Google: Core Updates Are Not About Bad Links

Oct 10, 2019 - 8:18 am 50 by

Google Clean Up

Most of you know this already but Gary Illyes from Google said the other day at PubCon that cleaning up your link profile will not help you recover from a core update. He was quoted as saying this by numerous people during his PubCon talk on Tuesday.

Here are those tweets:

Core updates are not about links and not something specific to your site, as Google has said numerous times. Google said it is about Google thinking there is something more relevant to rank for the query.

Here is how Gary put it:

John then responded as well:

Here is the outline from what Gary said about these core updates from his talk:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 28, 2025

Nov 28, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Ads Account Hijacks, Thanksgiving Google Volatility & Web Guide For All

Nov 28, 2025 - 8:01 am
Spiders

OpenAI Scales Up Crawling & Bots For The Holidays

Nov 28, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google

Google's Sundar Pichai Monitors X On Launch Days For Feedback

Nov 28, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

Gemini 3 Now Powering Google AI Mode For Some Queries, Automatically

Nov 28, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google

Google AI Overviews Showcases Events With New Results

Nov 28, 2025 - 7:21 am
 
Previous Story: Google: All You Need Is Google's Link Tool, Not Third-Party Tools