Those who have been around the industry for a while will remember that Google used to post updates about recent algo changes on Inside Search. However, it was discontinued in 2012 and hasn’t been updated, aside from changing the header to the new Google logo.
The question came up yesterday during Gary Illye’s Q&A at the Pubcon keynote and whether it would ever be updated. And for those nostalgic about it, the answer was no.
But the reasons Illyes gave for it being discontinued were kind of interesting. The main one was that SEOs tended to over-analyze and read too much into the changes Google did post, and focused too much on those specific parts of the Google search algo. This isn’t too surprising, as whenever we see any kind of algo change, SEOs definitely tend to try and reverse engineer it and over-analyze every possible nuance, signal and change, and use it to their advantage.
Google's weather reports was discontinued because people were focusing too much on what they shouldn't. @methode #pubcon
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) October 8, 2015
However, SEOs still do tend to over-analyze comments from various Googlers, whether made on Twitter, Google hangouts or any of the other mediums you can find Googlers answering SEO and ranking related questions. But I could see where Google publishing it “officially” as part of Inside Search would lead to over-analyzing.
Google no longer updates us on what they are doing because we were dissecting every single word of every update. #Pubcon @methode
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 8, 2015
It is also something I wrote about recently – too many SEOs and webmasters are too hyper focused on very small parts of the search algo, and are often missing the “bigger picture” aspect as well as not focusing enough on things that they could be doing/adding/changing to improve not just the overall site but with rankings as a bonus side effect of doing it.
But Illyes also mentioned another side effect… the reduction in the quality of pages in the search results with this info being used for SEO and ranking purposes. But when they stopped updating the algo info, it slowly came back up again. Which also leads to the point that Illyes often makes both at conferences and on Twitter – create for users, not the search engines.
Jennifer Slegg
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