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Google s search engine is one of the wonders of the technological world. Think about it the way we use the internet and access information would be dramatically different if we had to manually visit websites one at a time and sift through content to find information.
Most of the time, most of us wouldn t even know where to start. Instead, in a fraction of a second, you can type in a query and Google will give you a list of results in a ranked order that it thinks are a match for what you re trying to find.
Of course, Google is focused on making search better, which means that it makes changes to the algorithm that powers those results. Over the past few years, those changes have been focused on figuring out what users are looking for by making Google better at understanding natural language.
Google’s John Mueller Confirms Core Updates Apply to Discover
Google Discover is part of, not separate from, web search. Broad core algorithm updates that impact search results also impact Discover.
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Google’s John Mueller says it’s common for broad core algorithm updates to impact Discover in addition to web search results.
Google sees Discover as part of search results, rather than a separate component. Since Discover is part of search it uses a number of the same quality algorithms, Muller says.
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That means changes to Google’s web search algorithm will impact Discover. Or, as Mueller puts it, updates to Google’s search algorithm “commonly” impact Discover.
Google December 2020 Core Update Insights
Five search marketers share their perspectives on the December 2020 Google Core Algorithm Update.
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In my opinion, Google updates have increasingly been less about ranking factors and more about improving how queries and web pages are understood.
Some have offered the opinion that Google is randomizing search results in order to fool those who try to reverse engineer Google’s algorithm.
I don’t share that opinion.
Certain algorithm features are hard to detect in the search results. It’s not easy to to point at a search result and say it is ranking because of the BERT algorithm or Neural Matching.
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On December 3rd, Google announced that they were rolling out the latest Core Update. Initially, the bulk of the impact seemed to arrive on that date, with MozCast spiking at 112.4°F:
We measured above-average ranking flux in the three days prior to the update announcement, and a few days after the announcement, but the bulk of the flux seemed to occur on the roll-out day. (The dotted line represents the 30-day average prior to December 3rd.)