Was it a Google update, or was it you?

If your traffic fell while a Google update was rolling out, don't assume the update did it. Check two things first: whether the drop started inside the update's rollout dates, and what shape it takes. A gradual slide across many pages and queries during the rollout points to Google. A sudden step on a single day, one section of the site dropping while the rest holds, or a drop that lines up with a change you made points to you. Most drops make sense once you put those two things side by side.

This article covers how to line your drop up against the update timeline, the patterns that point to each cause, and what to do once you know.

Why it matters

The cause decides the response, and the two responses are opposites.

If it was your change, you fix it now: restore the title, remove the stray noindex, put the redirect back. Waiting costs traffic every day.

If it was an update, there's usually nothing broken. Google's guidance on core updates is direct: "These changes are broad in nature, and don't target specific sites or individual web pages." Rushing out changes to pages that were doing well can make things worse. Google's guide to debugging traffic drops says "there might not be anything fundamentally wrong with your content."

Blaming the update when it was you means a real fault sits there for weeks. Blaming yourself when it was the update means rewriting pages that didn't need it.

Step 1: pin down the start date

Before you compare anything, find the day the drop started.

1. In Search Console, open Performance, then Search results.
2. Set the date range to Last 6 months so you can see the normal pattern either side.
3. Tick Clicks and Impressions and find the first day the line breaks from its usual range.

Two cautions. Search Console labels days in Pacific Time, so a day there may not match a day in your analytics. And the last couple of days are often incomplete, so judge the start date from data at least three days old.

Write the date down. Everything else hangs off it. If Search Console is new to you, the four things founders should look at covers where these reports live.

Step 2: line it up against the update timeline

Open the Google Search Status Dashboard and its ranking updates history. Each entry lists the type of update (core, spam and so on), when it started and when it finished rolling out.

Check where your start date falls:

• Inside a rollout window. The update is a suspect. Rollouts take days or weeks, so a drop that starts partway through still counts.
• Within a few days either side. Possible, but look harder at your own changes from the same week.
• Nowhere near an update. Look at your own site first. Google makes smaller changes all the time without announcing them, but an unannounced change is the last explanation to reach for, not the first.

Google also asks for patience before you judge a core update's effect: "We recommend waiting at least a full week after a core update completes before analyzing your site in Search Console." Then compare a week after it finished with a week before it started.

Step 3: read the shape of the drop

The date tells you whether an update could be to blame. The shape tells you whether it probably was.

In Performance, use Compare with custom dates: the period after the drop against the same number of days before it, starting on the same day of the week. Then look at the Pages and Queries tabs, sorted by the clicks difference.

A few patterns deserve a closer look.

Impressions dropping to zero for specific pages is rarely an update. Updates move rankings; they don't usually remove pages from the results. Run the URL Inspection tool on two or three of those pages. A noindex tag, a broken canonical or a redirect will show up there. Our guide to why a keyword disappeared from Search Console walks through those checks.

One template losing traffic (all product pages, say, or all blog posts) usually means something changed in that template: a title format, a schema change, a new block of content above the fold. Check what was deployed to it.

Position steady, clicks down usually isn't you or the update. Either fewer people searched, or the results page changed and took the click. Google's drop guide suggests Google Trends to see "if the drop was only for your website or throughout the web." Our article on impressions up but clicks down covers the results-page side of this.

Step 4: check your own change log

Before you settle on "it was Google", list everything that changed on your side in the two weeks before the drop. The usual suspects:

• A site redesign, theme change or new page builder
• Changed page titles or URL structures
• A plugin or CMS update, especially SEO or caching plugins
• Edits to robots.txt, the sitemap or canonical tags
• A domain, HTTPS or hosting move
• Content removed, merged or rewritten in bulk

Then open the Page indexing report and the Crawl stats report (under Settings). Google's drop guide says to look for "a corresponding spike in issues detected". If excluded pages or server errors jumped on the same day as the drop, you've likely found your cause, whatever else Google was rolling out that week.

Step 5: decide what to do

If it was you, fix the change and ask Google to recrawl the most important pages with URL Inspection. Recovery is usually quick once Google recrawls, because nothing about how Google rates your content has changed.

If it was an update, resist the urge to rewrite everything. For a small drop, Google says: "There's no need to take drastic action". For a large one, it recommends you "self-assess your whole website overall (not just individual pages)": is the content genuinely useful, written for people, and better than what now ranks above you?

Then give it time. Google is candid that "it could take several months for our systems to learn and confirm" improvements, and "If it's been a few months and you still haven't seen any effect, that could mean waiting until the next core update."

If it was demand, there's nothing to fix. Note it and watch whether it comes back, as it often does for seasonal searches.

A worked example

A small accounting firm sees clicks fall about 25% over a week in March. A core update started rolling out two days before the fall began.

Comparing the fortnight after with the fortnight before, the Pages tab shows the drop isn't spread out. Twelve service pages lost almost all their impressions. The blog and the homepage barely moved.

URL Inspection on one service page shows "Excluded by 'noindex' tag". The firm had moved its service pages to a new template the day before the drop, and the template shipped with a noindex left over from the staging site.

The update was a coincidence. They removed the tag, requested indexing for the main pages, and clicks returned within about two weeks. Had they blamed the update, they would have spent a month rewriting content that was never the problem.

Common mistakes

Treating a matching date as proof. Updates roll out several times a year, so most drops land near one. The date makes an update possible; the shape tells you whether it's likely.

Analysing during the rollout. Rankings can move back and forth while an update rolls out. Wait a week after it finishes.

Reading only site-wide totals. A site-wide number hides whether one section collapsed or everything slipped a little. Our guide to finding declining pages shows how to break it down.

Changing everything at once. If you rewrite titles, restructure pages and prune content in the same week, you'll never know what helped. Change one thing, then measure whether it worked.

Noticing weeks later. The longer a drop runs before you look, the harder it is to remember what changed that week. A weekly SEO routine means you catch it in days.

Ignoring the pages that held. The pages that didn't drop are evidence too. If they share a template, a topic or a level of quality that the losers lack, that's your answer.

Turn this into a habit

Lining a drop up against an update timeline narrows the suspects, but it rarely names the culprit. The answer usually sits in which pages moved and which held, and Search Console makes you dig for that one filter at a time. Sense Console reads the same data and ranks what changed by urgency, with the evidence and a next step for each, so you see which searches and pages lost ground without building the comparison yourself. It can't see your deploys or your analytics, so the change log is still yours to check. Connect your site for free and you'll have the first list in under a minute. You can start on the Free plan, and you do not need a card.

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