John Mueller was put in the hot seat a bit in the last Google Webmaster Hangout when he was asked about why it seems there are no changes happening in search results, despite active SEO being done by multiple sites in a vertical.

It’s hard to say what you’re seeing there.  In general, we are working on search and we are bringing updates all the time.  I think last year we made over a thousand updates in search. And these are things that you’ll always see resulting in fluctuations and rankings, changes in the way that we rank things.

Also, of course, we pick up on all the new content, all the signals that are associated with that, and try to take that into account.  So if we see that signals for one site changed significantly, then that should be picked up within a fairly short time, maybe like minutes, hours, that kind of time frame even.

The person asking the question added some clarification, saying that in the past, you’d see some kind of movement within a couple weeks after making changes, but he isn’t seeing much changes in the results at all.

I don’t really have anything specific where I’d say “oh, we all went on summer vacation the last couple of months and nothing is happening in search.”  People are working here and pushing changes.

We have our algorithms that are picking these things up automatically so it’s not that there’s an artificial freeze on the search results where we’d say for this niche or for this kind of website or even for search in general where we’re freezing things and not changing things at the moment.

Things should always be changing but of course if you are making a lot of changes on your website and you aren’t seeing any results then maybe some of those changes aren’t really relevant for that site’s ranking at the moment.  That might be one aspect there.

So Google isn’t putting a stop on search results movements at all, but if you aren’t seeing any changes, have a look and see what you are changing, and what you might be missing that could boost your rankings.