or not following the rules.

 

Poor user experience / sky-high bounce rate?

If your writing content marketing that’s sending the customer to sleep, or the website offers a poor user experience, such as loading way too slowly, well, Google will notice and so will your vistors.

Google uses AI through Google RankBrain. Basically, if your content marketing is not holding customers’ interest (low dwell time), it will not reflect well in how the website ranks in the SERP’s after a Google core update rolls out.

 

Google evaluates:

– What’s the dwell time like for each page (how long is the average shopper is reading and staying on the page for)
– What’s the bounce rate like for that page / post (how many shoppers are leaving more or less straightaway?)
– How many product / main pages are they visiting on average? (how engaged is the shopper with the website, for example, are they visiting a lot of different pages?)

 

Come back stronger, and don’t give up!

Okay, so if you feel that you have put in your best effort, yet a Google update has drastically reduced the organic traffic in your Google

Analytics account to key pages, well, you have to ask why?

How has that happened?

Don’t give up, sure the recovery can be a long process, when it comes to anything to do with organic search engine optimisation, nothing is quick!

 

However, do the following:

• Look at how we can improve some of the content marketing
• How can you implement good quality on-page SEO on those pages that have been impacted
• How can you make the page more engaging to retain the customer
• How can you fix any technical SEO issues

 

Frequently asked questions:

 

How long does it take to recover from a Google core update?

We hate to say “it depends”- yet it in this instance, it very much depends.

If its just something like a few core pages could be updated, perhaps reworded, and the products recommended changed to more up to date products, well that’s a piece of cake.

You could change the products that you recommend, make some text description changes, and get the work re-indexed.

You could bounce bank in terms of where you once ranked in the organic SERP’s quite quickly.

However, if someone has built a load of spam links, these could cause link penalty issues, and that is much harder and much longer to recover from.

Basically Google has lost trust in your businesses SEO ability. It takes time to then recover.

 

Do all pages get impacted by a core update?

This does depend, sometimes an update can be granular, so it just targets say a group of pages.

For example it could target just duplication issues.

On the other hand, Google’s engineers could have been busy working on a massive update, targeting spam pages, duplicated, content thin, spun content or AI written work, then a lot more pages could be impacted.

Therefore, it does depend on how large Google’s update is.

 

Does improving content marketing quality help to improve rankings?

Yes, is the short answer.

However, because there’s only so many hours in the day, you do have to be careful with your time. That’s because, you could spend months updating old blog posts, to little or no effect.

Therefore what you should do is, see which of the most important product pages for instance have plummeted in terms of organic rankings and visitor numbers.

Then look to see how you can improve those pages.

Perhaps, there’s duplication issues, or the page is just content thin, so it doesn’t offer much in the way of information.

 

Should we just delete effected pages?

So, we wouldn’t recommend deleting pages.

Sometimes, some inexperienced marketing agencies, and businesses, just delete pages and then create new work.

However, its far better to try and improve the existing pages.

 

Remember that sometimes it can be a simple fix

Okay, so lets return back to our example, where we had direct experience of a website that was down on sales.

The SEO was damaged by a previous SEO.

And did it take hundreds of hours to fix?

Nope it, was a no-indexation issue, a problem with some of the code, that once fixed, Googlebot could do its job, go in and crawl and index the page.

Then all of that work, in terms of the blog posts could be indexed, appearing in Google’s results, bringing in more visitors.

So sometimes its not a hard fix.

Its just knowing what to fix.

 

Hire the best, hire Walsh & Partners

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Looking for an SEO company that’s had our work mentioned on Search Engine Land? Which is widely recognised as one of the best SEO resources on the planet!

Looking for an agency which as low priced retainers starting from 1k a month?

Well, look no further, Ryan Walsh and the team are some of the best SEO consultants in the country.

 

Do call us for further help and advice.