I've been noticing that Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, has been removing posts from his X (formerly Twitter) account a lot. I also noticed on select posts, John Mueller from Google has also done that but a lot less often.
John removed tweets related to Google not rolling back the helpful content update. If you read that story, you can see the tweets were removed but the embeds that I used are still showing the text of his tweet.
Here is a partial screenshot:
John Mueller, from what I can tell, rarely ever removes his posts from X. So these removals made me do a double-take. Did Google roll back the helpful content update? They didn't say they did. So why remove those posts?
Update: Google clarified the helpful content update was not rolled back:
To clarify any potential confusion, no, the last helpful content update was not rolled back.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 7, 2023
I did email John over a week ago before publishing this asking for a comment about the removal. I did not hear back. I also asked John and Danny about the removals on Twitter, in which Danny replied but John did not.
Danny Sullivan automates the removal of his tweets from his personal account. He told me on X, " On my personal account, I have (well had, the service died) auto-delete that's been in place for over a year. It kept things with some notable engagement that seemed, well, worth keeping. I can pull work tweets up from my archive if needed."
Meaning, he had a tool that removed posts that had lower levels of engagement. Why? I am not sure. I guess he felt the lower-level engagement stuff was not worth keeping. I did not see him doing that on his @searchliaison account but again, he said the service has been turned off that does that.
I think you mean off my personal account, not @searchliaison. I shifted fully to @searchliaison for work stuff at the beginning of this year. On my personal account, I have (well had, the service died) auto-delete that's been in place for over a year. It kept things with some…
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 4, 2023
No.
— I am John - ⭐ Say no to cookies - biscuits only ⭐ (@JohnMu) December 7, 2023
John Mueller did not reply to my question on why some tweets were removed.
I had this story scheduled for today, just to give John more time to reply before I published. I also see that this morning others are noticing the removal:
Link to the post that references all the answers on X:https://t.co/F3OLCLOBGt
— Gael Breton (@GaelBreton) December 7, 2023
It does make you wonder if Google did roll back any of the last helpful content update and why there has not been another helpful content update since September and why there was only one helpful content this year.
Forum discussion at X.
