Why are there so many Google algorithm updates?

This morning Google just announced another Core Update and yesterday a Spam Update. This follows on from the Core Update in August the not-so-helpful Helpful Content Update in September. That’s a lot of big updates in a very short space of time!

Although Google makes many minor updates continuously, which is why the search results are never static, these much larger updates, which they announced publicly, tend to be the ones that have the biggest impact and can really negatively (or positively) affect the rankings of websites.

Over the years, website (business) owners have called on Google not to release significant updates in the lead up to the peak Christmas shopping period, but the reality is that we will see more key updates even in December too.

But why so many? Current estimates reveal that there are 250,000 websites created EVERY day. Each will have many pages so there are well over 1 million new pages for Google to crawl and index every day. As the web grows, it gets more and more difficult to filter the good from the bad. Google also has to tackle increasing spam techniques and the amount of AI generated content flooding the internet.

The Christmas period tends to also encourage the spammers to try and make the most of the busy Christmas shopping period, which is why we’ll see updates around this time too. The reality is that there are increasing challenges in crawling the web and delivering quality search results, so we’re going to see many more significant updates. Stable search results are well and truly a thing of the past.

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