At first glance, the “Health” category appears

[kexej28769@nongnue]

There is speculation that this algorithm update targeted so-called YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) queries and disproportionately affected health and wellness sites . MozCast is divided into 20 keyword categories (roughly corresponding to Google Ads categories). Here are the August 2nd temperatures by category:



A to be the most affected. The average daily temperature for keywords in this category was 124°F. Note, though, that all categories showed temperatures above 100°F on August 1st – this is not a turkey number data where one category was blown out and the rest were left untouched. It is also important to note that this pattern changed during the other three days of heavy flow, with other categories having higher average temperatures. The multi-day update affected a wide range of verticals.

Top 30 Winners
So, who were the big winners (so far) of this update? I always hesitate to analyze winners/losers – while useful, especially for finding patterns, there are many pitfalls. First and foremost, a site can gain or lose SERP share for many reasons that have nothing to do with algorithm updates. Second, any winners/losers analysis is only a snapshot in time (and often just a day).

Since we know this update spans several days, I decided to look at the percentage increase (or decrease) in SERP share between July 31 and August 7. In this analysis, “share” is the raw percentage of page 1 rankings in the MozCast 10K dataset. I limited this analysis to only sites that had at least 25 rankings in our dataset on July 31 (the data gets very noisy below that). Here are the top 30...