Guide to Google core updates and interventions to recover ranking
Every day, or almost every day, Google publishes one or more changes with the aim of improving the quality of search results: most of these changes are not particularly visible to users, but serve precisely to incrementally improve the efficiency of the search engine. Just to rattle off some numbers, in 2021 there were 4336 launches, 11,553 experiments with real-time traffic, 757,583 search quality tests, and 72,367 side-by-side experiments, as explained in the guide to how Google Search works. And then there are them, Google’s dreaded broad core updates, significant and far-reaching changes that intervene on Google’s search algorithms and systems, released periodically throughout the year and usually announced officially so that site owners, content producers and SEOs have the right information to understand any changes that are noticed in terms of ranking and traffic.
What Google broad core updates are
A broad core update is a change to the search engine’s basic algorithm, i.e. the core that makes Google’s ‘main’ systems and, on a general level, search ranking work.
As we have said elsewhere, Google’s core algorithm is actually a collection of algorithms that interpret signals from web pages, with the aim of ranking the content that best answers a search query. We know practically nothing about Google’s secret formula for ranking, and we have vague information about the 200 factors used for ranking or about some more specific algorithms, but from what (little) has been explained to us by Google, we can say that the broad core updates affect the whole of this system.
From a technical point of view, then, broad core updates are ‘substantial improvements to Google’s general ranking processes’, are repeated several times a year, and are designed to increase the general relevance of search results, so as to make them even more useful for everyone. They are broad because they do not target anything specific, but are designed to improve Google’s systems in general, and they apply simultaneously to all languages and versions of Google, because their implementation is global and simultaneous worldwide.
More specifically, the major algorithm updates are changes made to improve Search in general and “keep pa