After August 1, 2018, the SEOer community around the world simultaneously posted a status about the Google algorithm update that caused their website to fluctuate greatly.

There are websites that increase their rankings significantly, while most of them drop in rankings and lose traffic.

Personally, I didn’t pay much attention to this Google update at first because neither our website nor the client websites we’re working on have seen much change. Up to now, in the 3rd week after the sweep, only 4 projects have had a slight decrease.

However, I have received many (must say many) questions sent to inbox fanpage and personal email about this algorithm update. So…

• What is the algorithm update this time about?
• What factors affect website rankings after August 1st?
• How to overcome when you have been “sticky”?

Let’s go through this article with me right now!

I keep a close eye on many algorithm updates over a long period of time. Every day Google updates 1 or 2 something to create the best search results for users.

According to what I see on Social Networks and from the opinions of many other SEO experts in the world that I often follow. This major change update affects the SEO ranking map a lot.

Announcement about the change of some key core points in the Google algorithm on August 1, 2018

The first sites I looked at didn’t see any significant changes (I’ll tell you why it wasn’t affected below). However, if any website I feel changes, it is really affected.

Observe & track the initial change after the algorithm update

Here are my initial observations:

• This update mostly affects YMYL (Your Money Your Life) websites – in other words, websites with topics directly related to finance and life. , your health
• Websites about nutrition, diet or medical equipment are greatly affected
• Many have a great influence on the websites of companies with many branches and offices across the country compared to the websites of local small businesses.

So where do such changes and influences come from? In the next section I will explain these points in detail!

What does Google say?

Google doesn’t always announce when it updates its algorithm because it updates every day, at least once a day. However, this time it did. The omen lies here….same as the update on 9/3!

If you ask me how to recover the website after being negatively affected? Then I will answer…just improve your content ^^! Specifically at 2 points Theme & Trust.

I’m not talking nonsense. Really, if you dig through Google’s guidelines, you’ll see something called the Quality Rater Guidelines. If you remember, I also mentioned this word a couple of times….

Okay, now I will go through some websites that I and “friends” in the closed group discuss about SEO with its rank tracking after the update. They are all in the YMYL category.

Case 1: Nutrition websites drop: why are they down?

In this area there seems to be a major transformation happening. You look at the traffic chart and see, the example website below is seriously dropping! (Screenshot from SEMRush)

A website that suffered a serious drop in traffic after the update

And besides, a few sites started to have rapid and amazing growth.

Other websites increase traffic rapidly

Honestly, I believe what we’re seeing here is the effect of Google finding new ways to evaluate YMYL pages in terms of user safety and trust.

As you can see, if you trust a website with false, unorthodox health information, or sell fake consumer products, then you are the first person in danger.

What does the Google Quality Guide say about safety?

First of all, please read carefully the highlighted section below. That is the update that has just been added to Google’s QRG.

Google’s definition of “Your Money or Your Life” pages

(Translation: “The types of websites that have the potential to affect a user’s happiness, health, future financial stability or safety. We call them ‘Your Money of Your Life’. “)

In addition, Google also added information to say that even if a website or its creator gets into a negative reputation, this could be a sign that Google will underestimate the quality of the website.

No one but Google can say what changes in the algorithm caused the drop. But from the right experience resulting from myself and from consultation with other famous SEO training experts in the world; I have summarized a few things you need to pay attention to in order for Google to trust the website that is providing the best value for the user.

Have a thorough and quality About page

The QRG is really clear when it says that it’s important to specify who is responsible for the information on a website:

Should have a detailed and quality introduction page

This site has little reputation in the world, or there are no reviews from customers

Sites with bad reputation will be underrated

If the website and its owner have bad rumors about the quality of the product, it will be rated as poor quality compared to other websites. Or the case is that no one reviews the product of that website, then there is a high possibility that Google underestimates the services and products of that website.

Website with content that support/against a proven medical method.

This is what the Quality Assessment Guide goes on to say:

Google’s assessment of high E-A-T pages

A website with high E-A-T factors will have content cited from people or organizations with high expertise in the field of science and talking about scientifically proven opinions.

