Industry News

This weekend there was another unconfirmed Google search ranking update, maybe starting around February 26th through the 27th and maybe the 28th. There was significant chatter in the SEO forums and some of the tools showed a spike around the 27th of February.

Generally when it comes to a Google local ranking algorithm update, you need to wait a week or so to see the chatter from the local SEO community. I am not seeing that chatter yet but BrightLocal's tracking tool is lighting up over the past two days, showing signs of serious fluctuations in the local rankings in Google Search.

I've been on the edge about if I should report or not report some of the chatter and signals I am seeing around a possible Google search ranking algorithm update. I was seeing some somewhat small signs since the weekend of an update but those signals are picking up a little bit more a few days in.

Google's revised mobile-first indexing deadline is coming up in the next several weeks. Google said it is going 100% into mobile-first indexing. Google moved the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021. John Mueller of Google said today the March 2021 is an approximate deadline.

I see a ton, absolutely a ton, of confusion in the SEO industry around the Google launch of passage based ranking. A reminder, according to Google, passage based ranking launched in the US English results in the afternoon of February 10th PST time. But honestly, I do not see any signs of any update rolling out after that time, not until much later.

This patent is about presenting data with search results and deciding when to show that data in a knowledge panel with those search results. The Web provides access to a wide variety of resources, such as image files, audio files, video files,...

I am seeing some early signs of yet another Google Search ranking algorithm update this morning. The SEO community is starting to buzz about ranking fluctuations this morning and some of the tracking tools are already picking up on the changes to the Google Search rankings.

Google's John Mueller posted one of the more detailed responses I've seen from him on the topic of overall search spam, penalties, quality algorithms and more. I am not sure if the comment is showing up anymore on Reddit, so here is a screenshot of it.

With the launch of passage ranking this past week, there has been a lot of confusion about if you can "see" these in the Google search results. The answer is no, you cannot see them in the search results as we covered last week and December 2020.

The day we have been waiting for has come on Wednesday, February 10th - passage ranking (formerly known as passage indexing) is live in the US English search results. Google confirmed this after I pinged Danny Sullivan of Google about the status the other day.