The latest update to the main Google algorithm, launched in early August, affected mainly websites from the Medicine / Health category. This is evidenced by the results of a study conducted by the Search Engine Roundtable.
Barry Schwartz, founder and chief editor of Search Engine Roundtable, analyzed more than 300 sites affected by this update. The results showed that most of them – 42% – were related to topics such as medicine, health, fitness and healthy lifestyles.
Schwartz noted that although he had conducted such studies more than once, such a pronounced concentration of sites in a particular niche had never been observed before. Usually, updates of the basic algorithm cover resources of all topics.
This time, sites from such categories as e-commerce, insurance, finance, entertainment and others were also affected. But their share is much smaller. However, many of these commercial sites sell products related to health and medicine. Thus, the share of sites from the category “Health” may actually be close to 50%.
With regard to the analyzed sample of resources, it included different countries, languages and types of sites.
Barry Schwartz continues to collect information and does not exclude that the totals may look slightly different. But the current ratio is unlikely to change.
