Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about the timing of updates. Many SEOs have noticed that ranking volatility will generally precede the announcement of an update. Mueller offered clarity on what’s happening behind the scenes.
Search Volatility Prior To Updates
Rankings seem to start going up and down prior to official announcements, and SEOs will start to chatter that something seems to be going on. Days or weeks later, Google will announce the update. Why doesn’t Google call the update when everyone is noticing it?
That’s what an SEO wanted to know.
Muhammad Saad asked on LinkedIn:
“I noticed in Search Console that they seem to start rolling out updates around 3–5 days before announcing them.”
Google’s Mueller responded:
“We don’t roll them out beforehand. We try to get the announcement as close as possible to the actual “button-pushing” (which is sometimes challenging due to time-zones).”
Google Ranking Fluctuations
There used to be a time about twelve or so years ago when SEOs would raise the alarm about a perceived update, and a big to-do would be made for a few weeks, and then the next month another perceived update would start the chatter all over again.
It got so regular and persistent that Brett Tabke of the WebmasterWorld SEO forum created a dedicated Google Update thread every month so that SEOs could talk about ranking fluctuations 24/7, every day of the year.
But of course, Google does not have updates every day or every month. So what’s going on? Part of it is that starting a panic about updates is good for the SEO business, but it’s mostly that Google’s rankings are always fluctuating because the Internet is always in a state of change. Consequently, there are going to be trending topics, viral articles that feed into new trends, and news.
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