Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said again that the search company “generally try to avoid” overlapping algorithmic updates. This is after Google released both the March 2024 core update and March 2024 spam update the same day.

While the spam update should take two weeks to roll out, the core update can take up to four weeks to roll out.

Google said this before, in 2021 Sullivan said they try not to overlap updates and repeated that in 2022 saying, “We’ve worked very hard to keep updates separated from each other, or as little overlap as possible, to help creators understand more.”

I asked Danny Sullivan, “what happened to working hard not to overlap updates – this March core and spam update has numerous updates released the same time frame, let alone manual actions and spam policy updates.”

Sullivan replied, “We do generally try to avoid this, but we had both the core update and the spam update ready, and ultimately, we’re going to push updates we think will improve the quality of search results. Manual actions aren’t an update. New spam policies aren’t an algorithmic update. So those aren’t “updates” that “overlap” with the core and spam updates.”

Here are those posts:

We do generally try to avoid this, but we had both the core update and the spam update ready, and ultimately, we’re going to push updates we think will improve the quality of search results. Manual actions aren’t an update. New spam policies aren’t an algorithmic update. So those…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 7, 2024

Here are those old posts – unless they get deleted:

Just saw this. We’ve worked very hard to keep updates separated from each other, or as little overlap as possible, to help creators understand more. So no, not coincidence we are due a core update but said let’s wait on that until the helpful content update has rolled out…

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 16, 2022

It’ll be unavoidable that some updates might overlap as we can’t hold things we believe will help improve search back. But I think we’ve done more to communicate more about updates we do, when they happen and what they involve than ever, including our page https://t.co/gElfbRUpl2

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 16, 2022

We were due an update, and Google had to do something big, so this is Google’s big thing.

Forum discussion at X.