Why does anyone care if an algorithm update took 45 days to complete?
Or that Google was slow to announce the end of the update? – asked John-Henry Scherck.
We have little insight into how a rollout works so I don’t see how this changes how you operate – at all.
For what it’s worth, trying to be some algorithmic sleuth is not going to grow your business or help your career (unless you are trying to be an SEO influencer) only doing the work will, and I don’t see how an algorithm update’s length of rollout changes how the work gets done.
Patrick Stox said:
My personal theory is that the time for this one is an indicator of how long it takes them to crawl through most of their index.
They only crawl a subset of it.
~400B pages.
The Internet is always getting bigger, but a lot of it isn’t that useful.
Shane Harter said:
The most logical case to me is that they are rolling it out slowly and measuring the results.
Longer rollouts indicate a more conservative approach and confirmation that the results we’re seeing are exactly as they intended.