Once upon a time, Google gave us information on their updates pre-release.
These updates were regularly announced and would include details on the changes being made to their ranking algorithms.
This gave SEO companies and organisations the chance to react and ensure their websites were up to par.
So should we be given more information about upcoming Google updates?
This information ceased to be given out once the head of Google’s Webspam Team left the company.
Matt Cutts was a Google engineer and quickly became the public face of Google.
He would provide information on the updates to come; what they would bring and how they would affect websites.
As he was actively involved in helping to write the search algorithm, he became a very authoritive and trustworthy voice.
Matt Cutts departure meant the end of the information.
This made it difficult to know when there would be an update and what it would consist of. Also, this lead to confusion.
Companies would lose rankings and not know why until the discussion of a Google update arises.
Other spokesman of Google has been less than forthcoming with the details of Googles updates.
Over time, this has diminished the understanding of what Google are targeting and how they are going to do it.
The updates have gone from one large update to smaller tweaks and changes.
Recently, there have been some confirmed updates such as the mobile-first indexing update.
These however have thinned out and are not as common.
There aren’t many large updates and there are even less updates that have been given names.
This can be seen by looking at Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History.
You can see that most of the recent updates and even some from back in 2016 are referred to as ‘Unnamed’ or ‘Unconfirmed’.
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