Google Helpful Content Update & Link Spam Update Delayed Rollout Because Of Holidays

Google officially confirmed that the helpful content update needs more time to roll out, but now the link spam update is also past the two-week mark, and it is not done rolling out yet either. John Mueller of Google said these updates may take longer to complete due to the “holidays” and “for safety reasons.”

John Mueller wrote on Mastodon when asked about the status, “Sometimes things take longer, for good or for bad. We try to reduce the amount of change in our systems over the holidays for safety reasons, and that sometimes means things that started before take a bit longer to complete.”

Technically, this does make sense. If the main engineers responsible for these system updates are away or on limited access, changing anything with them might trigger an issue. I am surprised they pushed this out when there was a chance that it would run into the holidays and not be able to confirm the updates were done until after the holidays fully. But I guess maybe things came up, and it ran into the holidays, so they decided to slow things down. I am not sure, and I am really just guessing.

We saw some big turbulence days before Christmas and then things clamed down a lot. The truth is, the Google volatility is much calmer still than the previous couple of weeks.

I would have thought these updates completed themselves. Like they start to roll out and over time, it just finishes themselves. So I kind of would not be surprised if Google tells us at some point it is finished, but it finished earlier than when they confirmed it was finished. But again, this is me taking some guesses on how I think these rollouts work.

Does Google need to press a button to finish or complete the rollout? What do you think?

Meanwhile, I keep checking to see if the rollouts are done.

The December 2022 link spam update is now over two weeks since it started and the December 2022 helpful content update is now three weeks and two days since it first started. Both are over the two-week mark.

It looks like we will have to wait a bit more…

Just a reminder, Google said last year that there is no reason to work on algorithm and SEO issues over the holidays…

Forum discussion at Mastodon.