What I Learned from 50 Google Updates (And Why You Should Ignore Most SEO News)
After two decades of updates, the signal is clear: focus on user intent and technical hygiene, not algorithm speculation.
I've been doing SEO since the Florida update in 2003. Since then, I've counted roughly 50 confirmed core updates. And you know what? The vast majority of noise around each update is useless. The real lesson is boring: Google rewards sites that serve the user's intent cleanly and quickly.
Take the 2022 'Helpful Content Update'. Everyone panicked about AI content. But the sites that lost traffic were often thin, ad-heavy, or stuffed with keywords. The ones that won had clear structure, original insights, and fast load times. Same story for every core update since BERT.
My advice: stop refreshing Twitter during updates. Instead, run a quarterly technical audit. Check for crawl errors, broken links, and duplicate content. Make sure your pages have a single clear purpose. Write for humans first, then optimize. That's the only strategy that's survived every update I've seen.