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Google has published its annual "Ads Safety Report" and disclosed that it has blocked or removed over 3.1 billion ads for violating its Google Ads policies, it restricted over 6.4 billion ads, suspended over 1.7 million advertiser accounts, and removed ads from over 1.3 billion pages in 2020. Google also said it added or updated over 40 policies for both advertisers and publishers.

I know, I know, this is getting ridiculous, at what won't do I stop reporting on all these Google algorithm updates that are unconfirmed. But the beginning of 2021 is unlike anything I've seen from Google in terms of how volatile the organic search results are.

The BrightLocal tool picked up one of the the biggest updates I've seen it report in a long time or maybe even ever. It normally runs at the 2.x in terms of local pack changes but yesterday, Wednesday March 11th, it showed 6.78 out of 10 in terms of fluctuations in the local search results.

Question Answering Using Neural Networks Google performs question answering of queries and returns URLs in response to queries. Google shows answers when the intent of a searcher is to expect an answer for a question and to provide a list of...

Over the weekend there are a nice amount of chatter from the SEO community around the Google search results rankings being all over the place. The chatter was unusually high for the weekend and some of the tools have also picked up on the fluctuations in the search results.

I have yet another unconfirmed Google search ranking update to report on. This was started around March 2nd towards the evening and continues through March 3rd. There was a nice amount of chatter over a 24-hour period and then it seems to have died down a bit. Many of the tools also picked up on this update.

Here is the monthly Google Webmaster Report where I sum up the more important topics webmasters and SEOs care about when it comes to Google organic search. This past month was super busy with numerous unconfirmed updates, passage ranking rolling out, the upcoming page experience update and mobile-first indexing and so much more.

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.