Google Had A Major Core Ranking Algorithm Update This Past Weekend

Barry Schwartz on January 12, 2016

Zineb Ait Bahajji (in French), Gary Illyes and John Mueller of Google have confirmed on Twitter that what webmasters were seeing over the weekend was not the Penguin update we are expecting, but rather a core ranking algorithm update.

On Friday, I noticed early signs of an update, and then, over the weekend, I called this a “massive update.” I asked Google for confirmation, and on Twitter they confirmed it was a core ranking algorithm update.

Google rarely confirms core algorithm updates. They did confirm one back in May 2015 for us, but it is rare that they confirm these. So it is a big thing for Google to go on record that this update webmasters were seeing was related to the core update.

Webmasters are still waiting for the Penguin update that was delayed and expected to be pushed sometime during this month. So there was a lot of confusion, with SEOs and webmasters thinking this update was Penguin-related.

But the signs didn’t point to Penguin; it seemed more core search- or Panda-related. Now we know it was core search, and potentially also Panda, which is now baked into the core search algorithm. More on that in a few minutes over here.

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Google Explains What It Means To Be Part Of The “Core” Algorithm

Barry Schwartz on January 21, 2016

Last week’s news that Panda is part of Google’s core ranking algorithm has gotten SEOs buzzing about what exactly being part of the core algorithm means. Now, Google has shared some more information about that, saying that the algorithm is consistent enough to not require many changes in the future and can run with less hand-holding.

In a Q&A with Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, he spends a good amount of time explaining the confusion around what it means to be part of the “core” algorithm, and also why it is hard to sometimes define a Google update.

The video starts at around 8 minutes in, where Andrey Lipattsev, a search quality senior strategist at Google, said in regard to what core means:

It is less about the functionality, which means it probably doesn’t change that much over time, and it is more about how we perceive it, in the context of the algorithm. Do we still think this is an experimental thing, it is running for a while and we aren’t sure how long it will last? Or is it like PageRank, it is part of it, it will always be there, at least in the foreseeable future and then probably call it in certain context part of the core algorithm.

He also cites how Gary Illyes from Google tried to explain it on Google+ with this analogy:

I think this is really the worst takeaway of the past few days, but imagine an engine of a car. It used to be that there was no starter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starter_[engine]), the driver had to go in front of the car and use some tool to start the engine. Today we have starters in any petrol engine, it’s integrated. It became more convenient, but essentially nothing changed.

For a user or even a webmaster it should not matter at all which components live where, it’s really irrelevant, and that’s why I think people should focus on these “interesting” things less.

Andrey Lipattsev explains that Gary meant here that Panda is now part of the core ranking algorithm, and it means they do not need to know how it runs any more. It’s been tested, it works, and it can now run by itself without much worry.

Ammon Johns, in the hangout, then said, “Once they forgot how it works, it is core?” To which Andrey Lipattsev replied, “That is exactly right.”

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