Industry News

Over the past couple of days, starting as early as Wednesday, but most on Thursday, June 18th, I am seeing some signs of a Google search ranking algorithm update. It is not a massive one but there was an increase in SEO community chatter along with some tools showing signs of changes in the Google search results.

Last week we covered that Google said again, nofollow links in guest blog posts, even if they are not paid guest blog posts. This is not new, Google said this many times over the years. But whenever I cover these statements, some SEOs are a bit shocked. Well, Google's John Mueller again over again said, nofollow them.

There are some signs of a Google search ranking algorithm update happening now. Google has not said or confirmed anything but there is some chatter over the past few days and now signs from the automated tracking tools of an update.

Google's John Mueller in an interview with Marie Haynes said that it would be "really rare" that disavowing links would result in your web site doing better in search algorithmically. Sure, if you have a manual action, maybe but not without a manual action.

Well, it was a pretty jammed packed month for Google webmaster and SEO related news. Google announced an upcoming ranking change named the Google Page Experience Update, where core web vital metrics and page experience metrics will become a ranking factor. Google launched the May 2020 core update and it was big. Google had a confirmed bug with local rankings and a confirmed indexing bug as well.

I am seeing some early signs of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update touching down in the past several hours. Google has not announced anything, and the last core update was last month, the May 2020 core update. So we are not due an update but Google may have made some tweaks or maybe this is a blip?

Google announced a new algorithm update that will be launching sometime in 2021. I covered it in detail in my story yesterday on Search Engine Land named the Google Page Experience Update. I personally would not go too insane about this update, it is a lot of stuff Google has algorithms for already all packed up into one new name - "page experience."

Danny Sullivan of Google posted an update to the local volatility from late last month through early this month - saying it was a bug that was resolved about two weeks ago. The fix Google rolled out then he said "seems to have stabilized things since."