Industry News

Over the past couple of days, I have been seeing signs of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update. It may have started on May 1st, with the chatter within the SEO community growing throughout yesterday, May 2nd.

While last month's Google webmaster report was filled with the Google March core update, the product reviews update, Bard, AI, sitenames and more; this month was just as packed. We had the reviews update, a local look at the core update, big updates to the Google ranking systems document, a new search engine for Google code-named Magi and so much more.

Google is now saying that page experience, mobile-friendliness, page speed, and secure site are ranking "signals" but were never ranking "systems." "It just meant these weren't ranking *systems* but instead signals used by other systems," Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison said this morning on Twitter.

The Google April 2023 reviews update finished rolling out yesterday afternoon on April 25, 2023. It took 13 days and two hours to roll out this expanded reviews update, which goes beyond products, that initially kicked off on April 12, 2023.

Google's April 2023 reviews update is now just almost two weeks since it started rolling out, and while the update seemed to have started slow, this past week, we've seen some significant movement and volatility. This weekend was no exception and we are seeing some big movement this weekend.

It’s been a little quiet on the blog recently, and the reason for that is either perfectly valid or profoundly unnecessary, depending on your viewpoint. Even I am not entirely sure which one it is.

Over the past couple of weekends (and too many late weeknights) I have used all my spare time to build a mini-site for my obsession with music. It started as a small idea to just show the current track I’m listening to, and a list of recent physical albums I added to my collection. But then it...

Google has updated its documented ranking systems page over here to remove four ranking systems from the list, including removing three ranking systems. Google has removed the page experience system from the main list, not adding it to the retired list, and removed mobile-friendly ranking, page speed, and secure sites systems from the retired list.

Yesterday, Google announced it made some changes to its guidance around what makes content considered helpful, including adding in good page experience to the equation. Google also made some other changes to this document, which I will detail below.

In the coming months, Google will deprecate the page experience report within Google Search Console, the mobile usability report, and the mobile-friendly testing tool. The core web vitals and HTTPs report will remain in Google Search Console.