January 18, 2023
This month, Google released its December 2022 Link spam update and rolled out its December 2022 helpful content update. E-E-A-T also made significant updates to Google’s quality rater guidelines. Meanwhile, Google has also started testing video search technology.
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If users have started to see ranking declines recently, it might be because of the new link spam update that Google released in December. The latest update will help Google detect spam and reduce the volume of spam online.
The update is leveraging what Google refers to in 2018 as “SpamBrain”, specifically the spam trends section, where Google refers to its machine learning system, to improve search spam detection. Google has stated that the SpamBrain can not only detect spam directly, but it can also now detect both sites that are buying links and sites used for passing outgoing links.
Users have been advised to check that their links are natural and follow Google’s webmaster guidelines. They have also been reported to improve their site to attract links over time. Site owners should ensure they follow the best practices on links, incoming and outgoing. Focusing on quality content and improving user experience always wins, compared to manipulating links.
The December 2022 helpful content update, released by Google on December 5th 2022, improves the helpful content system that Google introduced back in August 2022. It enhances Google’s classifier and works across content globally in all languages.
Google’s helpful content system is designed to reward webpages created for people rather than search engines. It aims to elevate content that adds value to the web, above and beyond what is usually available from other websites or publishers. As well as covering all languages, the new update can potentially include other signals/adjustments than it previously has.
If customers have improved their websites after Google’s helpful content system hit back in August, they may see rankings climb with the new December update. Contrastingly, there are also challenging effects that can come with the algorithm update. For example, customers who experienced a positive impact on their websites after the August update could see rankings change due to the December rollout. The update was criticised heavily over the summer for being too ‘quiet’, so there is the potential for the new December update to have much more of an impact and be much more noticeable.
Google has significantly improved its Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) for search. Despite Google updating this document several times per year, the latest update came with noticeable changes to the document’s structure, many new sections and tables, and an additional 11 pages of content. The most noticeable difference is the addition of the letter E to the acronym E-A-T.
E-E-A-T now stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. The introduction of “experience” shows that the quality of content can also be evaluated through how much knowledge and first-hand experience the author has in the topic. Having the potential to affect the validity of the content users produce.
Through the new “Search In Video” feature, Google has started to test the ability to search for spoken works within a video. In the latest post for the Google India blog, Google stated that “besides images, videos are also a rich source of visual information, but it’s often hard to find something buried inside a long clip.” Therefore, you can now find the “Search In Feature” beneath a video. Users can then use the feature to enter a term and quickly find what they are looking for within the video.
Google can now isolate what sections of the video users are talking about, and with YouTube’s advanced transcriptions, it is no shock to users that Google has now announced this new feature.
The new feature showcases how far technology has adapted over recent years. It also means that marketers who post video content should ensure that the language used within their content is clear and concise so that Google can correctly and accurately transcribe the words in their material.