Google Expects Helpful Content and Link Spam Updates to Extend by Another Week or Two

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said on Twitter on Friday afternoon that the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update may take an additional two weeks to complete. He said it would finish “likely within two weeks, maybe only one, but that’s not a guarantee. Timings might change.”

Here are those tweets:

As a reminder, the December 2022 helpful content update started on December 5, 2022, and should have been done three weeks ago, but we are now on week number five. And the December 2022 link spam update started on December 14, 2022, and should have been done almost two weeks ago, but now we are heading into week number four.

So if the updates take another two weeks, then the helpful content update might take a full seven weeks to roll out, and the link spam update might take about might take six weeks to roll out.

Earlier last week, Danny Sullivan implied that the fluctuations we saw on January 3rd to 5th were related to these updates. He said on Mastodon then, “Both the updates are continuing to rollout. Normally these types of updates would have concluded by now, but rollouts can slow or pause when we get into the holiday periods.”

The two updates were delayed in its finish date because they ran into the holidays. Google said there was a security issue with completing them on the holidays. Also, we did see some big turbulence days before Christmas, and then things calmed down a lot. The truth is, the Google volatility is much calmer still than the previous couple of weeks. We also saw some fluctuations on December 26th.

So, in short, it is still rolling out and might do so for several more days…

I should note that the weekend volatility and chatter were somewhat less than a typical weekend.