After updates, the spokeswoman said, some sites might perform better and others worse. The updates are a general reassessment of relevance, she said, adding that some Web pages that may have been underrewarded for their relevant content could get higher rankings on searches as a result.
Google says it provides webmaster guidelines to help site owners create high-quality content, and owners can visit Google’s webmaster forums for support and guidance. The spokeswoman said improvements that webmasters make to their sites, such as optimizing for mobile devices, are the types of user-friendly changes that can result in higher rankings.
“While there is no record of here’s what changed and why, Google is very vocal about making sure it tells everybody what best practices everybody should be following,” said Mary-Grace Wilson, SEO team lead at Dealer Inspire, a company Cars.com acquired last year that provides dealership websites, digital retailing products and a messaging platform.
“We can’t point to something and say, ‘Here is exactly what happened.’ You can go back to Google’s quality guidelines and say, ‘What am I doing right? Where am I just toeing the line versus where am I trying to do what’s in the best interest for all of the users?’ Unfortunately, there isn’t a clean answer to say this is exactly what you need to do,” Wilson said.