Google Algorithm Update Due Soon, But Don`t Expect Lost Ranking Recovery

Google’s recent web creator event, where staff members answered questions from invited site owners affected by past updates, announced that an algorithm update is coming “fairly soon,” but it won’t help lost rankings or traffic, deflating attendees’ hopes of recovery. 

Quick acknowledgment 

Barry Schwartz covered the Web Creator summit in his articles on Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable, and as with all of Barry’s posts, they’re a great read. 

Barry also recommends reading Mike Hardakers (founder of Mountain Weekly News) detailed documentation of the event on his blog, I Drank the Kool-Aid at the 2024 Google Web Creator Summit.

Much of the information in this post is from those sources and quotes from attendees/Google staff, which I break down for a quick read. 

The event

Danny Sullivan (Google’s Public Liaison for Search), Pandu Nayak (VP of Search at Google), and Elizabeth Tucker (Director of Product Management in Search Quality) chaired Google’s Web Creator summit held at the GooglePlex where they answered questions from invited site owners whose Google search rankings were affected by past updates.

Algorithm update on the way

The main announcement at the event was that an algorithm update is coming “fairly soon.”

Good news, right?

No, as any hopes of recovery were extinguished by Sullivan and Nayak, who clarified that sites negatively affected by recent updates, like the Helpful Content Update, shouldn’t expect to recover their lost rankings and traffic after the update is finished.  

As quoted below, this led to some follow-up questions from the bemused content creators. 

Your content isn’t the problem!

Mountain Weekly News founder Mike Hardaker said Danny Sullivan gave him this reply regarding his website’s ranking problems:

  • According to Danny Sullivan, my ‘content was not the issue’ when referencing the Mountain Weekly News, so don’t let the HCU update make you automatically question your content.” 
  • So, if it wasn’t the content, then what was the issue? I mean, it was called the helpful content update.

Move on and get over it!

Content creator Morgan at Charleston Crafted shared her thoughts on X, saying her take on what Google staff told her was:

  • If you were hit by HCU, do not expect a recovery anytime soon. They told us repeatedly an update is coming “very soon” and do not expect recovery. If the feedback from this event is taken into consideration, it will not be this update OR the next one, MAYBE the next one.

Morgan added you should move on and get a job:

  • “If you were hit by HCU & depend on google, MOVE ON. They made it clear SOME of us MAY recover ONE DAY, but all would not and who knows when it might be. Build a product. Get new traffic sources. Get a job.”

What Google said

Mike Hardaker, who had earlier been told his content wasn’t the reason his site’s traffic decreased after the Helpful Content Update, quoted what Google’s Pandu Nayak and Danny Sullivan said at the event.

Mike quoted Pandu Nayak as saying:

“I have to say I am very very sorry for you, this is not great at all. I can’t also give you any guarantees about recovery or not, I think that would not be responsible for me to say this. Because I can’t tell what is going to happen. It’s just the unfortunate state of how we operate here. We are here listening to you, I think the whole reason we are having this conference at all is for us to hear you out, to get our teams to hear you out.”

“Our goal is to surface great content for users. I suspect there is a lot of great content you guys are creating that we are not surfacing to our users, but I can’t give you any guarantees, unfortunately. We are focused on things for our users, that is not going to change.”

“I have to say that it is exactly the kind of things that drives us forward, I don’t see this as a waste, I can see if you don’t recover in a certain amount of time I can see you thinking of this as a waste but we find this incredibly valuable to guide the work that we do.”

“Just one other comment I would like to make is that we do want to say we have a vested interested in having a great web ecosystem. We are very closely tied to the web ecosystem. Users benefit hugely from a vibrant ecosystem. Now that doesn’t answer your question if you will recover or anyone else in the room will recover. But we think having a vibrant web ecosystem is important, and that drives a lot of our work.”

Danny Sullivan gave him this reply about how Search will never go back to how it was before the HCU, and it’s all very depressing:

“In August some of the sites saw recovery, but some people are saying I want to be back to where I was in September. I was talking to somebody and I said September is not coming back, the whole format of search results has changed.”

“One of the biggest thing that has happened, I have seen sites that absolutely believe they were hit by the HCU or other updates, but no you are actually ranked 2 or 3, 4. Your ranking in the top results, but going from the 1 to 2 can have a big impact. It’s more complicated than that. The whole search results have changed, it’s possible that maybe things are better down the line.”

“That’s why on the recovery thing it is much more likely that hopefully it’s going to be a gradual process. The thing to really watch for is when we do updates. Google will have another update fairly soon, but it probably won’t or won’t have any updates from what we talked about here because we can’t run back and change it that quickly. It kills me because I know that’s going to be depressing, and I’m also looking forward to the times on X.”

Other Googlers quotes

As reported by Barry Schwartz in his post on SEL, Mike Hardaker published the following word-for-word quotes from Google staff at the event. 

  • “Google probably needs to do better, there is nothing wrong with your sites.”
  • “E-E-A-T is not for creators, it’s for your readers.”
  • “Does the topic of the page match what the searcher is looking for?”
  • “When you think things are broken, please send things to Danny.”
  • “Unfortunately, we can’t tell you how our signals work.”
  • “Please keep the feedback coming, we really do care and we are listening.”
  • “People want to hear from people.”
  • “To the extent we have AI content trying to swarm results, we launched a new policy in March around this sort of thing, we have a great motivation to actually surface real content.”

The takeaway

Since the last search ranking updates, Google’s mantra to site owners whose traffic was negatively affected has been “stay patient,” which is wearing thin and having the opposite effect by testing publishers’ patience. 

This time, however, Google (Danny Sullivan specifically) is adopting a more transparent approach by saying an algorithm update is imminent, but don’t expect it to solve your site’s ranking problems.  I’ll finish with a read that Danny Shwartz recommends by Josh Tyler from Giant Freakin Robot, who attended the event and whose title’s a classic, I Attended Google’s Creator Conversation Event, And It Turned Into A Funeral.

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Terry O'Toole

Terry is a seasoned content marketing specialist with over six years of experience writing content that helps small businesses navigate where small businesses meet marketing - SEO, Social Media Marketing, etc. Terry has a proven track record of creating top-performing content in search results. When he is not writing content, Terry can be found on his boat in Italy or chilling in his villa in Spain.

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