For about almost 14 years now, I’ve been reported on Google algorithm updates. We’ve been through different levels of communication with Google regarding these updates.

Early on, Google simply did 30 day Google Dances, so it was clear when Google did an update. After that we had updates like Florida and many others that Google did not confirm or talk much about, but we knew there were major changes. Then Matt Cutts at Google shared very specific details on updates around Panda, Penguin, EMDs, and many others. In fact, he would give us the percentage of change Google noticed in the search results around them.

Now we are back to a point where the only changes Google is communicating are major indexing issues, like the mobile first index and such. Google has not confirmed officially any search quality or spam algorithms in a long long time. On one hand, I miss the confirmations, on the other hand, now Google mocks us with their “we change things all the time” line. Of course they do, I write 5 stories a day on this site, so I change this site all the time too! Kristine Schachinger put it well with some of the frustration around the lack of communication.

So I asked John Mueller of Google about this specifically in a hangout at the 37:34 mark asking “are you guys ever going to confirm algorithm updates in the future? Back in the day, Matt Cutts use to be like yea, this update effected 1.3% of search queries. Matt Cutts retired, you guys stopped doing that.”

John, and maybe rightly so mocked me saying “yea, we should just keep asking Matt, maybe he knows?” But then added “I suspect we will” communicate more algorithm changes in the future.

Here are examples of Matt communicating updates such as Penguin releases with links to the Google blog:

Here he is saying that during one release there was also an EMD update:

Transparency! Heck, even the Google Twitter account did it:

Here is the video embed:

He added:

Honestly, I think the days are done for the level of communication about search quality updates. We don’t have someone like Matt who is at the table approving these algorithm changes to be effectively able to communicate this updates to us. At least right now.

It is a shame – but we can keep tracking them ourselves.

Forum discussion at YouTube.

This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier – I am currently offline today.