Google Has Read Your Feedback On The March 2024 Core Update & Changes To Come

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said yesterday on X that he has read the feedback from the community related to the March 2024 core update and the general feedback about search quality over the past few months. He said there are places where Google can do better, but it won’t happen overnight.

Sullivan wrote, ” I’ve spent a huge amount of time looking at the feedback over the past few months, diving deep into sites, writing up thoughts and talking with people internally.”

“I fully recognize that there are “small” or “independent” or whatever you want to call them sites that are diligently producing great content but our systems aren’t recognizing it as well as they should,” he wrote. He said that there is “also a lot of really poor content that our systems are indeed recognizing, and there’s also great content that is doing very well — but those doing very well with great stuff tend not to talk about that on the socials.”

He said here is what Google can do better at, specifically he said:

(1) Google can do better with that subset he mentioned above, i.e. the great content not well recognized.

(2) Google can do better in helping to guide away from maybe unhelpful things that have been learned by others? This can be done by offering “better guidance, maybe better reporting, and some other things I’m pondering we might try,” he wrote.

But this doesn’t happen overnight. He said, “I just can’t do that overnight.” Plus he said he cant do it himself, adding “nor is is the primary thing I’m responsible.” He is a liaison, he works “with other teams and suggest, encourage, recommend — but other teams have to go-ahead on stuff,” so he does not have the final say on any of this.

Plus, sometimes changes to the algorithm have trade-offs, he wrote, “and they also have to balance various trade-offs and other things.”

What Sullivan do so he said and what he said he has been doing and “will continue to do,” he wrote “is take the external feedback, channel that back to various teams and provided advocacy and recommendations in ways that I think would help all around.” This includes maybe an automated action viewer.

Plus Danny can’t win:

It’s not really a roadmap? It was a question I thought useful to respond to, as a way of sharing of some of my own thinking and how I’m sharing back to our team? As for the number of followers someone has, gosh, I sure hope you don’t have to have a lot of followers just to get a…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 13, 2024

So buckle up folks.

Forum discussion at X.