One of the SEO industry's gripes with Google is that they rarely confirm search algorithmic updates. We cover most Google updates here and very few of them actually get confirmed. Sometimes, Google will come back to us weeks later and say, yea, we did do an update but most of the time, no - they won't confirm it.
Google's Gary Illyes said at SMX Advanced the other day that if there was significant and/or major algorithm changes, they will communicate that. But Google is constantly updating, he said he can confirm there were two updates each day for the past few days. So Google can't confirm each one and most of those updates don't really have a significant impact on the results.
If there were significant changes, like with the mobile-first index, Google will let us know. But small algorithm changes - it sounds like Google is done giving us confirmations on that.
Don't get me wrong, I will keep covering unconfirmed updates but getting a confirmation has been harder and harder since Matt Cutts left.
Here are some important tweets from that session:
When there is a major change to the algorithms, G will communicate that. i.e. Mobile first. But really there are few major changes. #smx
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) June 13, 2017
If there is a significant/major change, they will talk about it. Similar to how they did with mobile first. @methode #smx
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) June 13, 2017
We had at least 2 updates to our core algorithm today. Tomorrow there will be at least 2, the day after at least another 2. @methode #smx
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) June 13, 2017
We can confirm 2 updates today and 2 updates tomorrow. We do 100s on an ongoing basis - @methode #SMX #SMXadvanced
— Avinash Conda (@avinashconda) June 13, 2017
Today, we have at least 2 updates to our core algorithm. And tomorrow. And the day after. Every year we have 100s of updates@methode #smx
— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) June 13, 2017
Today we can confirm we had at least two updates to our core algo... and the same tomorrow and the next day. @methode #smx
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) June 13, 2017
"Today we have at least two updates to our core algorithm." Tomorrow too. And the day after. @methode #smx i.e. every day there are updates.
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) June 13, 2017
Forum discussion at Twitter.
