Penalty and Broad Core Algorithm Recovery

Google penalties aren’t the only thing to think about – continual updates in both E-A-T and Broad Core Algorithms can lead to lost or reduced rankings, which results in loss of traffic and ultimately, revenue. Our SEO team can help to understand when and why your site was affected by such an update or manual action penalty, as well as how to fix the issues and recover lost performance.

In the past 2 years, Google has fundamentally changed the way they understand and position websites in search. While manual action penalties are still issues to particularly egregious breaches of their webmaster guidelines, Google has invested in algorithms that reward websites which align with their search guidelines. As part of this, the E-A-T (expertise, authority and trust) update has become a key part of ranking websites effectively.  

Further to this, Google updates the core algorithm, known as the Broad Core algorithm, adjusting the factors that it looks for when analysing a webpage. These can vary wildly and can have a marked impact on site performance, particularly in YMYL (your money or your life) websites – medical, legal, wellbeing and financial websites are most vulnerable. 

The impact felt and strategy for recovery differs greatly depending on your situation. A manual action penalty is a human-issued penalty from the Google team themselves, which will be a reaction to particular actions or issues present on your website. This will heavily impact your visibility and it is critical to fix the highlighted issues for the penalty in order to recover performance. Traffic loss from an algorithm update is different in nature; instead of demoting websites based on ranking metrics, a loss of ranking is typically due to a competitor doing something right, leading to a boost in theirs. Recovery here takes into account competitor strategies to ideate the path to success for your individual business case. 

Analysing the Broad Core Algorithm

As part of our drive to deliver the best results to our clients, we actively engage with and monitor updates from Google to understand their impact across search. From the sectors that have been most profoundly affected – positively and negatively – to the changes in the search landscape itself, we can react and adjust our strategy to safeguard against lost rankings and even capitalise on new opportunities. 

For a website that has already felt the sting of a Broad Core update, we’re here to help. Through our use of our professional-grade tools and years of experience, we can identify exactly when your site was affected and the steps necessary to get you back on track.

Our team writes a blog post each month rounding up the latest changes in Google’s algorithm and services. Read the most recent articles here.

E-A-T: The Need for Quality

E-A-T has had one of the most wide-ranging impacts on organic search in recent history. Google’s ability to interpret and rank content on a fundamentally deeper level than ever before has forced websites to provide genuinely expert content in order to succeed. We’re big fans of this change, as it allows websites that offer insightful, high-quality and genuinely useful content to be put in front of the right users, whilst long-form content that achieves little but a word count won’t make the grade. 

With this change, however, comes challenges. For many websites, the sheer volume of content to optimise can be daunting, leading to sections of a website underperforming and dragging the rest down with it. We can help to assess your on-site content, providing a clear picture of where your website delivers and where it doesn’t. From this, we’ll help strategise where and how to optimise key pages, where to prune away or improve  low-performing content, and ultimately create a stronger content offering that shows expertise, authority and trustworthiness in your sector.