Danny Sullivan posted on Twitter that he hopes Google will communicate more about larger Google updates in the future. Here are the tweets where Danny Sullivan said this:
I hope that we'll be doing so in the future. There are times when it can be useful for publishers & site owners to understand when these happen. We have typically done so for some in the past.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 21, 2017
To be fair, they did somewhat confirm the Maccabees updates. That is a big step for Google these days.
Google did also promise to communicate about "major" algorithm updates in the future. And by Google's own definition, these past updates were not major, they were "minor."
So it is up to Google to decide when it would be helpful for publishers and webmasters to know about an update, if it was major or minor and if they want to communicate about it.
It does really come down to them feeling if we can handle the truth or not. Things like mobile first, ad heavy, HTTPS, AMP, stuff like that, webmasters can make changes and implement. If a page is spamming, low quality, etc - that is their generic advice and telling us if a site was hit because it was low quality - maybe they think why do they need to communicate such messaging. Everyone should make quality sites and continue to improve their sites.
I don't know. I am hopeful we get more communication in 2018.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
