After a 10-day rollout, it might be a good time review how you were impacted by the Google core update.
The Google June 2021 core update that launched roll out on June 2nd was completed on June 12th, the company announced via Twitter.
There were a lot of ranking fluctuations on June 11 and June 12 and it is tricky to figure out if it can be 100% attributed to the core update rollout but possible.
More on the June 2021 core update. Here, you can read more detail on this update named Google’s June 2021 core update was slow to roll out; here is what the data providers saw.
Why you should care. With the completed rollout in place, you can now safely check your rankings to see how you were impacted. Keep in mind, Google is going to roll out another core update this month and that update may reverse the gains or losses you experienced from the June core update.
Google correcting 2 search bugs – review snippets and soft 404 detection
These bugs lead to some pages and stars being removed from the Google search results.
Google has confirmed it is fixing these search-related bugs impacting what is displayed in Google search results. The issues are with review stars showing in the search results and how Google processes soft 404 documents. These seem to be unrelated but are both being addressed by Google.
Soft 404 Bug Leads to De-Indexing Issues
Google changed how it detects soft 404 pages and that led to some page removals from the Google Search index. In short, Google now does soft 404 detection by device type, which caused some spikes in soft 404 errors but not visibly seeing if those pages were in the Google index or not.
Google confirmed both on Twitter and on YouTube that the company has pushed out a change to address the issue. Google some may have detected an increase in soft 404 error reports in Search Console. The group recognized the classifier that was causing an issue and deactivated it while they fine-tune.
Improvements should already be happening.
Review snippets and stars removed
Over the past couple of days, Google Search has stopped showing, for the most part, review snippets. Those stars that are placed under some of the search results that have review structured data. Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed this afternoon that this is indeed a bug and Google will hopefully fix it soon.
Here are screenshots that illustrate the before and after that I personally captured.
Review snippets after the Google core update:
Review snippets:
As you can see, the stars are not showing up but Google is now aware and the issue should be resolved soon.
Why you should care. These bugs can directly impact your traffic from Google Search. Once Google resolves the bugs, it could lead to more traffic on your site from Google Search. With the soft 404 bug, Google was not listing some pages in its search results that will soon be re-listed once the bug is resolved. With the review stars, Google was/is not showing review stars in the search results that can lead to a lower click through rate from the search results.
We all hope both will be fully resolved soon with a positive impact in your traffic.