After the core update, most sites did not fall, but what about the part that did?
After the core update, most sites actually did not decline. The part that did decline should first look at whether the content theme and keyword coverage deviates from the search intent, and then check the technical layer. A survey covering more than four thousand sites shows that 70% of the sites improved or remained the same during the update, and only a small part showed a decline. That is to say, after the update, the first thing to do is not to change the structure, but to first put yourself in the correct group of '持平, improved, declined', and then decide where to move.
What are the three main categories of sites after the update?
In the same round of updates, the direction of the site can be divided into three groups based on the results: those with index uplift, those with little movement, and those with significant decline. The significance of grouped statistics is to avoid two types of misinterpretation: treating overall fluctuations as problems of your own site, or using the stability of most sites to comfort the decline of a few.
| Group | Typical performance | What should be done first? |
|---|---|---|
| Uplift group | Exposure and clicks rise simultaneously | Record the characteristics of rising pages and don't rush to expand changes |
| Flat group | The curve fluctuates within the original interval | Only do baseline record-keeping, don't change content and structure |
| Decline group | Click decline is concentrated in some directories | Locate the common features of the scrolling page |
In the AnQiCMS backend, you can export the scrolling pages according to the keyword library groups for comparison, to see if the scrolling is concentrated on the same batch of thematic words. The historical versions left in the content review process are also clues to determine when the drop started after which change.
Why most sites actually haven't moved
The update affects specific types of low-quality signals, not the overall site rating. Most sites have a limited thematic scope, so the judgment area is small, resulting in the curve being within the normal fluctuation range. The sites that are truly adjusted are often those that produce a large number of contents with similar structures and inconsistent口径 in a batch.
Therefore, 'not dropped' does not mean 'no need to look at it'. The task of the持平 group is to archive the current indicators as the baseline for the next round; otherwise, when the next fluctuation occurs, without a reference point, any change will be attributed to the update.
First look at the content layer for the part that has decreased.
It is recommended to fix the order of checking the content layer:
- Is the title and description of the page still answering the same question after scrolling down. After multiple rewrites, the page theme is easy to drift from service introduction to general science popularization, and the search intent matching will be distorted first.
- Are there a large number of paragraphs with inconsistent口径 under the same theme. When numbers, time, and conclusions conflict with each other, the quality of the extracted answer will decrease.
- Has the sensitive word filtering and keyword replacement been temporarily closed? Once the filtering rules are relaxed, promotional text in historical articles will re-enter the text.
This step should produce a comparison table of 'sliding page—theme—conflict point', not a full-site rewrite. The content-side revision suggestions should only affect the named pages, and the rest should remain unchanged.
Check the content layer first if there are no problems.
For the technical layer, check the crawling and indexing path: whether the static rules still point to valid pages after the revision, whether there are still residual return redirection or error status status code addresses in the sitemap, and whether the link push sends out the new address in time. These three items all have clear switch positions, and the cost of inspection is lower than that of content revision.
The order cannot be reversed because technical layer issues are manifested as 'batch page anomalies', and content layer issues are manifested as 'only part of the page slides in the same template'. By looking at the distribution of sliding, you can determine which layer to check, avoiding repeated jumps between the two layers.
How to arrange the review window
After the update is completed, the index will continue to fluctuate for a while. It is recommended to take a snapshot once a week, observe for four consecutive weeks before judging the trend; when online corrections are needed, schedule the release time outside the observation window to avoid mixing changes and updates with the same curve. The timed release capability allows corrections to take effect at a controllable point, and it is also clearer to trace back later.
Common questions
Question: Should the stable group be optimized during the update window?Answer: No. Changes during the update period will invalidate the attribution, wait until the index is stable and arrange a change separately, retaining the data for comparison.
Question: If the decline only occurs in one directory, what does it mean?Answer: It is more likely a problem with the content theme or quality distribution of the directory, rather than a technical configuration problem of the entire site, and it is prioritized to locate common features at the content level.
Question: How long will it take to see the results after the changes are made?Answer: Content layer corrections usually take several weeks to be fully reflected, and the absence of changes in the short term does not mean they are ineffective; comparing with the baseline on a weekly basis is more reliable than daily monitoring.