Industry News

There may have been a smaller and unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update that touched down around January 26th but mostly felt on January 27th. I was going to report on it yesterday but more important information came out, so I held this until today. Again, this seems like a smaller update but if you were hit by it, you probably felt it in a big way.

On Friday afternoon, Google announced the beginning of the rollout of its new mobile search results design. I now see this new design and I wanted to share some side by side comparisons of the old versus the new design for queries.

I know I just reported about an unconfirmed Google ranking algorithm update around January 7th and 8th but I think I am seeing signs of another one that started to get noticed January 12th or maybe the day before.

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that the search company launched the subtopics ranking feature or algorithm in November 2020, just weeks after announcing it at the Search On event in October 2020.

I am seeing some signals and signs of a Google search ranking algorithm update touching down in the past day or so. The chatter is limited but it is there and it is unusual. The tools, most of them, are showing big shifts in the Google organic search rankings.

Well, 2020 is over - phew, right? December was a wild wild month in terms of what SEOs and webmasters need to be concerned with around Google Search. We had the December 2020 core update and some unconfirmed updates. We learned more about the page experience update, passage indexing and more.

Since Google announced passage indexing (ranking) many assumed they would look different in the search results. But no, they won't look any different according to Danny Sullivan of Google. Danny told me on Twitter that passage indexing "doesn't change the look of results."

It is not uncommon to see signals of a Google search ranking algorithm update on or around Christmas. But it is highly doubtful Google would release any algorithm update from Christmas day through New Years. And the signals we are seeing this weekend of a Google update are doubtful.

There are some SEOs that are asking Google to reverse the December 2020 Google core update. Truth is, it is very common to see this reaction after every single core update. Google's John Mueller first response was "nah, sorry" when he was asked about reversing it. But then he went into a thoughtful response on why not to reverse it.

There has been a lot of speculation that passage indexing is live in the Google search results. I personally have not seen any evidence of that yet but still, I miss a lot of things. I asked Danny Sullivan of Google last night if it rolled out yet and he said, not it has not.