Industry News

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.

Determining Locally Prominent Semantic Features Using a Computer This patent relates to determining locally prominent semantic features using a computer. Operations associated with the state of a geographic area can get implemented on a variety...

Ever since Friday morning, August 6th, I've been seeing signals of a possible Google Search ranking algorithm update. This looks like a typical unconfirmed Google search update with both chatter from the SEO community and the automated tracking tools picking up the fluctuations.

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit this morning that the page experience update that incorporates core web vitals is more than a tie breaker ranking signal. He said "it is a ranking factor, and it's more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn't replace relevance."

Google announced that it has removed the safe browsing signal as part of the page experience update. In fact, Google implied it was never used as a signal, saying the it is "clarifying that Safe Browsing isn't used as a ranking signal."

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that core updates can sometimes impact both image search and local search results. This comes after Danny said that local updates don't impact local results. But now he is saying "it depends" and can impact all content types across search.

On Monday, Google announced a new algorithm update named the link spam update. I've been following the SEO chatter both in the public white hat and black hat forums, and the chatter is super limited. Very few SEOs are saying they saw ranking declines or improvements since the announcement. But now, I see some of the tracking tools noticing changes as of this morning.