A site owner said that after getting hit by a core update in March 2019, he is going to have to shut down his site. John Mueller of Google responded to that saying "I recommend taking a look at the top queries & top pages from before & after a change, and asking yourself if your site is really the best result for those."
It is hard for a site owner to think about their own site like this. Trust me I know. Is your site, the site you spend your time, money and resources on day in and day out, not the best site for a relevant query... It is hard to look at your own site and say that your own site is not the best for a specific query. But sometimes the answer is subjective and it is hard for you to be objective about your own site.
John Mueller did add "sometimes sites get a lot of irrelevant traffic, so absolute numbers can be misleading." Meaning, sometimes the traffic you are getting is not all that relevant and thus is not quality traffic. So losing that traffic might not be all that bad?
In any event, here are those tweets:
March 2019 is a while back, but I recommend taking a look at the top queries & top pages from before & after a change, and asking yourself if your site is really the best result for those. Sometimes sites get a lot of irrelevant traffic, so absolute numbers can be misleading.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 18, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
