Google Update “The Perceived Medic Rollback” March 2019

Back in March, many website owners and sites I monitor / manage experienced a big boost in rankings.

What connected these sites?

They have all previously been negatively effected by the Medic updates in August / September of 2018.

They were all in the health and financial niches.

If I look across all of the Google Search Console data, I can see the exact date where this update “brought these sites back”.

Many people, including Google, have described this as a core algorithm update, and not a “rollback” as such of the previous update.

However for all intents and purposes, whatever was hurting their rankings for the last 8 months is now not hurting them, or conversely positive factors that had been negated in the medic update, are now positively impacting rankings.

Or perhaps it’s a mixture of the two?

Until Google is completely transparent on what a certain update has looked at / impacted, it leaves website owners down to speculation.

How can you minimise damage from Google updates?

The best way you can minimise SEO risk factors is to rely heavily on offline advertising and branded search (which you should always rank first for).

However obviously this isn’t appropriate or cost effective for a lot of companies.

So, the next best thing you can do to minimise exposure to Google updates is to have multiple properties ranking in Google that send you traffic.

This means that if a certain update negatively affects one property, it is highly likely that it won’t affect another (or all of them at least).

And maintaining multiple properties over time will usually equalise any results of ups and downs from the main website.

The final step is to consistently think ahead of the curve, and perform pro-active SEO that uses long term solutions to avoid any penalties. Some examples would be providing an amazing user experience, having a market loving unique selling point, focusing on building links that send targeted traffic, and increasing offline brand exposure.