Industry News

I am seeing signs both in terms of SEO community chatter and the automated tracking tools of another Google search ranking algorithm update. Unlike the last one, where all the tools were spiking but the community chatter was at the same level of the tools, this one seems to have support of both the community and the tracking tools.

I’ve written a couple of posts about patents at Google on personalized knowledge graphs (a topic worth thinking about seriously).

When Google introduced the “Knowledge Graph” in 2012, they told us about just one knowledge graph. But it appears...

The tracking tools are still going insane, some are higher today than they were yesterday or the day before. I am even seeing tools in the local space show bigger fluctuations now. But the chatter, again, seems mostly around the tools and not about their own rankings or client rankings going up or down.

Over the past 24-hours or so, most, if not all, of the Google rank checking tools are showing spikes in fluctuations in the Google search rankings. The weird part, the chatter in the SEO community and individual people complaining about ranking changes has really not spiked with the tools.

Last week at Search Engine Land I wrote Google says you can recover from core updates without a new core update. Part of the video conversation where I spoke to John Mueller of Google on this topic is now publicly available. In this video John discusses that sites can recover, some might not see a full recover but some can. And that Google regularly refreshes the scores within the core update between core updates.

Last week we reported that Google is aware that Google Search Console's coverage report was delayed and stuck at August 31st or September 1st for many and a fix would be out this weekend. Well, the fix did not happen and it is still delayed and we are now 14-days delayed here.

Yesterday, Google posted two blog posts around how it delivers reliable information in its search engine. Some believe this is a pre-announcement to a core update but it is not. It does not mean a core update is not happening very soon, we are due one and we are waiting for it. But this announcement is unrelated to any core update.

Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit he thinks it is unlikely that core web vitals "would ever become the primary factor for organic traffic." He said you shouldn't ignore it but Google and other search engines rank primarily based on "highest quality and most relevant results for users' queries," not necessarily what is in the core web vitals.