Industry News

Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the year, the September 2022 broad core update. It started on September 12, 2022 at about 11:25 am ET and can take about two weeks to roll out.

The Google helpful content update finished rolling out around 2 pm ET on September 9th. That morning we reported we started to notice more widespread volatility and fluctuations, possibly related to the helpful content update. But now I am thinking that maybe those or most of those fluctuations were unrelated to the helpful content update?

I never thought that I’d want to read a book about a guy who watched Predator 146 times. But Shooting at Nothing: An Interview with Ander Monson convinced me otherwise:

In following every rabbit hole of his obsession with the film through to its end, Monson creates a book that is truly one-of-a-kind—not just a dose of nostalgia for movie buffs, but a revelatory investigation for anyone who’s ever really loved a singular piece of culture, enough that it got tangled inextricably in...

In Official myths Mandy Brown talks about how we are trying to solve the legitimate challenges of remote work by blindly (and incorrectly) assuming that the solution is going back to the office:

In many a remote-critical piece I’ve read, there’s a kind of mythical office that remote culture is being compared to, a place where everyone is welcomed, where collaboration and support is easy-going and automatic, where everyone is always whiteboarding or talking in the hallways. It’s kind...

Today marks the two-week and one-day mark since the Google helpful content update started to roll out and by the time I am writing this (at 5:30 am ET on September 9th - jet lagged) Google has still not noted that the helpful content update is done rolling out. Plus, as I noted yesterday, we are now seeing more significant volatility and fluctuations as of yesterday and more today.

There seems to be a lot of confusion around the Google helpful content update and if it is "big" or not big. That all depends on if you were hit by it, if you were, oh boy is it really big for you. But in terms of how widespread it is, so far, it is not affecting many many sites.

I am a week late with the monthly Google webmaster report because I was on vacation and these are a pain to put together. But it is important and I wanted to catch you all up on the changes with Google SEO, webmaster, and organic search over the past month.

So many of you, including myself, are wondering why Google would make such a big deal of an upcoming update when the update itself is not that huge of a shakeup to the search results. There is an interesting back and forth between Glenn Gabe, an SEO consultant, and Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, about just that.

As we have reported, so far, the Google helpful content update seems pretty minor in terms of what SEOs and tools are picking up, despite what we all thought would happen. A recent poll by Aleyda Solis confirmed that, showing that only 20% of SEOs noticed ranking changes, either positive or negative, since the update.