Google’s 2018 Core Algorithm “Medic Update” Update

And What It Means To You And Me

More than a month after Google’s algorithm update on the first of August 2018, we thought we’d take a closer look at the so-called “Medic Update” and find out how it’s affecting users across the industry – as well as examining the official news from the corporate giants themselves.

Now that the update in question has been operational for a few weeks we are able to fully register its impact across various sectors of the industry. Now, instead of speculating, we are able to examine the results for ourselves and find out local SEO was adversely affected – and hopefully find you some pointers as to what you can do about it.

Google are using various words to describe their new update to make us feel a lot more comfortable… words like “Global Core Update” but the reality doesn’t seem to be transpiring quite as they described. It has earned its nickname as the Medic Update because it seems to focus rather heavily on websites within the medical profession, or websites where you are encouraged to spend money to better your life in some way – although it has impacted other sites as well. While Google won’t admit that these websites were ‘targets’ in any way, they do say that the more useful the site, the less likely it is to go down in rankings. It seems that the whole move has been a huge push towards providing better content.

What Google will admit to…

Although they won’t confess if the medical industry was an intended target of the recent update, they are producing an official line. The “broad Core Algorithm” phrase has been rolled out again and again – but they do advise that they perform these updates when needed and, judging from our past experience, that is something that we won’t argue with.

Naturally Google took to Twitter to announce it’s updates as it has in the past and once again we found them repeating past information. We need to keep building better, more engaging, more entertaining, more user-friendly websites in order to keep up in the algorithm charts. When it comes to content, if it isn’t on point you can’t expect to sit at the top of the rankings. You need to keep it up to keep your number up.

Danny Sullivan, slightly cheeky Google Search Liaison officer, added his own affirmation to the argument:

He then went on to further baffle us by his short answer to questions about how much of an impact this has had on across the industry:

With very little other information given out, both Danny and Google went on to publish the update without much else to say about it. A few weeks on, perhaps we can finally get the answers we have been looking for…

Who did update impact?

Google might have implied over and over again that this update was ‘global’ but our data says differently. We scoured the internet to find out what SEO advertisers are saying, what big data management firms are saying and what survey results say; and we found this to be a little lacking in truth. In fact, the majority of affected sites lie in the Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) categories. The medical industry has also been targeted, with some of the financial aspects of the update affecting users on a broader scale.

What’s Googles answer to it? You guessed it, simply re-read the statements in the previous section and you will be as up-to-date as we are.

For those of us not in the know (and don’t worry, that’s almost everyone) YMYL is the newest buzzword floating around the online markets that is used to describe and site that encourages you to buy a product to better your life. Defining features of these sites are thus:

Any page that is vulnerable to bank number/credit card number theft.
Which means any site that processes transactions in any currency.
Any page which stores personal data regarding your health or well being.

‘Guidance’ pages that give advise on major life decisions (this means Estate Agents, Car Sales, anything that demands the user invest in something grandiose).
Pages that offer legal advice, perhaps as a result of the growing number of accident claims companies that promise more than they can reward.

We consulted and consolidated data from a variety of different sources to arrive at some of the conclusions listed in this article. Primarily we relied on our own vigilant survey sources, but we also consulted with RankRanger, Sistrix and more than a few articles protesting the new changes.

Sistrix happily sent us over copies of some of the first results they collated. They accompanied the graphs below with a few pointers for us, indicating that the vast majority of changes are in the YMYL sector of sites and that the changes are lowering peoples rankings by a small percentage. However, it is not so black and white as first thought, and cuts have also been made in educational, automotive and e-commerce sites have also been affected.

Below we have a few sites that gained in rankings after the update, along with a few that experienced loss:

While this list shows us exactly who came out on top thanks to this update:

We also have two graphs from two separate sites, one in the health industry, the other not. When placed side by side and compared we can note exactly where the losses were suffered – and it isn’t surprising information.

We also received a lovely set of easy to read visual information from the techs over at SEO development firm RankRanger. As is reinforced by the image below; the company stated that the home goods, finance and health industries all suffered huge drops in rankings after the update. These drops are rare to see and could be an indication of worse things to come.

Below, you will see the data for listing rank across the health and fitness market alongside the same data from a family/lifestyle market.

As you can see by the sharp drop in rank these sectors have both been adversely affected. This represents a similar story across many other niches as you will be able to define by using the image below. This chart shows the top three results when a search term is entered into Google and how they have changed since the update. Again we see this ripple throughout lifestyle, home goods and health sites.

For these charts, the base readings were taken four weeks previous to the update.