Can 10 pages cause an overall decline in site ranking?

Google's John Mueller answered a question about the overall impact on a site with ten pages that lost rankings after the March/April 2024 algorithm update, followed by an overall decline in May.

Can 10 pages cause an overall decline in site ranking?

The person who asked the question on Reddit explained that they had ten pages (out of 20,000 pages) that were affected by the September 2023 Content Enhancement (HCU) update. They subsequently updated the pages, which ultimately restored their rankings and traffic. Everything was fine until these same ten pages took a hit from the algorithm update in March/April. The exact date of the second downgrade was April 20.

• 📌 Until now, the rest of the site was fine. Only these same ten pages were knocked down. That changed on May 7, when the site experienced a general drop in rankings across all 20,000 pages of the website.

Their question was whether (1) the ten problem pages caused HCU's overall impact or (2) whether the ranking drop was a result of the site's reputational fines that were announced on May 6. To avoid confusion, the site reputation fines were announced on May 6, and the announcement was that they would be manual actions.

A note on the diagnosis of rating decline

I'm not commenting specifically on the person who asked the question, but... the question has the appearance of correlating the drop in rankings with specific parts of the announced algorithm updates.

• 📌 In general, it is reasonable to assume that the drop in ranking is related to a recently announced Google update, if the dates of both events coincide. However, it is worth noting that updating the core algorithm can affect many things (such as query-content matching), and it should be understood that HCU is no longer a single system.