Buckle Up – Google Search To Make Major Rating Modifications

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, spoke at BrightonSEO in San Diego on Friday and while most of what he said was “not new,” he did say big changes are coming to search rankings. Sullivan told SEOs to “buckle up” because major changes are coming to the search rankings. (Update, he may have said not to buckle up if you are doing good things, but those who are not…)

Update: Danny Sullivan now replied on X saying, “I was talking about various things people have raised where they want to see our results improve, or where they think “sure, you fixed this but what about….” And that these things all correspond to improvements we have in the works. That there’s so much coming that I don’t want to say buckle up, because those who are making good, people-first content should be fine. But that said, there’s a lot of improvements on the way.”

There were two posts on X that I found paraphrasing what Sullivan said:

One said, Sullivan said, “so much is coming to change ranking but doesn’t want to say “buckle up” because if you are doing the right thing to help users then you should be ok.”

Another one said, “buckle-up there are major changes coming to search ranking signals…

Here are those posts:

.@searchliaison says so much is coming to change ranking but doesn’t want to say “buckle up” because if you are doing the right thing to help users then you should be ok. #brightonSEO

— Danielle Rohe (@d4ni_s) November 10, 2023

.@searchliaison “buckle-up” there are major changes coming to search ranking signals…#BrightonSEO

— Kristine (@schachin on Threads/Spoutible) 🇺🇦 (@schachin) November 10, 2023

Danny Sullivan would not elaborate on what those changes were exactly…

His exact words were…”There’s so much coming on and i don’t want to say buckle up because that makes you freak out because if you’re doing good stuff, it’s not going to be an issue to you.”

— Andy Simpson 🇬🇧 (@ndyjsimpson) November 13, 2023

He had slides but I don’t think this was on any of them. He added that as he has seen complaints from people about issues that he thinks “oh we’ve got something coming soon to fix that and that and that”
So… pic.twitter.com/xc7RGfIgKN

— Danielle Rohe (@d4ni_s) November 12, 2023

“Major changes to search ranking” … coming to Google? I don’t know the exact words Danny did/didn’t say, but I’m confident he did say “if you’re doing the right things, you’ll be fine”. Or something like that. And if you ARE affected, you have work to do. https://t.co/KcFkvw8Vp3

— duane forrester (@DuaneForrester) November 13, 2023

But by saying he didn’t want to say it he was saying it lol

— Danielle Rohe (@d4ni_s) November 13, 2023

Forum discussion at X.

Update: Danny Sullivan now replied on X saying, “I was talking about various things people have raised where they want to see our results improve, or where they think “sure, you fixed this but what about….” And that these things all correspond to improvements we have in the works. That there’s so much coming that I don’t want to say buckle up, because those who are making good, people-first content should be fine. But that said, there’s a lot of improvements on the way.”

I think the point I was trying to make is the opposite of the headline. Which … probably was inevitable anyway, and I did use the words “buckle up” in saying “I don’t want to say ‘buckle up’.” If I were writing it, it would have been, “Google says many ranking improvements…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 13, 2023