Industry News

Via Chris Coyier I found this great post by Karl Sutt on How to communicate effectively as a developer. I especially appreciate him pointing out the importance of communicating clearly in short-form writing like Slack messages. His example of “low-resolution” vs. “high-resolution” writing in that context is a useful reminder for all of us:



In both cases, the example on the left is what I call “low-resolution writing”. There is very little context, too much reliance on pronouns...

While it has been calm for the past several days, today is a new day and I am seeing some signs of more volatility and ranking fluctuations as of the past 24 hours or less. Some of the automated tracking tools are picking it up, and I am seeing some renewed chatter in the SEO industry.

Google officially confirmed that the helpful content update needs more time to roll out, but now the link spam update is also past the two-week mark, and it is not done rolling out yet either. John Mueller of Google said these updates may take longer to complete due to the "holidays" and "for safety reasons."

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It seemed a lot calmer this past weekend, Christmas weekend than we had it a while in the world of Google search volatility. This is a good thing since we really want to see the two Google ranking algorithm updates wind down before yearend.

As you know, the December 2022 helpful content update and the link spam update are rolling out now. In fact, it seems like the helpful content update needs more time to do its thing. Taking a look at the past few weeks, the Google Search results, it has been pretty volatile.

Google's Search Liason, Danny Sullivan, said that the December 2022 helpful content update would take longer to roll out than originally expected. The update started to roll out on December 5th and was expected to finish earlier this week.

Last Wednesday, December 14th, Google began to roll out the December 2022 link spam update, and it seems, at least based on the chatter and tracking tools I follow, this link spam update has some teeth. I am seeing a nice number of real reports of sites feeling the impact in a big way and Google really being able to zone in on links it never did prior with other link algorithms.

The Google search quality raters guidelines were updated and updated in a big way, with a new E added on to E-A-T. Google is adding experience on top of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google said that trust is the most important of all four elements here.

Google began rolling out a revised link spam update on December 14, 2022 named the December 2022 link spam update. This update is new in that it uses SpamBrain AI to "detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links," and not just "detect spam directly," Google said.