The SEO industry has stated that updates with Google’s core algorithms have been affecting low quality web pages. Google has denied that there has been anything special going on with the ratings of web pages, and there was nothing to be fixed.

By expressing that there was nothing to fix, Google was saying that they did not target low quality sites. In other words there is other reasons why sites were losing rankings. There is no fix for poor performing pages.

Companies need to stay focused on building better page content. In time, their pages may rise relatively close to other pages. Other sites may have stronger page content, which improved their rankings. The sites that lost rankings were not junk or of poor quality, but were not strong enough to gain attention and satisfy the user.

If the majority of users are looking for informational sites and not commercial sites, Google will start indorsing informational sites by sending them to the top of the search results pages. A good example is if a user types in baseball, Google will bring up pages of baseball games and not the baseball itself. It will not matter how many links are used, Google will not place, baseball on the top of the page if users are not looking for that information. That kind of ranking is called User Intent. Web pages are ranked by Google by the kind of pages users are looking to get information on. By understanding user intent, a site that has lost rankings will have lost only to another site with better and different user intent.

It makes better sense to study the winners then it does to study the losers. The losers are always studied by the SEO industry because Google targets the losers to remove the SERPs. Articles prove that Google is not always targeting the low quality articles.

Google said they update their core algorithm almost daily. The now named update Fred and other phantom updates were not officially announced. They were based on unreliable circumstantial evidence.

This algorithm update was officially announced. It was an extensive core algorithm update and was an important change in how the tasks of the algorithm work.

- Is there more name recognition in the winners?

- Are the winners educational, informational or commercial?

- Where are the sites located geographically? Some users tend to like specific areas because sites from those areas satisfy them more.

- Does the structured markup make a difference?

- What does the winning page have that yours is missing?

Once you learn about the winning pages you can make substantial plans to improve yours. Winning pages satisfy the user intent on a larger scale, you need to understand intent better in order to raise your rankings.

Before you panic and make changes to your pages, sit back and see what happens. Sometimes Google will rollback some of the major updates after testing and before they go live. They also minimize damage to those sites who have been given false positives or are innocent sites, even after going live.

Once the algorithm is fine-tuned it is possible that your ranking page could be restored. It might take up to ten days to three weeks.