Industry News

There are some signs of the start of a Google search ranking algorithm update that kicked off on September 1, 2021. The truth is, it seemed like an update touched down for a short period of time and then slowed down. There are not a huge number of complaints, but the tools are picking up on the fluctuations in the Google search results.

Well, I got to say, the last month was an interesting one for webmasters, marketers and SEOs in the Google organic space. We finished off the prolonger link spam update, safe browsing was removed from the page experience update, which should have been fully rolled out by now but Google did not confirm. Oh and that update might be bigger than just a tiebreaker but it is still pretty small.

There are a lot of people asking if the title/header change Google made on August 17th has any impact on rankings. Like, is Google uses the new title it itself generated for ranking purposes. The answer is no, there was no ranking change with this - as I wrote originally.

Google announced that the link spam update that initially began rolling out on July 26, 2021 is now done rolling out as of August 24, 2021. That is over a full-month of rolling for that update and two-weeks longer than Google initially said.

A week after Google made a change to the titles it produces in its search results, the search company confirmed it actually did make these changes. I mean, why didn't Google just write about it when they first noticed it, did they think we wouldn't notice?

Last week we were the first to report on the change Google made around its titles in the Google search results. In short, Google seems to be showing less titles from the title tags than it did the week prior. Google has been listening to the feedback and has said it hopes to make improvements based on what SEOs have been sharing.

As I mentioned yesterday in my story on the slow rollout for the Google link spam update - there seems to be a Google update going on. It started - maybe Tuesday but spiked in a big way on Wednesday, August 18th. It is not clear if this is related to that link spam update or something else.

Google announced on July 26, 2021, three-weeks and two days ago, that it started to roll the link spam update and that update would take about two-weeks to roll out. Well, like I said, it is three-weeks and two days and it is still not done rolling out.

Google's top stories carousel is not loading all the images for those articles. It seems like a bug is causing some of the images to not show up as of early this morning.

I am seeing signs again of yet another weekend search ranking update from Google Search. Again, this is unconfirmed and it is hard to tell what this is from. It might be the tail-end of the Google link spam update, which is not fully done rolling out, even as of Friday. Or it might be something new.