Google Has Not Seen Ranking Updates Where They Got Everything Wrong

Google’s John Mueller was asked about his feelings on the Google March 2023 broad core update and if he can honestly not say that the “update messed the SERP a bit up.” John responded saying, “I’ve seen a ranking update landing as “oops, everything is wrong.” There’s always room for improvement, I don’t think the team sees it as having “messed up the search results.”

John added “If anything, I’d expect a focus on quality to continue — people have high expectations.

He was earlier asked, “are there moments in updating the SERP where your team was like, “whoops, this was wrong”?”

John responded, “Sure! 15% of all queries are new, it would be unexpected (or scary) for everything to be perfect all the time. Many people are “still” working on Search, it’s an important area, and there’s always more to do, things to improve, apart from the web & user needs constantly evolving.”

But to get it all wrong or mostly wrong – Google does not look at it that way. Instead, Google doesn’t roll back algorithm updates, they do a ton of testing before it goes live. If something goes wrong, I am sure Google will push a new update to address those issues, but a revert or roll back – nope…

Here are those tweets:

Sure! 15% of all queries are new, it would be unexpected (or scary) for everything to be perfect all the time. Many people are “still” working on Search, it’s an important area, and there’s always more to do, things to improve, apart from the web & user needs constantly evolving.

— johnmu likes 🥚 staplers 🥚 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2023

I don’t think I’ve seen a ranking update landing as “oops, everything is wrong.” There’s always room for improvement, I don’t think the team sees it as having “messed up the search results.” If anything, I’d expect a focus on quality to continue — people have high expectations.

— johnmu likes 🥚 staplers 🥚 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2023

There are always SEOs that come out and say the most recent Google algorithm update is a step back and the quality of the search results are worse off after the update than before the update. But I have never seen Google revert an update, despite what we may have seen or thought we’ve seen. I have never seen Google admit on record that an update was reverted.

So Google is okay with an update not being perfect but it is a far line to say an update got “everything” wrong.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.