Algorithm Analysis

What We're Seeing with January 2026 Core Update

Google rolled out another core update this month. We've been tracking how it affected sites in the finance and health sectors specifically.

Early data suggests sites with strong E-E-A-T signals held steady or improved. But we also noticed some surprising drops for sites that had been performing well. The pattern seems connected to how recently they updated cornerstone content.

We're still gathering data across our client base, but the initial findings point to content freshness becoming more critical for competitive queries. Not just adding publish dates, but actually revisiting and expanding older pieces with new information.

Technical SEO

Fixing Crawl Budget Issues on Large Sites

We worked with an ecommerce client who had over 200,000 indexed pages but only about 15,000 were getting crawled regularly. Their logs showed Googlebot wasting resources on filter URLs and session parameters.

After implementing proper crawl directives and cleaning up the URL structure, we saw crawl frequency increase by 40% within three weeks. More importantly, their product pages started ranking faster after updates.

Content Strategy

When Topic Clusters Actually Work

Topic clusters get recommended a lot, but we've found they only work if your site already has decent authority. For newer sites, focusing on long-tail keywords first builds momentum faster.

We tested this with two similar clients. One built a cluster immediately, the other focused on specific queries. The second approach generated traffic within eight weeks, while the cluster took nearly six months to gain traction.