Let’s take a quick look at the early effect of Google’s core update.

The September 2019 Google core update was rolled out and this article shares the reaction from several SEO tool suppliers, community experts along with providing Google’s advice on the update.

Google core updates adjust search ranking algorithms with the objective of returning more relevant and beneficial results to the searcher. Google performs these releases about every quarter with measured results.

Rankings change. Of course these updates result in change. Some outcomes are that sites may rank higher for their prime keywords; others may see a drop in their positions, while others see no change. Click-through rates can be affected by updates and you may notice a change in traffic after these updates. Google made more than 3,200 changes last year alone, but core search algorithm changes occur only a few times per year, with big core updates happening around once a quarter.

Sept. 2019 Core Update. Looking at the data from various SEO toolset providers, it appears this September update was not as strong or impactful as the June core update, which was on data as well. Overall, the September core update appears to have had a stronger impact on the YMYL, your money – your life, category.

RankRanger:  This company told us: “as is typical with these core update, the Health and Finance niches took the brunt of it.”

“The volatility of increases seen at positions 1 – 3 during the June update were substantially higher than what I saw with this [September] update,” the company added.

Sistrix:  Sistrix.com which published data around this update Friday morning told us its “initial impressions are that medical, media and travel domains are included (from a global perspective.)”

“In the USA there are some clear winners. As for losers, there are no significant examples to share at this time,” it added.

SEMRush: Finally, SEMRush told us, “at the moment SEMrush Sensor shows the average level of volatility for September 25, 2019, the overall level of volatility is 4.7.”

“Volatility in some categories is higher, e.g. News and Sports, but these categories are likely to have higher changes throughout the day,” the company added. The company said it did not see a strong pattern for winners and losers with this update.

The community. The SEO community has been very active watching and reacting to this update. Here are some comments from the community, including what I covered on my personal blog.

Google advice. Google really did not provide any advice in the past around core updates. Google has said there is nothing to fix with these updates. But last month Google finally gave the community advice around core updates – you can read that here.

Time will tell. The rollout is still happening, so this is all early data and things may still change over the next couple of days. It definitely appears this update was not as big as the previous update. So, watch your traffic, improve your web site in any way you can and keep working on driving traffic and conversions to your site.