Google once again said that its indexing systems are completely independent of its ranking updates, like the core update. Gary Illyes from Google said indexing, canonicalization, and those types of “systems are independent” of core updates.
Truth is, this is not news, Google has said this numerous times. In 2016, Gary Ilyes said crawl rate spikes before/during updates are a myth – they do not work like that he said. In 2022, John Mueller said helpful content updates don’t trigger crawling spikes and that updates do not trigger crawl spikes. Although, Google has been quoted as saying the opposite sometimes.
This new statement comes from Gary Illyes commenting on a LinkedIn post from David Minchala.
David asked:
Posit: during core algo updates (and maybe any big update?), indexing services like canonicalization (i.e., selecting the URL to index and merging all signals from other known duplicate URLs) still work but are slower. Maybe much slower.
So David was saying the opposite, things slow down – which I have never heard before.
Gary responded:
The posit is incorrect.
Those systems are independent from the “core updates”. think of core updates as playing with cooking ingredients: you change how much salt or msg you put in your stir fry and you can radically change the result. in this context index selection and canonicalization is more about what’s happening in the salt mines or the msg factories; not much to do with the cooking just yet.
So no, this does not happen according to Gary and you got a cooking analogy to go along with it.
Here is a screenshot of the posts on LinkedIn with more context:
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.