Google Says Its Search Rankings Can Improve But At Scale On System Level

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said it again, that “there’s clearly more we should be doing” with ranking websites that deserve to rank better in Google Search. He clarified that this is not something Google does manually, on a per-site basis. Instead, Google does this at scale by updating its ranking systems and algorithms, he said.

He posted on X, “there’s clearly more we should be doing. I don’t think this is particularly new, as I’ve shared before that our ranking systems aren’t perfect and that I see content that we ought to do better by, as well as content we’re rewarding when we shouldn’t.”

How does that happen? Well, he said not manually. He wrote, “But it’s also not a system where any individual reviews content and says “OK, that’s great — rank it better” or “OK that’s not great, downrank it.” It simply wouldn’t work for a search engine that indexes trillions of pages of content from across the web to operate that way.”

You need to do this in a way that scales. He wrote, “You need scalable systems. And you need to keep working on improving those systems.”

Google will do that, he said. “That’s what we’ll keep doing.”

He added again:

We’re definitely aware of these concerns. We’ve seen the feedback, including the feedback from our recent form. I’ve personally been through every bit of that feedback and have been organizing it so our teams can look further at different aspects. This is in addition to the work they’re already doing, based on feedback we’ve already seen.

This is something that Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said at a high level. This is something Elizabeth Tucker, director, product management, Google Search, said also at a deeper level. This is something Google’s Danny Sullivan said in May, and Google’s John Mueller said in May also. Google said it read all the feedback on the last core update and it does not get upset with construction feedback and they share the feedback with engineers who work directly on the ranking algorithms at Google.

This of course reminds me of that buckle up chatter from 6 months ago. So hopefully after whatever changes Google’s search engineers make, we will see sites not just recover but also grow? But Google has set us up to tell us this may take a lot of time, despite earlier saying it can be weeks which turned into several months.

So we will see what changes when the next core update is released.

Here are those posts on X:

Danny, I appreciate where you’re coming from — just as I appreciated the post that HouseFresh originally shared, as well as this type of feedback from others. I do. I also totally agree that the goal is for us to reward content that’s aligned with our guidance. From the…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 26, 2024

Forum discussion at X.