Page Experience, Pirates, Shopping & Penalties

It is time for the March 2022 Google webmaster report, where I look back at the past 30-days of SEO news related to Google and highlight the most important changes over that time period. This month we had a confirmed rollout begin of the page experience update for desktop, we learned about an update to the Pirate update, a new shopping ranking factor and more.

Like I said, Google said it began rolling out the desktop version of the page experience update last month, it will continue to roll out through the end of this month – no need to panic over this update. Google also supposedly strengthened the Pirate update from 2012, that impacts sites with a large volume of DMCA takedown requests. Google added a new ranking factor for Shopping search, the shopping experience scorecard. We also learned that MUM is barely used much in Google Search to-date and we had a number of unconfirmed Google algorithm updates.

Google quickly processed the Google News and Google Discover manual action penalties. Google added more messages to Search Console going forward. And we had another data loss with Search Console. There was also a Google crawling issues that was resolved.

Google Maps is now an interactive map in the local pack – which is very cool. Google is dropping the business follow and welcome offers from local listings. Google is testing buyer guides in search and testing messaging in Google Shopping for merchants and customers.

There is a lot going on, but honestly, it was not an insanely busy month like we had in the past. To catch up on last month, see the February 2022 Google Webmaster report.

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is still buzzing about that last unconfirmed update.

Here is a summary of the more important stories over the past 30-days:

Google Algorithms:

Google SEO:
Google Search Console:
Google Maps & Local:
Google User Interface:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.