Industry News

Google has published on the Search Off The Record podcast, which was a recording from brightonSEO session, where John Mueller of Google said that he believes that over time, links as a ranking factor will be not as important and not as big as a ranking factor as it is today.

The past 30-days or so was pretty heavy between the October 2022 spam update and then several unconfirmed updates that were pretty strong, it was a bumpy road. Google also renamed the webmaster guidelines to the search essentials, rolled out new site name, favicons and ad labels and more.

Some SEOs are noticing a possible Google search ranking algorithm update on or around October 28th where sites hit by the unconfirmed October 13ish update and even the spam update (amongst others) are noticing big swings the other way in terms of their Google rankings and traffic.

So we had Google confirm that the October 2022 spam update finished Friday morning, the morning of October 21st. The tracking tools and chatter were somewhat mild but that makes sense for a spam update. But the day after, on Saturday, October 22nd, I am seeing renewed chatter and the tools are showing much bigger swings in the Google search rankings.

In less than about 42 hours, Google has fully rolled out the last spam update - the Google October 2022 spam update. The update began on October 19, 2022, at about 11 am ET and was completed on October 21, 2022, at about 5 am ET.

It has been 11 months since the last time Google released a spam update and now Google announced the October 2022 spam update. Google said this update will take several days to complete and is a global update.

Google is officially rolling out the new site name and favicon design, along with the new sponsored ad label, in the mobile search results. Yes, this is something Google has been testing and we saw this coming but now it is official and live in English, French, Japanese, and German regions.

For months we have been watching Google test a new ads label in search named "Sponsored" in bold black text. Well, now it is officially live in the Google mobile search results.

Google has replaced the Google Webmaster Guidelines with the Google Search Essentials. The name change is Google's ongoing efforts to remove the term "webmaster" so that these tools and documentation do not narrow the focus to just "webmasters," but expands it to publishers, site owners, developers, creators, and so on.

It has been a while since I reported on an unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update but it seems over the past 24 hours or so, we are seeing one. It probably started yesterday and is now continuing throughout today. There is some SEO chatter and the tools are now starting to light up.