Ysais Digital Marketing

Google Updates

SEO, or search engine optimization, is good for your site for the simple reason that it boosts your ranking in search engines, which translates to higher organic traffic and more clicks. However, it is important to note that some optimization strategies may take some time to produce results, but they tend to be the most effective in the end. Others, as you may rightfully guess, work much faster, but may end adversely hampering your site. Overall, Google SEO can tell the good websites from the bad, and rank sites appropriately. How does Google achieve this objective then?
Well, Google uses the search ranking algorithm/infrastructure to rank sites. In the past, Google used the principle of quality first as one of the methods to push low-quality websites to the top pages of the search results. However, there have since been countless changes and updates on Google SEO are made quite often.


If you realized that your site is suffering a big drop in traffic and rankings, then it is more likely that it has been hit by one of the algorithm updates. Which one? Of course, there may be many, and this article looks at some of the recent Google infrastructure update.


The March 2019 Update was massive and big


Infrastructure updates, as hinted in the introductory section, can help speed up indexing or calculations. Prior to the March update, some information has already hit the internet that 2019 is the year when biggest SEO updates will be rolled out. Most webmasters were of the opinion that the effect of the said infrastructure update will not reach many sites. In fact, there was a lot of misinterpretation as far as what Google meant by saying that the update was going to be a big thing!


Going by the words of Google, infrastructure change brings significant changes. While it might not be felt immediately, it will affect website rankings in the long run. It should be noted that the infrastructure updates introduced allowed for the advancement of SEO algorithmic processes.
One month later


Google has earlier explained that the update will be big and that is exactly what it came to be! One month down the line, Google search index wheels started to meltdown and fall off as a result of the update. It led to massive and widespread technical issues resulting in many web pages getting eliminated from the Google index. Many online marketers and website owners reported a significant fall in the rankings because most of the pages were no longer in Google index. This can be interpreted to mean that something momentous happened in Google infrastructure that caused the sudden loss of the web pages. To salvage the situation, Google has since embarked on a major infrastructure update, which again has severely affected the web publishers. It is unfortunate that Google has never announced that such an update has been happening!


Google Indexing Bot seems to be updated


Another clear indicator that Google infrastructure is undergoing major updates is the fact that its Bot “the crawling software” is updated. It should be remembered that for the past four years, Google’s Bot lack the ability to download on Chrome has been lagging behind for the simple reason that it was based on the March 2015 Chrome 41 version of the browser.


Chrome is now at version 74, implying that, until recently, Google’s Bot could not see the web in a similar manner as folks who are using modern browsers. However, that has since changed. In 2019, Google announced that its Bot would be based on the latest Chrome browser version going forward. The upgrade on Google’s Bot represents a significant update on how Google crawls through the web.


It is without a doubt that the recent change to how Google crawls the web has occurred amidst the troubles related to the March 2019 a big update that affected website caching and indexing.