Industry News

Again I am seeing signals, both a lot of chatter from the SEO community and tools lighting up around a possible but yet unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Yes, there has been a ton of unconfirmed updates in the past couple of weeks and let's add this one to the list.

Google has been busy over the last couple of weeks after being taking a bit of a break with the new years. It seems we are seeing again signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update occurring yesterday and today, January 19th and 20th. There is both SEO industry chatter and data from the tracking tools that support this but yes, we do not have a Google confirmation about an update.

We know Google has deduplication efforts for when a featured snippet is displayed so that it might remove the snippet from the main web results. Google may do the same, in some cases, for when a URL is listed in the top stories section and then not show it in the main web results.

Friday and Saturday, January 14th and 15th there may have been another unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. This comes a few days after the unconfirmed January 11th update. There is some chatter but this time, the Google tracking tools are showing much higher volatility.

There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update on January 11, 2022. This would be the first real unconfirmed update for the 2022 year. I am seeing both chatter spike up starting on January 10th and continue through today. Plus, many of the tracking tools are showing big movements in the Google search results.

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that there is or was a backlog of manual actions issued by Google. Google has been slow and delayed in responding to those manual actions but is working through the backlog.

Tim Soulo from ahrefs posted a Twitter poll asking will you pay money to get links in 2022? Sadly, someone spammed the poll but I recreated it and it clearly shows that many, almost half of SEOs, are planning on buying and paying for links in 2022.

Normally the month of December is not that busy because people take off for the holidays and such. But the past month was really not that calm at all. We had huge Google ranking volatility most of the past month, we had a confirmed three-week rollout of the December product reviews update, Google confirmed a local update and much more.

Around December 27th and 28th we may have a Google search ranking algorithm jolt or quick tremor. I highly doubt Google pushed out something over the holidays, this last week of December. But it might just be some weird change that jolted the search results (like that even happens as I am describing).

According to recent Semrush data, this month, the month of December, was the most volatile month of the year and probably Google history. Here is a chart Mordy Oberstein of Semrush shared showing how December soared amongst the rest of the months in 2021.