Google Algorithm Update Effect

Every year Google updates their search engine algorithm to provide seamless user experience to their user, but the meantime it hurts lots SEO peoples work. Here my question is, How to know my website is affected by the recent algorithm updates?

You would probably start dancing around google or your ranks would just get lower (even deindexing is possible).

Every year? It's not like it's on some kind of calendar where every May 3rd is International Google Update Day.

How to tell if you've been affected? Did your rankings change? Did your regular traffic change? Should be pretty obvious how you tell... and if you don't know how to tell if you're getting traffic from Google or not, I don't know why you care about the updates.

What are you asking here?


Also:

"but the meantime it hurts lots SEO peoples work."

1) Google doesn't care about the work you put into building links to game their system, making you money isn't their purpose.

2) For every site that goes down a rank in Google, another site goes up a rank in Google. It's not like Google does an update and now all of the sudden *every* site gets moved down 10+ slots somehow.

check your rankings than you see the movement

See if ranking changed, obviously. Also look at your traffic, see if its down historically, and see where your vistiors are coming from.

If you lose your rankings and you hear about an algo update on forums then you may have probably been affected.