Industry News

There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update on January 11, 2022. This would be the first real unconfirmed update for the 2022 year. I am seeing both chatter spike up starting on January 10th and continue through today. Plus, many of the tracking tools are showing big movements in the Google search results.

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that there is or was a backlog of manual actions issued by Google. Google has been slow and delayed in responding to those manual actions but is working through the backlog.

Tim Soulo from ahrefs posted a Twitter poll asking will you pay money to get links in 2022? Sadly, someone spammed the poll but I recreated it and it clearly shows that many, almost half of SEOs, are planning on buying and paying for links in 2022.

Normally the month of December is not that busy because people take off for the holidays and such. But the past month was really not that calm at all. We had huge Google ranking volatility most of the past month, we had a confirmed three-week rollout of the December product reviews update, Google confirmed a local update and much more.

Around December 27th and 28th we may have a Google search ranking algorithm jolt or quick tremor. I highly doubt Google pushed out something over the holidays, this last week of December. But it might just be some weird change that jolted the search results (like that even happens as I am describing).

According to recent Semrush data, this month, the month of December, was the most volatile month of the year and probably Google history. Here is a chart Mordy Oberstein of Semrush shared showing how December soared amongst the rest of the months in 2021.

Google said on Tuesday, December 21, 2021 that the December 2021 Google product reviews update is now fully rolled out. Alan Kent from Google shared this news on Twitter after I asked him for an update - he said "the Google product review update is fully rolled out."

Are you dizzy yet? The Google search results are still super volatile and we are seeing high levels of chatter spike back up over the past 24 to 48 hours and the tracking tools are also running incredibly hot. There is just so much going on right now in Google Search for an SEO that taking off for Christmas might not be an option for many.

As we reported a week ago, we saw a possible Google local search ranking update starting around a week prior to that - well, Google has now confirmed it. Google said on Twitter "Our November 2021 local search update has concluded. It began Nov 30 and ran through Dec 8. It involved a rebalancing of various factors we consider in generating local search results."

It seems like Google is having a major indexing or crawling issue this morning - again. Google seems to have not picked up on new content in the past hour or two. You can see sites like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and niche publishers like TechCrunch and The Verge are not seeing their new published content show up in the Google Search results.