Google says it can’t provide specific information, so announcements about core algorithm updates are unlikely to become more detailed in the future.
Google has the information, but it is not permitted to release it publicly.
This was revealed in the most recent episode of the Search Off The Record podcast, which featured Google’s Search Relations team members John Mueller, Martin Splitt, and Gary Illyes.
Illyes is particularly irritated by the team’s inability to provide more information to the community when a major update is announced.
He questions the value of even announcing core updates if they can’t provide any guidance other than directing people to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Based on the discussion, it appears that each announcement of a core update will be a carbon copy of the one before it.
Google’s Search Relations team sympathizes with anyone who is concerned about core updates and wishes they could be more helpful to those who are affected. But their options are limited.
Here are some highlights from the core update discussion.
Google Knows What’s In A Core Update, But It Can’t Tell You
Illyes claims that the team in charge of core updates is aware of what’s in them:
“Well, our team generally knows what we are doing when we are doing core updates or what the things in the core updates do, more specifically. And in the vast majority of the cases, the things are just focusing on the guidelines that we’ve been publishing for the past 20 years.
So basically, write good content, right, don’t buy links, whatever, I don’t know. So every single time we do one of these core updates, we are basically saying that… follow our guidelines, and that’s also our advice.”
Illyes questions the benefit of announcing core updates when the team can’t provide specific details.
He continues:
“… If we could give more guidance or more information about what’s in an update or how… Or what kind of sites it’s affecting or content it’s affecting, then I would be all for it, but at the moment we cannot.”
“And at the moment, we are just saying that: ‘Hello, there was a core update or incoming core update in two hours.’ And then four weeks later, we are like: ‘Yeah, we are finished with this core update.’”
In short, communication about core updates is limited to when they begin and when they end.
That’s how it’s always been, and it’s likely that’s all Google will be able to say about them in the future.
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Misconceptions About Core Updates
Because there is so little information available about core updates, there are many misconceptions about them.
One of the common misconceptions is that core updates are intended to penalize websites.
Illyes wants to make it clear that’s not the case:
“And the thing I wanted to say is that there’s also a misconception about core updates. I think that it’s a punitive thing. It’s basically punishing sites. Which is not the case, but rather, we are optimizing our relevancy algorithms, for example, or quality, or algorithms that assess quality of a site/page/content. And what we are trying to do is give users better results in some sense, right?”
Core updates will invariably have a positive impact on some sites while having a negative impact on others.
When a site is negatively impacted by a core update, it is not always because the site did something wrong. Illyes states:
“So, it might be that those sites that were affected negatively by a core update didn’t actually do anything wrong, but rather, our algorithms changed and that is very hard to explain, and also swallow, I imagine.
Because if you are publishing content and you’ve been publishing content for five years already, and you have a follower base and whatever, and suddenly, you rank lower and some competitors and ranking higher because Google made a change. That’s not easy to accept, I guess.”
If your site’s ranking drops after a core update, it doesn’t mean you’re publishing bad content or that there’s something wrong with your site that needs to be fixed.
It’s more than other sites were “awarded” for producing higher-quality content. For example, articles with greater depth or articles more relevant to a specific query.
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