Daily Search Forum Recap: December 22, 2022

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Just an update for you, the Google search results are still very turbulent, I take a look back at the past few weeks. Google said word count per section is simply not a thing. Google says you can, if you want, use a single robots.txt file for all your international sites. Bing sill be switching to the new BingBot user agent for 100% of all crawls soon. And Google spoke about making Mastodon more search engine friendly.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Google Helpful Content Update & Link Spam Update Still Making SERP Turbulence
  
  As you know, the December 2022 helpful content update and the link spam update are rolling out now. In fact, it seems like the helpful content update needs more time to do its thing. Taking a look at the past few weeks, the Google Search results, it has been pretty volatile.
• Google: Our Search Algorithm Doesn’t Look At Words Per Section
  
  Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that the Google Search ranking algorithm does not look at words per section or the word count in different sections of your page.




• Google: You Can Use A Single Robots.txt For All Your International Sites
  
  Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn that if you want to you can use a single robots.txt file for all your international sites. He added that he is not saying this is a good idea, but rather, technically, you can implement your robots.txt this way.




• Bing Will Fully Switch To The New BingBot User Agent In Early January
  
  Since April, Bing has been slowly testing a new BingBot user agent, slowly rolling it out to more percentages of crawls over the year. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said while the new BingBot is still only doing 50% of all crawls, it will move to 100% of all crawls in early January.




• Google Comments On Making Mastodon More Search Engine Friendly
  
  There is an interesting thread on Mastodon where Danny Sullivan and John Mueller, both of who work at Google, talk about making Mastodon more search-engine friendly. The thread was started by Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, when he wanted a way to search Mastodon.




• Google Developer Groups Shades
  
  Here is a box of cheap promotional sunglasses or glasses with the GDG logo on them. This is for a Google Developer Groups event of some sort.

Other Great Search Threads:

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Links & Content Marketing

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

Search Features

Feedback:

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