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It’s been a very busy year for anyone involved in Google Search. Whether organic or paid, there have been a host of updates, new features, and launches across the board.
For the SEO community, it has been a very eventful year. With multiple and often back-to-back named algorithm updates, along with new systems, new SERP features and updates to the official documentation.
So here’s a little roundup of some of the notable changes month by month for organic search in Google. Starting with the most recent.
On December 15th Google announced an update to their quality rater guidelines. E-A-T gained an additional E. So now E-A-T becomes E-E-A-T.
If you’re not familiar with E-E-A-T (née E-A-T ) it is an acronym for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Experience being the newly added E.
It is part of what Google’s Search Raters look for to determine whether the search engine is providing quality, useful results.
The guidelines are extensive and E-E-A-T forms just some of what raters are looking at when assessing results. However, it is very useful for those producing content online to be aware of the guidelines to understand what Google considers to be the hallmarks of quality content deserving of ranking well.
This began rollout on December 14th and was expected to take 2 weeks to complete. Google later announced that the rollout would take a little longer to complete due to the Christmas period. It finished rollout on January 12th 2023.
Link spam updates differ from general spam updates in that they purely target spammy links, which try to artificially affect rankings.
Google have an AI spam prevention system ‘SpamBrain’. It is constantly evolving in order to help it better recognise unnatural links and prevent them from providing benefit to those who use link-building techniques that Google have long stated are against their guidelines.
It should come as no surprise to those who buy and sell links or use link networks if they take a hit from this update.
On December 14th Google announced the addition of the Search Status Dashboard to more conveniently communicate any issues with or disruptions to Google’s search systems.
This status page provides a central and easy-to-access place for anyone to check whether there are any current (7-day period) widespread issues impacting their crawling, indexing and serving systems and data.
Essentially uptime monitoring but for confirmed interruptions to Google’s search infrastructure.
This seems like a positive addition and means greater visibility outside of the Search Central Twitter account, where issues tend to be reported.
This began global rollout on December 5th and was expected to take about 2 weeks to complete. Google announced later in the month that the rollout would take a little longer to finish due to the Christmas period. It completed its rollout on January 12th 2023.
This was the second Helpful Content Update in 2022, with the first being the introduction of the Helpful Content system, which started to roll out in August and finished in September.
You can learn a bit more about Google’s Helpful Content system here. But essentially it creates a site-wide signal to establish the level of poor quality ‘unhelpful’ content on a website and is used alongside all of their other ranking signals to determine how well that site performs in search.
The more low-value content on a site that is unlikely to benefit searchers, the less well that site is likely to perform organically. This is of course dependent on numerous other ranking signals.
If you think you’ve been impacted by a Helpful Content update, DO NOT panic and go on a mass content cull!
Look at where you can make improvements to weaker content to ensure it is providing value to users. Removing or consolidating content should only be done after a thorough investigation into the potential knock-on effects, preferably guided by an SEO professional after a content audit.
Continuous scroll was rolled out to mobile search back in 2021, and this December Google began rolling it out to desktop SERPs, starting with US English searches.
Presumably, we’ll see this rollout to other countries and languages soon.
This change comes with a potential impact on both organic and paid search. For an idea of how it may affect Google Ads, have a look at this article from Search Engine Land.
As for organic search, no huge change was apparent with the mobile rollout, so you are unlikely to see much change when it comes to desktop searches.
There is a very slim potential for more clicks for those outside the coveted top positions in the SERP, but more likely is that those sitting in the page 2 positions (11-20) will see a slight increase in impressions when looking at their reports in Search Console.
To make the most of this opportunity, make sure that your Page Titles and Meta Tags are well-written and descriptive, to tempt searchers to choose your result.
In November, Google released their new guide to ranking systems, to try and simplify language around the changes and updates they make.
It’s worth running your eyes over, just so your up-to-date with naming conventions for future updates and changes.
This was a global update across all languages. It started rolling out on October 19th and was completed on October 21st.
Google makes occasional spam updates to ensure their spam detection and prevention systems are keeping up with the ever-evolving forms of search spam.
“In 2020 alone, our systems found 40 billion spammy pages every day.”
Google
If you think your site may have been impacted by this update, first thing is to make sure you aren’t falling foul of Google’s spam policies for search.
Those consistently abusing it risk receiving a manual action, which would completely remove their site from Google Search. Recovery from a manual action is time-consuming and slow, so ensure you’re following guidelines.
In October we saw site names added to results in mobile SERPs. This was done to make it clearer for a user to see the site a result is associated with.
If you find that your site name isn’t displayed as you wish, you can show Google your preferred name via the structured data on your homepage. If you’re not sure how you can find out more here.
The Google guidelines for site owners got a long-needed dust-off and update in October, simplifying the original guidelines which have been evolving and growing since 2002.
This was the 3rd Product Review update in 2022. These updates primarily impact e-commerce and review sites, and currently only apply to English language searches.
This type of update is made every now and then, to ensure that Google’s ranking systems are rewarding quality, useful and expert product reviews, over very simple ones that offer little value to those researching products.
If you’d like to learn more about providing product review content that is deemed high quality by Google, they have more information on writing them here.
Prioritise:
The September Core Update was a standard broad core update. We tend to see these 2 or 3 times a year, and they are notable as they bring in fairly large changes to Google’s algorithms.
Updates and changes to their algorithms are continuous but usually small. They are only announced and named if of a larger scale that may have a noticeable impact on organic search performance for many websites.
This was the rollout of the Helpful Content system and one of the biggest in recent years.
The system received a further update in December which we’ve already covered above, providing more detail on the ins and out of what Helpful Content means to Google.
August also saw the introduction of a new type of product structured data which facilitates sellers providing product pros and cons which can appear in product review snippets.
You can read more about the different types of product structured data available, what they can be used for, and how to implement them in Google’s documentation here.
This was the 2nd of 3 Product Reviews Updates in 2022.
June was a rarity, in the form of another quiet month in search. There were no big updates or changes.
Just some clarification in documentation regarding Googlebot’s 15MB fetch limit, along with how they deal with generating titles for pages with title and content script misalignment.
The first broad core update of the year began rolling out on May 25th and concluded on June 9th.
April was a blissfully quiet month in organic search with no updates or big news. They must have heard it was my birthday 😉
This was the 1st of 3 Product Reviews Updates in 2022.
In 2021 the Page Experience Update was rolled out for Mobile, bringing Core Web Vitals into the set of Page Experience ranking signals.
This year it was rolled out to desktop, beginning on February 22nd and finishing on March 3rd.
Google eased us into the new year gently. There were no big changes, just the introduction of a new robots tag ‘indexifembedded’ to help signal whether embedded content in iframes and the like should be indexed, even when the page it is embedded in is ‘noindex’.
Throughout the year there were also a few changes here and there to Search Console, which included the addition, updating and removal of certain reports as part of the ongoing process of simplifying the tool.
I’ve added a list of most of those below, with links to the Google Search Central blog if you’d like to find out more:
So there you have it. What a year! I hope this has provided a useful summary of the biggest news and changes to come to organic search from Google in 2022. Did I miss anything you’d consider important?
It will be interesting to see what 2023 brings us. Do you have any predictions?
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