A bunch of folks are asking Googlers like Danny Sullivan and John Mueller if they can confirm that Google did an update over the weekend. Both Danny and John basically said Google is always making updates.
Danny posted on Twitter when asked about this update "We always have changes that happen, plus the web results will naturally change as the web's content changes."
We always have changes that happen, plus the web results will naturally change as the web's content changes.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 18, 2019
Danny also responded to another request on Twitter about an update showing them that tweet about Google doing several updates per week:
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 19, 2019
John Mueller of Google addressed it in a video hangout at 33:15 mark that these updates you see are likely unrelated to BERT and more likely related to the core changes they do all the time. He said:
We made several core algorithm changes over the, I don’t know, that last months or so. Which kind of overlapped with with the roll out of BERT as well. So that's something where my guess is that these changes here are totally unrelated to the BERT change but more just regards to the general algorithm changes. Where we try to figure out which pages are more relevant, which of these pages are better, higher-quality, and how can we show the more relevant pages in the search results.
Here is the embed when he starts talking:
Oh and in terms of John Lincoln's question about SEO news sites; I checked the raw analytics of this site and another massive SEO news site and the Google organic traffic is stable, if not slightly better after November 7th. So I am not sure what he is looking at.
I wouldn't call this Google confirming there was an update but rather Google saying they do updates all the time and they don't want to ask if there was an update because there are always updates.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
