Google updates are not always fun. Especially if they are not happening often enough. Since ever Google became a publicly traded company their update processes seem to become less frequent. In the early days updates seem to happen much more often and webmasters were able to respond in a timely manner. But as always - the frequent updates attracted the dark side of the Internet and it took advantage of it to beat legitimate competition. Competition is always hard but it becomes cumbersome to deal with it if the competition is not playing fair or follows the rules (here:

Google's rules). So, Google responded by making updates less frequent to make it harder for the bad guys to see immediate results of search engine optimization work. By making the updates less frequent and by keeping update procedures more secret the bad guys did not have an easy life as they used to have.

But - these changes also affected the good webmasters as they paid the price for a small group of greedy webmasters that could not behave. So, now everyone is always waiting for a major Google update to see if the hard work on the websites is going to pay off. And the wait can be frustrating. It is especially frustrating for the small guys that now need even more time to figure out how to receive better results in search engines. As a results - several Internet communities (forums) see an increased level of inquiries about Google updates once a quarter.

But does it really matter to wait for a major Google update? No, certainly not. Page rank and listing in the SERPS often changes on a daily or weekly basis. The smart webmaster should always follow his own strategy of search engine optimization work. Building back links to your websites, search engine friendly URLs, unique content and overall ease of usability of a website should be done on a regular base and the results of this hard work should show up in better search engine results daily or weekly. So, instead of wasting time to lurk around in Internet forums to see when speculations predict the next update a webmaster should spend the time more useful and work on his websites.