Industry News

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.

Over the past couple of days, some of the Google search algorithm tracking tools were reporting large swings in volatility in the search results - thus signaling a possible Google search update. But the chatter amongst the SEO industry during that time has been super quiet, showing no signs of an update.

So I wrote this pretty deep dive into how Google uses AI in Google Search at Search Engine Land, and Google posted a shorter version on their blog. I noticed after that, some folks were saying that Google uses MUM for search rankings. Truth is, Google uses MUM for only two things in search, COVID vaccine names and a related topics in videos results feature - that is it.

This month was packed with a handful of unconfirmed Google search algorithm updates, as you will see in the bulleted list below. In fact, there may be a more subtle update going on now...