One of the fundamental truths of SEO is that it changes very quickly. Google and Bing regularly tweak their algorithms to ensure that they’re providing users with the highest-quality results that they can. Sometimes these updates are small and almost unnoticeable to the untrained eye, sometimes they’re huge and wide-ranging updates to the core algorithm.
However, recently, there seem to have been a number of large-scale updates in a short space of time.
In just the months of June and July, there were a whopping six updates, including three core algorithm updates. This is fairly unprecedented and has bemused a number of SEOs, suspecting that Google is stacking these updates into a short space of time as a way of keeping us on our toes while they push more customers into focusing on paid advertising.
The updates are:
- June 2nd: Broad Core Algorithm Update
- June 10th: Known Victims Protection Update
- June 15th: Page Experience Update
- June 23rd: Spam Update
- July 1st: Core Algorithm Update
- July 26th: Link Spam Algorithm Update
And as we can see from SEMRush, there has been a lot of movement in the search results during this time, which may well have caused a fair bit of panic across clients and site owners.
Why is this happening?
Google is always updating the algorithm, but this many major updates in a short space of time is different. As to why it’s happening, there are a number of possible reasons. There have been a handful of updates which have either been rolled back as they didn’t perform properly, or they were delayed (the Core Web Vitals update, for example).
The Covid-19 pandemic has almost certainly caused delays, where engineers have been either unavailable or working from home. It’s likely that a number of these updates have been deployed in a short space of time because they were delayed due to this and had been planned for earlier releases.
There’s also the possibility that they wanted to keep SEO’s guessing a little more, with so many of us working from home and having more freedom and time for testing and to work on side-gigs, meaning the understanding of the algorithm was a little too close for comfort.
All Response Media viewpoint
SEO has always been a game of cat and mouse. Every time SEOs figure something out, Google tries to create updates to minimise scaling it. Failing that, they will publicly decry the tactic in order to cause confusion and fear around which tactics should be used.
Ultimately, as long as you’re creating a great site for users, making it fast and smooth and serving them the content that they want, while being guided by a professional SEO team, there should be nothing to worry about.
At All Response Media, we take great pride in having as much of a future-proof SEO process as possible and I can honestly say, in the last ten years, I’ve never had a client site impacted by a Google update. If your business has been harmed in this latest wave of updates, why not get in touch and see if we can help?
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