Although there has been a lot of fuss made in the past few weeks, Google seems keen to downplay the changes as part of ongoing updates and tweaks. A big deal had been made of the announcement by Google that Panda is now part of the core algorithm, but Google has been keen to explain what being part of the core algorithm actually means, and that it’s not a big deal.
Google Explains What it Means to be Core
Gary Illyes from google webmaster used this analogy to explain;
“I think this is really the worst takeaway of the past few days, but imagine an engine of a car. It used to be that there was no starter, the driver had to go in front of the car, and use some tool to start the engine. Today we have starters in any petrol engine, it’s integrated. It became more convenient, but essentially nothing changed.
For a user or even a webmaster it should not matter at all which components live where, it’s really irrelevant, and that’s why I think people should focus on these “interesting” things less.” Gary Illyes Google Webmaster
Andrey Lipattsev also explains that what Gary meant by this, is that Panda is now part of the core ranking algorithm, and they don’t need to know how it runs any more. It’s been tested, it works, and it can now run be left to run by itself.
In an online Q&A Google+ hangout, Andrey Lipattsev also took a great of time to explain why it is so hard to define a Google update. Pointing out that as tweaks to code and other small changes are carried out all the time, updates are happening constantly.
Ammon Johns in the Google+ hangout; “Once they forgot how it works, it is core?” To which Andrey Lipattsev replied, “That is exactly right.”
The general feeling coming from the Google camp seems to be, when we’ve got anything worth talking about, we’ll make an announcement!