Industry News

Yesterday, Google announced that it is releasing a core broad update named the January 2020 Core Update. It started to roll out around noon New York time yesterday. Google just echoed its previous advice around core updates. But this one does seem substantial and big based on some of the early chatter and signals.

I am seeing some early signals of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update starting today, January 7, 2020. There is some chatter within the SEO community and some of the tools are picking up on ranking fluctuations.

Searching for Quotes has shifted at Google with an Updated Continuation Patent

In August of 2017, I wrote the post Google Searching Quotes of Entities. The patent that post was about was called Systems and methods for searching quotes of...

Here is the first Google webmaster report of 2020, the January 2020 report is pretty packed. We had Google confirm in December that there was a local search update in November...

Changes have been made to Top Stories shown in Carousels in Google SERPs

Google made a recent announcement on its Keyword blog about top stories from non-news sites in search results. They told us about this change in the post Smarter...

There is some significant chatter in the SEO industry around a possible new years update that started late December 31, 2019 and throughout January 1, 2020. The chatter is high but similar to the Christmas update chatter, the tracking tools are not showing huge signs of an update. It leads me to believe the same as I did with the Christmas update, that I doubt there was a big update on New Years.

Over the past few days or so, I have been seeing chatter both at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World around ranking and traffic changes related to Google organic search. I got to say, I doubt Google pushed anything specific this week or even next week. Rankings do change by itself and new content is always being added to the index but an algorithm update - I doubt it.