Let’s say if you’re selling a health-related product but have a negative reputation or no backing from clear scientific studies, you might find that Google’s algorithms are less trustworthy. you more.

You see, if the information on the website does not cite reputable websites (Seed Sites), it will be difficult for Google to understand whether the content you are writing is quality or not?

Case 2: Diet/Nutrition Websites Rank Up – Why Are They Up?

After analyzing the ranking websites, I further analyze the ranking websites to confirm whether what I predict is the reason for the ranking drop mentioned above is correct or not?

The author of the article is clearly stated. Also, they are high E-A-T scholars

Below is a case study about the website “dietdoctor.com” that has experienced strong growth for the keyword “keto diet” that I found online – a fairly competitive global keyword. . The website owner is a doctor named Dr. Eenfeldt.

Traffic for the main keywords of dietdoctor.com skyrocketed

A little research shows that Dr. Eenfeldt has his own Wikipedia page, is the author of many books and is known as a knowledgeable and expert leader in the field of low-carb diets, lots of fat.

The name of the author who specializes in the field is clearly written below the article title

The main purpose of the site seems to be to provide information, rather than to sell products

When I look at the homepages of websites that have dropped in rankings, there are banner ads everywhere

In contrast, on dietdoctor, I did not find a single product or sale item.

Of course, it’s not wrong to sell products on your website. But, Google wants to prioritize websites whose main purpose is to help people instead of selling them. You can still sell products, but don’t put banners… you can use other ways such as inserting a few lines of product introduction at the end of informational articles…

And in particular, the article on selling the product makes it very clear: “Any over-the-counter supplement that is not dangerous or illegal (like steroids) is likely to have a small or negligible impact on your health. to your weight.”

In other words, they don’t push products against the scientific consensus on effectiveness or anything else.

Not only restricting content to sell products, the top 1 Google websites all optimize the depth of content and be useful to users.

They have a lot of good reviews from users

The site has thousands of helpful reviews for everyone. Those are reviews about the quality of information on the website, not about the product. And most of them are good reviews, praise the author

A very good review for the website dietdoctor.com

Not only that, it also helps to bring back an incredible amount of content in each of their articles.

Websites about medical products

Another niche that has seen an amazing change is in the health product websites. Let’s review some examples:

Web about medical products reduced traffic after the 1/8 update

This is a customer website selling medical products that I recently accepted as an Entity project. You notice that after August 1, the traffic dropped dramatically, only 1/3 compared to the peak period.

Regarding this example, when I started the site audit I kept thinking and recalling what the Google Quality Assessment Guide said about E-A-T

• It is possible that even though they have some medical E-A-T, it may not be enough
• Or the author of this website content does not have a medical E-A-T

Because it’s a customer website, I can’t disclose the name. However if you click on the author’s name of the posts on this website, you will not see the author bio, but only a list of the articles that the author has written on the site.

Just to be clear, I did a little searching on the Internet and couldn’t find any other news. And there’s a good chance this author doesn’t have a medical E-A-T at all.

Some articles by other authors don’t even put their last name under the article title

I emphasize again, Google’s Quality Assessment Guidelines say that an author’s lack of E-A-T is a sign of a low quality website.

One thing that leads to reduced traffic is the lack of E-A-T . nature

There is no clear purpose for this site

The new versions of the quality assessment guide have a lot of information that emphasizes the importance of distinguishing the purpose of a website.

Google makes it clear that it is necessary to define a website’s purpose and then decide if the web page fulfills its purpose. If your website does not meet Google’s expectations in performing its purpose and does not have the following points, you will be judged as a website that does not fulfill its purpose.

What websites with no apparent purpose to do

The home page of this site is simply a list of articles.

As a reader, I would like to see more interesting, inspirational, and trusting product content.

Everything should be made clearer, more prominent, more impressive to the readers whether your website exists to sell products, to inform people, or for any other purpose.

Or if you are an affiliate website only then make this clear to your readers!

No one wants to go to a website looking for information and then suddenly realize they’ve been offered a product. Things will be better if you clearly communicate with visitors to your site.

The August 1, 2018 Google Medic update had a huge impact primarily on Google’s ability to determine E-A-T for a website.

