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.

It has been a pretty volatile past week or so, not just over the weekend but also mid-week of last week – did you see a lot of Google Search ranking fluctuations? Google has retired the Duplex On Web crawler and feature. Google clarified the use of noindex and 4xx codes for crawl budget. Google gave advice for JavaScript-heavy pages and Search Console errors. And I posted the weekly Google webmaster report.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Large Google Search Ranking Algorithm Updates & Volatility Continues
  
  Every Monday, I end up covering an unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update but this past week, going into the weekend, was even more volatile than the others. I am seeing way more chatter, and even the tools are showing heavier volatility than the normal high volatility.
• December 2022 Google Webmaster Report
  
  Welcome to the big Google Webmaster Report for December 2022, the last one for the 2022 year. It was a fun 30 days or so; we learned a lot. The VP of Google Search, Hyung-Jin Kim, told us E-A-T is used everywhere and that there was a Coati algorithm that replaced Panda.
• Google Clarifies Using Noindex & 404 Status Codes For Crawl Budget Optimization
  
  On Friday, Lizzi Sassman from Google updated the crawl budget management help document with two more topics. Specifically, Google added two new myths to the crawl budget documentation.
• New Retired Google Crawlers Document With DuplexWeb-Google Being Retired
  
  Google has updated its Google Crawler / User Agent help document with a new section for “Retired Google crawlers.” With that, Google announced the retirement of the short-lived DuplexWeb-Google User Agent.
• Have Content Load First For JavaScript Heavy Sites Says Google
  
  Gary Illyes from Google posted a PSA (public service announcement) of sorts on Mastodon and LinkedIn for sites that are heavy with JavaScript. He said that you should try to load the content, including the “marginal boilerplate” content, first when you have a JavaScript-heavy site.




• Google Doogler Fire Station Hydrant
  
  Did you know that Google has a play fire station area, of course, a fire hydrant, for dogs, Dooglers, that are at the office? Here is a photo of one I found on Instagram, this is from the Google Kirkl
• Google Doodle For Seasonal Holidays 2022
  
  Google has posted its “Seasonal Holidays” Google Doodle for the month of December – the holiday month. Google did this last year as well, and while the past few days we had some other special Doodles on Google’s home page, when those Doodles came off, Google put up this Season Holidays Doodle up.
• Vlog #200: Jeremy Meindl On CRM Targeting To Get A Girl (He Married Her) & For Marketing
  
  
  
  Part one and part two with Jeremy Meindl was more on black hat SEO stuff and now in part three…

Other Great Search Threads:

• There’s no “weight” from a sitemap, it’s essentially just a collection of URLs, and the only difference is that the list comes from the site owner., John Mueller on Mastodon
• A mention in an article is prominent when it first comes out (maybe even linked from the homepage), and over time the article is less & less visible, perhaps even shifting into an archive section., John Mueller on Mastodon
• Heads-up: Google looks to have now rolled out infinite scroll on desktop (often including a ‘more results’ button) for some queries in the US. I guess some users like to browse a lot of results quickly. Thoughts on this? More inf, Brodie Clark on Twitter
• New Google Partner badges incoming…, Menachem Ani on Twitter
• Googlebot crawls from US based IP addresses. Keep that in mind when you’re doing geo redirects/blocking., Gary Illyes on Mastodon
• That sounds a lot like cloaking / spam. Make important things visible on the page to everyone., John Mueller on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Links & Content Marketing

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

• Prerender pages in Chrome for instant page navigations, Chrome Developers
• Semantic HTML: What It Is and How to Use It Correctly, Semrush
• SEO Gap Analysis — Whiteboard Friday, Moz
• 16 More Best Free SEO Chrome Extensions, I Love SEO
• Behind the Bing It On Challenge, Bing Search Quality Insights
• SEO Split Test Result: Adding the Category Name to Product Page Titles, Semrush
• A Quick Tech SEO Audit Template, Chris Green
• Generative AI For SEO: An Overview, WordLift Blog
• Anchor Text: The Complete Guide for Better SEO, Erik Emanuelli
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider Update – Version 18.0, Screaming Frog

PPC

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