Is Google devaluing pages with recent changes?

[goodroi]

Google has a gazillion moving parts to the their algorithm & they have filed plenty of patents to give us clues about what those moving parts might be doing. One of those patents hinted that Google might use a system that would penalize pages with recent changes. That type of rank dampening would make it harder for SEOs to figure out what changes boost ranking scores and would deter spammers from over meddling.

Do you think Google is currently doing this? Why or why not?

[RedBar]

Why or why not?

I don't think so since during Sept/Oct/Nov I substantially updated one site of 500 pages, many of which were already ranking well, and I have seen all pages benefit across all search engines especially those that were in positions 11-30, plus many of those already in the top 10 have generally improved to positions 1-5.

Improvements included more widget information, a couple of extra widget images and where available widget videos.

All additions were unique and not copied from elsewhere.

I have also started on another 25 year old site, last updated 3 years ago, with upgrades and after about 30 pages completed so far and these are also seeing solid improvements.

I used to perform complete site upgrades uploading them all at the same time however these days I update as I complete each page.

[tangor]

Does the patent reveal WHAT KIND OF CHANGES will be penalized? If not, there's not much to go on!

Pages update ... nature of the information beast. If that gets penalized g will alienate an enormous part of the web ... if proved.

[EditorialGuy]

That doesn't seem likely to me. Why would Google want to discourage sites from keeping content up to date?

On the other hand, it might make sense for Google to look skeptically at pages that appear to have a lot of recent SEO-driven tweaks, as opposed to changes that improve or update content (e.g., a series of title changes with little or no change to the underlying content).

[martinibuster]

A link to the patent should be included for a serious discussion.

[lucy24]

In order to take this at face value, you would have to postulatie that G### begins by assuming any change is a change for the worse--after which they may or may not look more closely and see if you can, as it were, prove your innocence.

[MrJefe]

There is a chance they're trying to do something about the recent trend of blogs constantly "updating" pages to increase search CTR.
Since people are more likely to click a link that shows "2 days ago," than one showing "Sept, 2015."

Often, these "updates" involve just changing the title from "Best XYZs of 2019" to "Best XYZs of 2020."
A lot of times, nothing specifically relevant to the new year has been added, and the info is sometimes stale.

[phranque]

A link to the patent should be included for a serious discussion.

if it's the one i'm thinking of, it's been around for quite a while.

this would be United States Patent 8,244,722 (Ranking documents) [patft.uspto.gov]

this patent is dissected by our favorite search patent expert (bill slawski) here:
The Google Rank-Modifying Spamming Patent [seobythesea.com]

If you make changes to your website that Google might consider spam tactics, Google may not change the ranking of your webpage in response to those changes, according to a patent filed by the search engine. It may increase your rankings, decrease those rankings, or make absolutely no changes at all to them.

[lucy24]

It may increase your rankings, decrease those rankings, or make absolutely no changes at all to them.

Color me baffled. What information is conveyed by this pronouncement?

[goodroi]

Bill Slawski did a good job explaining the complicated patent for SEOs who didn't read it. Basically the patent empowers Google to combat spammers/SEOs by misleading them.

When spammers/SEOs try to manipulate the rankings, Google may...
- increase rankings despite the SEO changes being bad (like adding the meta keyword tag), this would mislead SEOs into thinking the wrong things will improve rankings
- decrease rankings despite the SEO changes being good (like improving the title tag), this would mislead SEOs into thinking the the right things aren't important
- make no changes despite SEO changes being made, this keeps it random and harder to reverse engineer what influences rankings, this could also provide different experiences to different SEOs so when they compare notes & try to collaborate it makes less sense to them.

This isn't new. It's an old patent and Google has been using different versions of this tactic for a long time. They don't want to make it too easy for SEOs.