What if your website is banned?

If you are a website about YMYL and are experiencing a drop in rankings like the ones I shared above, I recommend that you first read and learn more about Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines. .

Google’s Quality Raters Guideline (QRG) is used to evaluate and score the quality of search results. While these scores do not directly affect search results, they are nevertheless used by Google’s programming engineers as a foundation to further develop and refine algorithms.

This means that your website will be highly appreciated by Google and even grow in rankings sustainably.

That is for a long-term strategy, however, in the short term, here are ways I think can help you in restoring your website rankings after the last Medic update:

Show all your E-A-T

Your About Us page should be full of reasons why you are known as the most expert business in your field. It could be about awards won, press recognition, years of experience, etc.

Note: We don’t know if Google actually received this information from your About page. But, our thinking is that anything we can do to help Google understand our E-A-T is fine for now.

Show Author Name & Biography for all edited content

Each article on your website should include a list of one or more authors/writers attached below. This list should be linked to the E-A-T profile pages of those writers.

In particular, Google emphasizes that articles must be created or written by trusted, authoritative & expert experts in that field.

For a landing page or a product page, your business contact & customer support information should be easy to find.

However, for blog posts, news, content should be displayed with the author’s name/information! If author information is unavailable or hard to find, this could affect your E-A-T!

Invest in improving the reputation of your business and your author

You can usually do this by going PR.

While emphasizing the importance of reputation for businesses and website content authors, QRG has been careful to warn that: Information about reputation is not always easy to find, especially for businesses /small organization.

But, note that Google is pretty good at knowing which parts of the site are written by paid writers and which are actually objectively rated by 3rd parties.

Other ways to increase your popularity (in a positive sense) include increasing the number of user reviews on the web, increasing the number of testimonials (reviews of customers using the service/product). displayed on your website, helping your author to post on other reputable websites.

Even you can  completely invest to develop the author’s personal brand by: Take advantage of the author’s social media channels, use these channels to interact with readers/customers of the business website are aiming.

Take a close look at the products/services you are offering

If you sell a product with content that is sketchy, spammy, or harmful to people, this could be the cause of your drop in rankings.

I realize that in some areas or areas, the competition has become so fierce that competitors slander each other with bad reviews and comments. Hopefully Google can look into that.

If you have real users leaving bad reviews about your products or complaining about your business, this problem must be resolved quickly!

If possible, build a product that ensures 3 factors E-A-T

If you sell dietary products, medical devices, or some other health-related product, there should be extensive information on the web about this product.

You can improve your E-A-T product by boosting reviews, creating discussions, and having a product so good that people actually want to share/comment about it.

Remove or edit Content with low E-A-T scores

Some content with a low E-A-T score does not directly affect the E-A-T score of other pages, but can adversely affect the overall website score.

That’s why, in most cases, you should delete pages with low E-A-T and low traffic.

On the other hand, pages with high traffic but low E-A-T scores should be treated with special care. Deleting these pages has a big impact on website rankings, while keeping them is a part of the reason why the website is held back.

The best way is to ask a reputable, professional author to go into the content of these pages and edit part or rewrite the entire content on the page.

Some pages, even without a specific author, still have a high E-A-T score because the content refers to the website’s goal, or is the primary source of content.

Pay attention to website technical security

The credibility of the website is not based solely on the author’s reputation or the accuracy or expertise of the information.

It’s also about security.

Specifically, the “Payment shopping site without a secure connection” without a wide HTTPS site is a typical example of Google’s low ranking.

Currently, Chrome has marked all HTTP pages as “Not Secure”, pages that do not have SSL certificates and do not automatically redirect to HTTPS URLs.

So, please equip your website with site wide HTTPS if you haven’t already!

Conclue 

Summing up all of the above, I want to share with you that these are all quite difficult things to overcome unless you really have the most reliable and useful website in your field. However, you might be surprised by this….

Entity is exactly what you need right now!

Obviously, because this is a method created on the basis of E-A-T, also known as T (Trust) – T (Theme)- T (Traffic) what Google wants. No matter how many Google updates are coming, with Entity you will be safe

Good luck!