Google employees cannot provide further details on Core Updates. The search team can only announce the launch of the next update, but they cannot reveal specific details. This became known from the new episode of the podcast Search Off The Record with the participation of John Mueller, Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes.
Google knows exactly what has changed, but cannot tell us about it
According to Illyes, in most cases, the key updates are focused on the recommendations that the search engine has been publishing over the past 20 years: “write good content, don’t buy links,” and so on. Therefore, every time the next Core Update is launched, Google says: “follow our recommendations.”
He also added:
“If we could provide more guidance or more information about a particular update – what types of sites it affects and what content it affects, then I would be totally in favor – but at the moment we cannot.”
For now, search staff can only announce the launch of the update, and in four weeks – the completion of its rollout, reports SearchEngines.
Misconceptions about Core Updates
Since the industry has only limited information about updates to the underlying algorithm, there are many misconceptions associated with them.
One misconception is that Core Updates is meant to punish sites. However, it is not.
“We are rather optimizing our relevance algorithms, for example, or quality, or algorithms that measure the quality of a site/page/content. And what we are trying to do is give users the best results,” said Illyes.
Key updates will inevitably have a positive impact on some sites and negatively on others. This is their essence.
When a site is hit by Core Update, there is no need to do anything, notes NIXSolutions. In this case, the deterioration of positions was not associated with violations. The algorithms have changed, but it’s very difficult to explain, Illyes added.
“If you find that your site ranks lower after a key update, this does not mean that you are posting bad content, or that there is something on the site that needs to be fixed. It says more that other sites have been “rewarded” for posting better content, such as deeper articles or articles that are more relevant to a specific query.”
You can listen to the entire episode on the page.