Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed that Google has not released a new broad core update since the company last confirmed one in December of last year, the December 2020 core update. Danny said on Twitter "we haven't had a broad core update. We do announce those," when asked about if there was some sort of update recently.
As you know, we have been covering many unconfirmed updates since then but none of those, outside of the product reviews update has been confirmed.
Danny did add "we have updates all the time" and also explained that sites update all the time too. Danny said "sites can move around for smaller updates; sites themselves make changes; content overall changes that produces changes." So sure, our unconfirmed updates can be related to any of those but according to Danny, they are not related to a broad core update.
Glenn Gabe asked Danny Sullivan about if "Google possibly decoupling algorithms from core updates & running them separately." But Danny didn't answer that question, all he said was there was no core update. Here are those tweets:
@dannysullivan I was told at the Google Webmaster Conference that's possible when I asked about running broad core updates more frequently. It's just weird to see sites recovering outside of an official broad core update. I haven't seen that much. Thx for any info you can provide
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 13, 2021
Here is Danny's reply:
We haven't had a broad core update. We do announce those. That said, we have updates all the time. Sites can move around for smaller updates; sites themselves make changes; content overall changes that produces changes.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 13, 2021
So there you have it - no official broad core update for the last several months now. When will be the next one? I have no idea.
And what does Google think about those unconfirmed updates? Well some make them scratch their heads and some are just small updates:
But we do have small updates that happen all the time. They can produce changes, as any update might. Plus, content itself is always changing, and since ranking is dynamic, that causes changes even if we made no updates at all.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 13, 2021
I should add, the folks at WebmasterWorld are not buying Danny Sullivan's comments above - but that shouldn't surprise anyone I guess.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
