Determine whether you were affected by a Google algorithm update

Google changes their ranking algorithm all the time to increase the overall relevancy of their search results and to make their service more useful and valuable for everyone. With so many changes and algorithm updates, it can be difficult to keep track of them or understand how they might affect your website. Some of these updates go unnoticed or may be specific to a particular industry. Others, like a broad update to their core algorithm, can affect the entire search landscape and are hard to miss.

With Annotations in the Pages report, you can use Conductor to find out about algorithm updates. identified by Conductor's experts. Then, you can use the Keywords, Pages, Result Types, and Market Share reports to analyze whether your rankings, organic traffic, or owned universal results were affected.

1. In Conductor, go to Pages↗️.
2. Review the Annotations that appear at the top Your Content's Performance chart.
   
   If you have many annotations, you can use the Annotations menu on the right and select View all. You'll see a window that shows all your Annotations.
   
3. Find the annotations labeled as Google Algorithm Update, marked with a globe icon. These annotations indicate where Conductor's panel of experts have identified algorithm updates that may affect your site's rankings.
4. Still in the Pages report, update the date picker to compare the week that ended prior to when the algorithm update began to roll out with the week after. 
5. Identify any significant increases or decreases to your organic traffic week over week. If you identify traffic that looks unusual, scroll down to the Performance by Page table, sort by change in Visits or Sessions to see if any pages were affected in particular by the update. Make a note of any pages that might need optimization based on the updates to the algorithm.
6. Go to Keywords↗️.
7. Review fluctuations to keyword rankings. Update the date picker to compare the week that ended prior to when the algorithm update began to roll out with the week after. 
8. Sort the Rank Change column to see any significant increase or decrease to keyword positions. Make a note of any keywords for which your content had significant changes to rank. You can investigate your ranking content to see whether optimization is needed based on the algorithm update.
9. Go to Result Types↗️.
10. Review whether your universal results were affected by the update. During major algorithm updates, results like Answer Boxes, People Also Ask, and Local packs are often volatile. Scroll to the second widget to view Your Ownership by Result Type. Keep an eye on the Not Owned results: if you see a drop here, it means that Google decided to show fewer of this result type. This could lead to a decrease in your owned result types. Consider re-optimizing the content that ranked for these result types to target other types of result that Google still favors for the topic.
11. Go to Market Share↗️.
12. From the Search Results filter, choose to see data for the 1st Page of results.
13. Review whether any of your competitors were affected by the update. When doing your analysis, adjust the time period to a week before the update. Then adjust the time period to a week after the update finished rolling out. Compare data sets to see which competitors increased or decreased in market share. Keep in mind which competitors were affected by the updates while you optimize your own content based on what you’ve learned. Seeing how their content was affected by the update can help you make more informed choices about how to optimize your pages.

What's next?

With these action items like monitoring organic traffic, keyword rankings, result types, and page 1 market share, you can stay ahead of the game after Google releases an algorithm update.

If you need additional help investigating your performance after a major algorithm change, request an Organic Performance Report from the Marketplace.