 Happy Friday, Mozfans. I'm here at Searchlove London recording this Whiteboard Friday. I don't know when it will reach you, but this is a bit of a different take on how to think about core updates. So obviously I'm filming this in October. We've just had three updates back-to-back in quick succession. I think it's quite interesting that we had three updates and they were described in very different ways. So we had a helpful content update, a core update and a product update or product review update. It's interesting that sometimes Google talks about updates very specifically. So I think the best examples are things like HTTPS or core vitals, page experience update, where they're very concrete about what they're going to do, how they're going to do it, how they're going to measure it, how it's going to impact the algorithm. Then you have core updates where they do say things. They tend to be kind of saying the same thing every time. So every single core update, they've said make good content, work on your expertise, authoritativeness, trust. And this isn't very concrete. It's not very specific about what they've changed this particular time. Indeed, if you're a site that's affected by these updates, it can feel quite random. It can feel like you're just going upwards or downwards. There's no particular rhyme or reason. So how can that be? I just want to give you some different ways to think about that. So the two different ways that I'd like to focus on, one of them is this concept of a refresh. So Google used to talk a lot about algorithm refreshes. This is up to about 2012. And what they meant was this is something that was different to an algorithm update. So it wasn't called an update. It was called a refresh as distinct. And they were trying to say that this would kind of be like a mini reset of how the algorithm was thinking about certain things. And if you look at how they talk about core updates in their documentation, they say things like this. So your site might not recover until the next core update. So you have situations where this is your rankings in blue. This is your competitors' rankings in red. You get to a point where they've improved their site over time gradually. They've not been recognized for it. And then a core update comes along and suddenly they go up to your position. You go down and you're left thinking, oh, that was a little bit random. Because it wasn't random, it was just that they were gradually being recognized for things they'd worked on, or suddenly being recognized for things they'd worked on gradually over time. The other concept I'd like to talk about is the extent to which Google is testing. They're iteratively testing over time. Again, they talk about this in their own documentation. And there's an article that I've come back to quite a few times. Back in 2018, it probably linked beneath where they invited some journalists to a meeting of their search engineering team. And in that meeting, they were talking about how they were thinking about some changes they were making to the SERPs. And they talked a lot about how they were going to run some things as a test and look at certain metrics, see how they were improved. So it's important to think that Google has their own metrics that they're iterating towards. And they're not necessarily saying, oh, your site is bad, or there's something wrong with your site. They might be saying, oh, well, what we're aiming for at this point could be more beneficially affecting some sites and others. Ultimately, if someone comes up, someone else has to go down. And indeed, if we look at in MOSCAS data, if we look at sites that are affected by at least four updates, so this is looking over the last since medic, technically there were some core updates before medic, but I think the industry has been very focused on this since medic. If we look at the core updates of which there have been 12 now and the sites were affected by at least four of them, the vast majority in MOSCAS data had both some positive, some major positive movement, and some major negative movements. So this is this tiny green slice represents the sites that only saw positive movements, and this red slice, the sites that only saw negative movements. So it's incredibly unusual to have mono-directional movement, which just shows that people are winning and losing as Google tests different things. It's not necessarily that some sites are just better suited to core updates and win every time. That's very, very rare. I also want to talk a little bit about the longer term. I think it's important when we think about these updates to zoom out a bit, because these short-term effects can seem more random, harder to explain, harder to predict. So I've looked at a lot of sites, again, in the MOSCAS data over time, and how they've been impacted by each update. So this is an example, obviously, it's drawn on a whiteboard, so it's not super precise. But this example I've attempted to illustrate here is actually Reuters, the news organization. And I've chosen them because this is a site that obviously produces a lot of original content. It's very authoritative. It's hard to criticize it from the regards that Google likes to talk about in its core update discussions and announcement. And these bars represent how it was affected by each core update over a period of time. So it had some big negative hits, not many serious gains from these updates. This doesn't look very good. But if you track how their traffic grew or their visibility grew within MOSCAS over time, it looks a little bit different. So it sort of gradually grows over time through... So what this means is even though on the days of the specific updates, they were taking sometimes negative hits, like if you look at the week before and the week afterwards, sometimes they took big hits, obviously there's long periods of time between these updates that they might still be able to grow. So say there might be three months between these bars and even though they took a big hit here, they're growing over the next three months, maybe over here, they take this big hit, but they've more than recovered it by the time they get to the next update, take this hit, more than recovered it by the time they get to the next one. And that could be that their SEO team is working some magic behind the scenes, but this is quite consistent trend, this happens to a lot of sites. And what I would suspect is actually happening is Google is, when they launched the core update, they're to some degree resetting certain things, looking at things afresh, valuing different metrics, and then over time, whatever historically was making that site perform will creep back in and start to be considered again. So I hope that was interesting, that's just a few different ways to think about core updates besides the usual messaging that we get, which is very consistently just eat good content. I'm not saying you shouldn't do those things. Those are important, this longer term trend that you get with a lot of sites that do do those things, shows how important it is. But I think when you look at individual updates, you have to keep in mind that it's not necessarily that Google is suddenly optimizing for these things more, they're just iterating over time. That's all from me, thanks.