This is of course very simplified, but that's how it goes

rigite2542@artg

Ranking updates (core update) Let's start with a very important point: There used to be the Panda Update and you could analyze, blog and philosophize a lot. Often you could see similarities in the “winners” or “losers”. Somehow many updates were understandable: bad content, bad links or inadequate web design were punished. This led to more quality in the search results. Things have been different for some time now: those affected don't initially know whether they were just given too much preference in the last update (and that has now simply been put into perspective) or whether things are now going permanently downhill.


The reason: Google is working more and more with machine learning. An AI is trained to Special Data make the search results better. Google knows and analyzes very precisely which search results are satisfactory for the user and which are not. This data used to be baked into manual ranking factors (by humans). Today an AI analyzes and optimizes. The algorithm is then updated with the instructions from the AI ​​and the search results are tested on real people. If the new AI-generated search results lead to happier users, then the update was a success and it will be rolled out.  That's also the reason why even a Googler can no longer say what exactly the background to the core update was: they don't know.




The AI ​​may sometimes make mistakes that we cannot understand. And that's what it does, which explains the strong fluctuations. But that's ultimately of secondary importance to Google if search results are improving overall. Because the satisfaction of the users is the priority, not the satisfaction of the webmasters. The quality of search results is the most important thing for the Search Quality Team. So how should you live as an SEO in today's world? “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose” is certainly not a good attitude, even if it can sometimes even be correct.