One of the biggest challenges for Google is to keep their algorithm out of the public eye. If SEOs knew exactly how Google ranked their search results, it would immediately ruin the whole system. The top spot would no longer be earned by the most relevant site, but by whichever site had managed to plug as many keywords, links and meta data into the right sections.
On the 9th March, according to a lot of webmasters, Google unleashed a major algorithm update. This caused search results to be ordered differently and was immediately noticed by SEO analytics. This caused a bit of belief behind the rumour and it lead to John Mueller, who is Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, to making the statement that “we make changes almost every day.”
It makes complete logical sense that the team at Google don’t wait until Friday’s to launch their new code. They don’t have a big launch party once a month whereby all the code that the whole company has been working on, will be simultaneously dumped onto the network at the same time. There’s no way that a tiny company would ever consider that to be good practice, so why would Google even have to entertain the idea?
The daily updates to the searching and ranking algorithms allow for the daily fluctuations and progression of the Google machine. The way we search has evolved in the last ten years and accordingly, the Google algorithm has evolved to match and exceed our demands. Would you not be disappointed if Google was still stuck with its original search engine.
Rankings and search results change every day, that is why there is a huge amount of potential in the SEO market. You have the opportunity to make a real impression on the search results for a company. One day they can be impossible to find on the fifth page and the next you have managed to progress them to the top ten results.
As if John Mueller’s statement wasn’t enough for the community to accept the Google update structure, Gary Illyes also managed to let us all know that we need to just accept the updates and move on. He used his twitter account to say “we have 3 updates a day in average. I think it’s pretty safe to assume there was one recently…”
Working for Google seems to have played into Mueller’s comedy strengths, as he revealed that all updates will be called “Fred”. It has left people trying to figure out the acronym or just labelling everything they do as Fred in the hope of scoring a few more SEO points and upping their rank.
