Recent Updates from Google that May Impact Your SEO
Stay Current with Google Changes for Optimal Search Performance
Google’s algorithm never sleeps and is regularly updated throughout the year in order to provide users with a better search experience and more relevant search results. With these neverending updates, you should make sure to keep up with impactful changes to ensure your website is in the best shape to be discovered by Google. Here are three of the most important recent Google SEO updates to keep in mind when updating or maintaining your website.
September 2022 Google Core Update
On September 12, 2022 Google announced a Core Algorithm Update that will reportedly result in noticeable changes to search results. According to the official Google list of announced updates , it will take up to two weeks to finish rolling out.
Usually, Google announces a core algorithm update when changes are made that are large enough to be felt by publishers and search marketers worldwide. The algorithm is constantly undergoing changes, but a core algorithm update tends to be more noticeable.
The algorithm changes can be seen within the next few days as the changes are rolled out to data centers. These kinds of updates are more general and affect search results across most languages.
Helpful Content Update
On August 25, Google began rolling out the helpful content algorithm update, which is designed to reward people-first content and devalue content clearly written for search engines. This is wonderful news for websites with quality, expertly written content since these types of websites will see ranking increases.
This update affects English searches worldwide and will expand to other languages in the future. Reportedly, this will not be the only helpful content update Google releases. Google explicitly states in its original announcement that it will continually refine its efforts to detect unhelpful content:
“Over the coming months, we will also continue refining how the classifier detects unhelpful content and launch further efforts to better reward people-first content.”
New Search Console Merchant Listings Report
Google has also recently announced its expanded eligibility for enhanced product experiences in Google Search through the use of Product structured data which was previously only open to Merchant Center users.
Google made these experiences accessible to more e-commerce website owners so that their products may now show up in more places, in a more rich way, than before. For website owners, there are two broad categories of experiences:
- Merchant listing experiences for web pages that allow shoppers to buy a product on the site.
- Product snippets for a broader set of web pages with product information (including pages that sell products, publish product reviews, and/or aggregate information from other sites).
To sum up, for some site owners, SEO performance may suffer as a result of algorithm updates. The updates can be particularly frustrating if your site had considerable ranking positions for valuable keywords and then dropped to page two or stopped being promoted entirely.
So recovering from an algorithm update is no easy task, but on the bright side, these updates have a way of showing site owners where our websites still have weaknesses and room for improvement.
When site owners similarly prioritize quality, they will never be that far behind updates, and any needed recovery will become easier and quicker, even as algorithms continue to evolve.
