Search engine algorithms and the way they rank pages have been a phenomenon that has been studied and used for over 20 years now. It’s not something new that we are looking at or working with. The fact that Google launches core updates of Google algorithm is also a frequent thing to ensure that quality pages keep ranking higher and the user experience only gets better. 

The search engine handles massive amounts of data that are beyond anyone’s imagination. Think of catering to billions and billions of pages and indexing more billions of keywords and then being able to serve them in seconds to every user across the world, not only segregated with relevance, quality, and geography; but also almost aligning with the intent of search that we have. 

While on one side Google engineers have done a phenomenal job in helping us retrieve what we are truly looking for, there is a whole swarm of businesses that compete for that ranking of 1,2, and 3 in Google search by using special techniques called search engine optimization.

The fact that you are reading this is already a validation to the assumption that you are well aware of what this domain is all about and you likely either have a large site [or wish to build one] and are seeing some effects on your traffic in the recent past. 

If you are getting more than 1 million search engine impressions every month, to see a drop of 10% to see a rise of 20% or 30% is the usual phenomenon month after month. But when the pages show you the increment of 50% to 100%, you surely know you have done something right. On the other side when you see a drop of 50%, you know something is going wrong.

If there are no major changes in the development of our pages, we tend to look at the type of content we are publishing and at the type of content the world is seeking. If we don’t find the answers there, the very next thing to look for is how the search algorithm of Google changed.

In the recent past with the launch of AI and the amount of content that generative AI can develop, Google certainly has had to give its own fight to developing Gemini and the way Gemini delivers the search results with AI snippets. AI snippets not only give you a summary of what you might be looking for but also give you a ton of valid quality links that might have an even deeper serving of the information around the context that you’re looking for. 

With this development, they had to refine the algorithm almost every quarter over the last one and a half years. In September 2024, November 2024, and December 2024, Google claimed to have released core updates.
 
While many aspects might have been affected, several large websites went out of business around October after experiencing a drop in their web traffic without any warning. Apart from the direct effect on web traffic due to search results, what left the digital marketing managers perplexed was the fact that they could not zero down on anything that was likely to affect the sites based on the history of work with search engine optimization efforts. Analyzing which keywords are performing, assessing where their strategies might have failed, evaluating the total number of backlinks that have been acquired, or monitoring the volume of outbound traffic being sent, is the usual way of knowing if everything is falling right.

What most sites miss in this context is to check for web vitals which are available in the Google search console results. In the recent past, the 3 core updates released by Google have mostly affected the web core vitals for desktop and mobile. 

Pages that were usually serving well and did not need any improvement almost started falling into need for improvement and sometimes for some websites they even went into poor URLs. 

Pages that otherwise saw no change in the content delivery or the code that renders them, saw changes from ‘being good’ to ‘being poor’ or falling into the category of need for improvement.

Here’s a quick snapshot of a few pages that needed improvement on a large platform like iU just before the September core update: 

While you can see that thousands of URLs are serving well, right after the update there is a fluctuation in the statistics, and about 2 weeks into the update, most of the URLs have fallen into the need for improvement category.

The pages seem to have recovered by themselves within a month because we released no update to the content on the pages or the code that renders the same around that time, as we were busy figuring out what might have gone wrong for the traffic to have fallen by 50%. 

While we may or may not be close to figuring out what went wrong with the traffic, the traffic seems to improve and return to its original status within the next couple of weeks which is evident from the following image which shows that around mid-November everything seems to have been alright with all those URLs that earlier needed improvement.

Around November 20th, the next core update was released by Google. As the image below indicates, right after that core update the pages have fallen into need for improvement. 

And, finally, on December 6 [as latest as it can get] you can clearly see that over 40,000 pages are now in the category of need for improvement altogether.

This time, we think we were on target in figuring out what went wrong and we realized that it was the Largest Contentful Paint [LCP] and the First Contentful Paint [FCP] that needed attention.
 
Our team extensively worked on this aspect for the last 10 days and as we write this article to share this update with all of you that we have used various page speed tools available on the internet, and they tell us that our pages are now optimized to deliver the FCP and LCP in less than 2 seconds.

This gives us a definite hope that we will be able to meet the requirements of Google’s algorithm not just with the quality of content but also with its requirement of quick rendering and quick delivery. 

According to engineers at Google, based on the kind of core updates and their impact on the webmasters, we were able to interpret and comprehend this: faster delivery of content that provides a high-quality browsing experience to end users to retrieve and read the information that they are looking for, is what search results want to be like in 2025.
 
While we have worked and achieved a milestone to be able to deliver the content on the pages we were delivering without compromise but much better delivery, we felt the need to share this piece with everybody who might be going through this and assure them that they were not alone.
 
If your sites have experienced fluctuations in traffic over the last 34 months and you are going through your period of anxiety to figure out what might have gone wrong, we hope this piece gives you a line of thought and an idea of what to look out for and where to direct your corrections. 

Our team would be glad to reach out and help you if you are unable to figure out all the solutions yourself. Feel free to reach us via Twitter.

Meanwhile, we wish you the best for the upcoming updates in search in 2025 and we hope for the best of web traffic for you. 

Watch out for our next article on the alternative ways of building traffic in 2025.