Industry News

For the past few days I have been debating if I should cover what may have been a Google search ranking update that ticked off on Friday March 11th. There was super unusual update like chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums but the automated tracking tools showed nothing - nada.

This past Friday, March 4, 2022, I noticed that the chatter within the SEO community started to heat up and then the day later, the automated search engine tracking tools started to show volatility. There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update on March 4th.

That is a wrap - the Google page experience update for desktop is now fully rolled out - as of yesterday, March 3rd. If you are counting, that is a 9-day roll out, which began on February 22nd and ended on March 3rd.

It is time for the March 2022 Google webmaster report, where I look back at the past 30-days of SEO news related to Google and highlight the most important changes over that time period. This month we had a confirmed rollout begin of the page experience update for desktop, we learned about an update to the Pirate update, a new shopping ranking factor and more.

I am seeing new signs of a possible, but yet, unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update that seemed to touch down on Thursday, February 24th. To be honest, this is most likely unrelated to the desktop version of the page experience update that started on Thursday, February 22nd.

Google is now rolling out the desktop version of the Google Page Experience update. This rollout started Tuesday, February 22, 2022 and will roll out through the end of March 2022. You probably won't notice any real ranking changes from it but we have to report on it anyway.

Over the past couple of weeks, the Google search rankings have been pretty stable and calm. It actually has been unusually calm that some SEOs are getting nervous. I recently saw some super early signs of an update brewing. Is this the calm before the storm?

I am seeing tons of reports over the past 24 hours of complaints around mass disapproving of ads and suspensions of accounts within Google Ads. Some are specific to being disapproved around "government documents and circumventing systems."

It looks like there is a missing day, a data gap, in the Google Search Console crawl stats report. I am personally missing Tuesday, February 8th crawl data but it seems others are missing February 9th.

Google seems to be testing a new ad label on the search ads that is way more noticeable than the normal ad label. This one has the black ad text but it is outlined in a curved green border making the ad label stand out much more than previous ad labels.