Future announcements about core algorithm updates are unlikely to become more detailed, as Google said it couldn’t provide specifics.
Google has the details internally, but can’t release the information publicly.
This was revealed in the latest episode of the Search Off The Record podcast with John Mueller, Martin Splitt, and Gary Illyes from the Google Search Relationships team.
Illyes was particularly frustrated by the fact that the team was unable to provide more information to the community when the core update was announced.
He even questions the value of releasing core updates if he can’t provide any guidance other than telling people to check Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Based on the discussion, it sounds like each Core Update announcement repeats the previous announcement.
Google’s Search Relations team extends sympathy to everyone concerned about the core update and hope they can provide more assistance to those affected. But their hands were tied.
Here are some highlights from the core update discussion.
Google knows what’s in the core update, but it can’t tell you
Illyes said the team behind the core update knew what was in it:
“Well, our team generally knows what we’re doing when we do a core update, or more specifically, what’s going on in a core update. In the vast majority of cases, things just focus on what we’ve released over the past 20 years guidelines.
So basically, just write the content, don’t buy links or anything, I don’t know. So every time we do one of those core updates, we’re basically saying…follow our guidelines, and that’s our recommendation. “
When the team couldn’t provide specifics, Illyes questioned the benefits of announcing the core update.
He continued:
“…If we could provide more guidance or more information on what or how in the update…or what kind of sites it’s affecting or what it’s affecting, then I’m all for it, but at the moment we can’t. “
“At the moment, we just say: ‘Hello, there is a core update or an upcoming core update in two hours.’ Then four weeks later, we say: ‘Yes, we’re done with this core update.'”
In short – communication about core updates is limited to when they start rolling out and when they finish rolling out.
That’s how it’s been until now, and that’s probably all Google can say to them in the future.
Misconceptions about core updates
Given how little information is available about core updates, there tends to be a lot of misunderstanding about them.
One of the misconceptions is that core updates are designed to penalize websites.
Illyes wants to clarify that this is not the case:
“I would say there is also a misunderstanding of core updates. I think it’s a penalizing thing. It’s basically penalizing the site. It’s not the case, it’s that we’re optimizing our relevancy algorithms, for example, or quality , or an algorithm that evaluates the quality of a site/page/content. What we’re trying to do is give users better results in a sense, right?”
Inevitably, core updates will positively impact some sites while negatively impacting others.
When a site is negatively impacted by a core update, it’s not necessarily because it’s doing something wrong, Illyes said:
“So it could be that the sites that were negatively impacted by the core update didn’t actually do anything wrong, but our algorithm changed, which is hard to explain and hard to accept, I think.
Because if you’re publishing content and you’ve been publishing content for five years and you have a follower base and so on, all of a sudden you’re ranking lower and some of your competitors and ranking higher because Google made a change. I don’t think it’s easy to accept. “
If you find your site ranks low after a core update, it doesn’t mean you’ve posted bad content, or that there’s anything on your site that needs fixing.
It’s more that other sites are “rewarded” for publishing better content. Such as more in-depth articles, or articles that are more relevant to a specific query.
For more information on recovering from a core update, see the following recommendations from Google in the past:
source: search history
Featured image: salarko/Shutterstock
