Google ‘s Core Algorithm Updates are the most important events when it comes to website optimization. Although Google is constantly working to improve search, several times a year it makes major updates that have a huge impact on search and its results. Google has never publicly released more detailed information about the introduced changes, and it will obviously remain so in the future, because Google says it cannot provide specific information. Google has the details internally, but cannot release the information publicly.

Google cannot provide details

This was revealed in the latest episode of the Search Off The Record podcast with John Mueller , Martin Splitt , and Gary Illyes of the Google Search Relations team.

Illyes is particularly frustrated by the fact that the team can’t provide more information to the community when an update is announced. He questions the value of even announcing a core algorithm update if they can’t provide any guidance other than telling people to review Google ‘s Webmaster Guidelines.

Based on the discussion, it sounds like that will continue to be the case. The Google team sympathizes with anyone concerned about the update, but their hands are tied.

Here are some highlights from the discussion of the core algorithm updates. The Google team knows what’s behind the update, but they can’t tell you:

“Our team generally knows what we’re doing when we do a core algorithm update or more specifically what the changes in the updates do.” And in the vast majority of cases, things just focus on the guidelines that we’ve been publishing for the last 20 years.

So basically, write good content, don’t buy links, whatever, I don’t know. So every time we do one of these core updates, we’re basically saying that… follow our guidelines, and that’s our advice.”

Illyes questions the benefit of announcing an update to the core algorithm when the team can’t provide concrete details.

He continues:

“… If we could give more guidance or more information about what’s in the update or how … Or what types of sites are affected or the content, then I’d be all for it, but right now we can’t.”

“And at this point, we’re just saying, ‘Hi, there was a core algorithm update or we’re announcing a core algorithm update in two hours.’ And then four weeks later, we’re like, ‘Yeah, we’re done with this core algorithm update. ”

In short – communication about updates to the core algorithm is limited to when the updates started rolling out and when they ended. That’s how it’s always been, and that’s probably all Google will be able to say about them in the future.

Misconceptions about core algorithm updates

Since there is so little information available about updates, there are usually a lot of misconceptions about them.

One of the misconceptions is that core updates are designed to penalize websites.

žIllyes wants to make it clear that this is not the case:

“And what I wanted to say is that there is also a misconception about updates to the core algorithm. I mean the penal policy. That it is basically punishing sites. Which is not the case, but we optimize our relevance algorithms, for example, or quality, or algorithms that evaluate the quality of the site/page/content. And what we’re trying to do is give users better results in some sense, right?”

Inevitably, major updates will have a positive effect on some sites and a negative effect on others.

When an update negatively affects a site, it’s not necessarily because something bad was done, Illyes says:

“So it could be that those sites that were negatively affected by the update didn’t actually do anything wrong, but our algorithms changed and that’s very hard to explain and also to swallow, I guess.”

Because if you’ve been publishing content and you’ve been publishing content for five years, and you’ve got a follower base and whatever, and all of a sudden you’re ranking lower and some competitors are ranking higher because Google made a change. That’s not easy to accept, I guess.”

If you notice your site ranking lower after an update, it doesn’t mean you’re posting bad content or that there’s something you need to fix on your site. It is likely that other sites are “rewarded” for publishing better content or articles that are more relevant to a particular query.

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Source: Searchenginejournal