Which 5 UK Global News Sites Lost or Gained US Traffic after Google’s June Algorithm Change?

5 min readJul 3, 2019

Changes to the Google Algorithm can wipe out companies, drop their share prices, halve their advertising revenue and more. Most of the time they are not announced in advance but June’s update was announced and it has had a huge impact on the traffic received by a few online news outlets. Below we cover how the June 2019 changes shook up the US traffic for UK global news outlets.

What change did Google make to its search algorithm in June 2019?

Google makes 1000s of changes every year to its search algorithm however, it only occasionally makes a Broad Core Algorithm change.

That’s more of a major update.

Note the words “Most have little noticeable change…”.

Well, June’s change had one hell of an impact on sites across the web even though they said that it was a standard update.

Why would a website lose traffic because of an update?

The focus of updates is generally to match up user search intent to a high quality result as that’s what makes Google a useful service.

If Google thinks there’s are a lot of low quality content on your site, it gets punished.

Google has targeted those who paraphrase a lot of material, those with slow page load speeds and even those who talk about health and finance but maybe are not deemed as being authoritative enough.

Natural medicine sites like Mercola.com lost 70% of their traffic after one of their updates and Moneysupermarket’s share price dropped 15% after a Google update hit their traffic.

Where is this traffic data from?

From SEMRush.

SEMRush is a tool used by over 1 million users across the globe, often for marketing purposes.

I use it to:

Analyse our competitor’s traffic.
Find which topics are popular in our industry to research and write about.
Understand who is linking to us and sending us visitors.

They have a free trial.

The Daily mail lost almost half its US traffic

(All statistics for all news outlets are for traffic over the course of the month in the USA)

May: 16 million

June: 9.5m

Loss: -6.5m

You’d almost think there was a conspiracy theory against tabloids but look further below at TheSun which doubled traffic.

In the above image you can see the total organic traffic over the years.

It looks like the Brexit effect was massive for all newspapers and the Daily Mail was one of the big winners. At one point the traffic rose to 50 million over the month.

It seems like the effect has worn off. Maybe people have really become bored of Brexit?

The June algorithm change impact? -41%. A massive fall.

Check out the search terms that bring people to the Daily Mail. Meghan Markle should be framed as a hero in their offices.

Also, I find it hilarious just how many people will Google for Daily Mail each day. I imagined that entering it into the browser search bar and have it auto-filled would be faster but maybe I’m wrong. That’s why “daily mail” has a search volume of over 4 million.

Below you can see the sudden drop off in June when the algorithm change came into play.

The Sun came out a big winner

May: 4.5 million

June: 9 million

Gain: They doubled. 100% increase.

They’ve doubled traffic so far.

Just to prove the point, below is The Sun’s traffic for the UK.

It went from 18 million in May to 31 million in June.

One thing to note about the Google update is the winners appear to take traffic from the losers. There are many cases like this, of one site going down and the other rising equally as fast.

It might take time to see if this was a blip BUT maybe the Daily Mail’s loss is the Sun’s gain? Time will tell.

Who would have thought that The Sun would rank no.1 for the search term “Venezuela news” in the USA right now.

The Guardian was already a monster and grew

May: 27 million

June: 33 million

Gain: 6 million

I figured the guardian had a lot of traffic but I didn’t think they were so much bigger than the Daily Mail in the USA.

Oddly enough, they seem to have more traffic than the Daily Mail even in the UK but I need to double check those figures as I find it surprising.

The Guardian receives a lot of traffic for the search term “Stormy Daniels” in the USA. Maybe they led the way in er uh exposing that story.

The Independent got a boost and ranks no.1 for “Sex”

May: 11 million

June: 14million

Gain: 3 million

Don’t ask me why but the Independent is the first result when searching for “sex” on Google in the US.

Also note, an extraordinary number of people searched for what, to me, is a relatively unknown chess player “Lyudmila Rudenko”. Maybe this is after she appeared in a Google Doodle. That’s the power of the Google Doodle for one online newspaper in one country.