Why This Question Comes Up So Often in Litigation
Google makes dozens of algorithm changes every year, and a small number of confirmed, named updates (such as core updates, spam updates, and helpful content-related changes) can move rankings significantly across an entire site or industry. When a client's traffic drops shortly after hiring an SEO agency, the timing alone is often cited as evidence of the agency's failure — but a documented, industry-wide algorithm update that hit the client's site alongside its competitors tells a very different story than an isolated, agency-specific decline.
Getting this analysis right requires more than checking a single date against a single update. Google's own announcements about update timing are sometimes imprecise, rollouts can take days or weeks to fully take effect, and a site can be affected by more than one factor at once. A defensible opinion needs to account for that complexity rather than pointing to the nearest named update as an automatic explanation.
How Bill Separates the Two
Bill's approach to these matters rests on comparing several independent signals rather than relying on any single data point in isolation, since any one signal viewed alone can be misleading and any conclusion built on just one of them is vulnerable to being picked apart by opposing counsel or a rebuttal expert.
Timeline Correlation
Comparing the exact date of the ranking change against Google's documented rollout dates for confirmed updates.
Competitive Comparison
Checking whether competitors and comparable sites in the same space experienced similar movement.
Site-Specific Signals
Reviewing whether technical errors, content changes, or link removals specific to the client's site coincided with the drop.
Recovery Pattern
Assessing whether the site recovered following a subsequent update, which is common after broad core updates and rare after manual actions.
No single factor above is conclusive on its own; it is the combination of timeline, competitive context, site-specific signals, and recovery pattern that supports a reliable opinion about what actually caused a given ranking change.