Industry News

On Monday, Google announced a new algorithm update named the link spam update. I've been following the SEO chatter both in the public white hat and black hat forums, and the chatter is super limited. Very few SEOs are saying they saw ranking declines or improvements since the announcement. But now, I see some of the tracking tools noticing changes as of this morning.

Google said it began rolling out a new algorithm update for Google Search named the link spam update. This update "is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages," Google wrote. It will roll out from yesterday, July 26th, over a two week period or so.

Google is rolling out a new feature for the about this result overlay that actually tells searchers (and SEOs) why Google is ranking that page for that given query. Yes, Google is telling you which high level ranking factors are the reason this page is ranking.

Gary Illyes of Google posted on Twitter that you should keep a redirect live for a year for Google Search purposes. The signals from original page A to destination page B will all be transferred and stick with page B even after the redirect is removed, if that redirect is live for a year.

Google's John Mueller was asked if a core update can have the people also ask (PAA) results show up more or less often. John said yes, it can, just like it can with rich results and featured snippets.

Danny Sullivan of Google published a blog post on Friday named answers to some common questions about appearing in Google News. Sadly, I honestly don't think this will lead to less questions and frustration from new publishers and their questions around sites appearing in Google News or not.

Google announced a bit after 1pm ET on July 12th that the July 2021 core update is "effectively complete." That means, in Google lingo, that it is done rolling out 12-days after it first started rolling out on July 1, 2021.

On Friday, July 9th, it looks like the Google July 2021 core update spiked again. Glenn Gabe asked Danny Sullivan of Google if the update was done and Danny said on Friday "not quite done." I suspect we saw the end wave of this update around July 9th.

In the second part of the Search Off The Record podcast released this morning Gary Illyes from Google explained how Google does ranking. In short, he said Google first cuts down the pages that can rank for a specific query to a short list of let's say about 1,000 pages. Then the magic happens where Google will apply ranking signals or as he calls it "magic signals" to that cut down list.

The past month in Google SEO and webmaster land was a bit insane...