Google Broad Core Updates Recoveries & How Google Reprocesses Core Update Scores

Sep 14, 2020 - 8:37 am 18 by

Google Core Update

Last week at Search Engine Land I wrote Google says you can recover from core updates without a new core update. Part of the video conversation where I spoke to John Mueller of Google on this topic is now publicly available. In this video John discusses that sites can recover, some might not see a full recover but some can. And that Google regularly refreshes the scores within the core update between core updates.

The video starts pretty much right away, at the 42 second mark where I ask John about this:

And here is the video which sparked this from a couple weeks ago:

It goes on for about four minutes and note, this was the second time he answered this for me. The first time, we got "zoom bombed" on Google Meet and we had to start it again. It was also a more fluid and back and forth conversation between the two of us where John did say a full recovery before a new core update is pushed out is possible.

In short, John said:

(1) Sites can recover between core update releases. I asked John "although most SEOs I've asked say they would never see a site recover from a core update until the next core update, that is not true and that can definitely happen?" John said "that can definitely happen. The important thing to know that if a site is negatively affected by a broad core update that it doesn’t mean you can’t do anything, that you have to wait it out."

(2) Google "regularly" does update the scores in core updates between core update releases (unlike the old Panda and Penguin updates). John said "there are kind of things that kind of require us to rethink how to calculate a score, but a lot of times we can recalculate it the same way, using the new data we have."

(3) Some situations do require a new core update to be released to have a site refreshed fully. John said "Some kinds of really strong changes when it comes to core algorithm updates do need to kind of wait for the core update to be re-processed again. So that is something where on the one hand, some really big changes might be things where you have wait for us to be able to reprocess things and take a new look at the way we would want to consider relevancy. But many small things along the way essentially can be adjusted over time."

Again, I wish both videos were published but this one has some good nuggets in it.

Here are some tweets I had earlier on with John about this:

He said he would ask folks, which he confirmed he did before we recorded the answer above in the later video:

More from John:

I asked on Twitter via a poll about SEOs recovering and most said not, but it was a pretty big mix:

I would still say most SEOs would say a full recovery from a broad core update is not really possible until the next core update is run. But hey - we have something to look forward to.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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