Google December 2022 Link Spam Update, E-E-A-T Guidelines Updated, Visual Elements, Status Dashboard, Content Ideas & More

This was a busy week, and I honestly thought it would start to slow down, but I was wrong; I am wrong a lot. Google launched another algorithm update, the December 2022 link spam update, which it baked in SpamBrain into the update. Google also released a large update to the Search Quality Raters Guidelines, adding an E to E-A-T for experience. Google released a new visual elements gallery where they document the names of various Google Search features. Google also released a status dashboard to tell us if Google Search has issues or outages with indexing, crawling, or serving. Google is testing featured snippets, not in position zero and also rolling out those perspectives more broadly. Google is shutting down Question Hub, but Content ideas in Search Console might replace it. Google said there is no helpful content score or threshold. Google said write content how you want, it can be diverse, just write for your people. Google said paging that pop in and out of the index is normal but also at the edge of indexing and quality. Google said 500/503 status codes for your robots.txt can ultimately lead to your whole site being removed from Google. Google said disallowing crawling is not the best way to remove your site from Google. Google’s John Mueller said using expired or repurposed domains is SEO flotsam. Google Ads has added four new insights pages. Microsoft Advertising will require verification of financial advertisers in the UK. Google Business Profiles added a way to remove business profiles. A study says that Google Local Guides reviews last longer. Also, Google posted the Chanukah decorations this week, Chanukah is this Sunday – have a good one! And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: Wix – I just love what they are doing with SEO, from the Wix SEO Content Hub to the SERPsUp podcast, let alone all the new SEO features they added to the Wix platform.

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