This Month in Search [September 2022]

We can’t believe it’s already September, and we’re expecting to see lots of search activity this month with updates from Google and Bing. With the rolling out of the Helpful Content Update, September is shaping up to be an interesting month for search.

Thursday 29th September

Google Search On 22

Google’s Search On 22 took place yesterday, and with it came the announcement of some new, fresh, features. We delved in and picked some of the highlights from the livestream.

What’s new

• Search snippets update – combining images, sounds, text and speech, users can find exactly what they’re looking for in a more natural and intuitive way. With multi search, you can take a photo and add text to it just as you might point at something and naturally ask questions about it.
• Breaking down language barriers – Google are breaking down language barriers with visual exploration. With major advancements to machine learning, they have gone beyond translating text, to translating pictures. Making it easier to understand signage, posters, anything visually when exploring a new place.
• Search labels – Google are making it easier to find the right words, by suggesting topics as you search in the form of labels that can help you go deeper into subjects that spark your interest. You can add and remove labels to adjust your search result.
• Google Maps – for 17 years, Google have been evolving maps from a 2D interface, into a rich multi-dimensional view of the real world. You will be able to zoom in on areas and get results on what’s fun and popular in the area, creating a more immersive and interactive user experience. By using computer vision and predictive tools, immersive view takes all the useful information you can find on Google Maps and brings it to life immediately. Again, the emphasis is on using visual search capabilities in a way that’s more natural. This feature is coming to 6 cities globally in the coming months.
• Food – the new features for food make it easier for users to find places to eat, as well as food information including dietary requirements and how much it costs in specific restaurants.
• Shopping – they announced “Shop the Look Feature”, during your search for products Google will create suggestions to complete your look. With this, merchants can create and show off their products in 360° using machine learning to automate the spins.
• Sustainability – using Google Maps, you can find eco-friendly routes to take for your travel, based on your engine type. You’ll also be able to figure out cost of fuel for a new car using Google’s fuel cost calculator. This feature will also show you emission information too, helping you to make more conscious decisions to help reduce your carbon emissions.
• Control your personal information – probably one of the most anticipated feature that everyone is expecting is the new “Results about you” tab. You’ll now be able to make requests to Google for the removal of your personal data showing up in search results.

These are just a few of our takeaways from the event, but if you want to catch up with the whole livestream you can watch it here.

Tuesday 27th September

Microsoft Bing Label Testing

An update from Microsoft Bing (for the first time in a while!) sees them placing labels in the search results snippets that tell the user if the snippet has been pulled from a web page or something else. We assume that “something else” could mean pdfs, videos, or some other file types.

Monday 26th September

Product Review Updates

The PRU has been rolling out but, as confirmed on Twitter, we may not be notified of when this happens. What we do know is that, unlike the core updates, there’s a periodic refresh given the “more limited nature of the content involved.”

So if you’re waiting for Google to confirm updates of the PRU, it’s best to be proactive and keeping working on your site.

It's still a periodic refresh situation. See: https://t.co/0gJccmGeoV

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 21, 2022

Friday 23rd September

It’s not just you that caught a bug this autumn

Last night there was a post on Twitter from Google Ads Liason, Ginny Marvin, reporting that Google Ads has an issue where some ads may not be served.

Google is aware of an internal issue impacting ads serving. Our product and policy teams are actively working on a solution. Currently, the impact of this issue may prevent ads from serving in certain circumstances for your account. We will follow up with updates/resolutions ASAP

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) September 22, 2022

Google Ads advertisers noticed issues with their ad spend which saw some accounts have their spending halted completely and suspend accounts. Google has promised to follow up with updates and resolutions to this issue ASAP.

Thursday 22nd September

So long, farewell to International Targeting Tool

It’s been reported for awhile, but it has now been confirmed that Google has officially deprecated the International Targeting report tool from Google Search Console. If you try to access the report, you’ll see a “This report is no longer available here.” message. Google has confirmed that they will continue to support hreflang and their recommendations for managing multilingual and multiregional sites still stand. You can read more here.

Tuesday 20th September

Product Review Update Roll-out

The much anticipated product review update from Google started rolling out today, making this the fifth in a series of updates from the search giant to target low-quality reviews. The update will take about a week to fully roll out, with Google saying:

For awareness, the September 2022 core update has not fully completed but it’s mostly done. We expect it will be fully complete within a week and will share on our updates page when it is done.

Thursday 15th September

Google ranking and sites that look the same: explained

Google’s John Mueller answered a question re: does Google penalise sites that are identical?

He said,

First off, there’s no penalty or web spam manual action for having two almost identical websites.

That said, if the URLs and the page content is the same across these two websites, then what can happen for identical pages is that our systems may pick one of the pages as a canonical page. This means we would focus our crawling, indexing and ranking on that canonical page. For pages that aren’t identical, we generally index both of them.

For example, if you have the same document on both websites, we’d pick one and only show that one in search. In practice, that’s often fine. If you need both pages to be shown in search, just make sure they’re significantly different, not just with a modified logo or color scheme.

Certainly something to keep in mind if you have 1+ brands using the same HTML structure and components.

You can listen to John talk about identical pages here:

Wednesday 21st September

Testing, 1, 2 ,3….

We have seen reports of Google going through more rounds of testing (it’s a never ending saga at this point) including tests of placing the thumbnail image on the top stories carousel in Google Search at the top and also at the bottom – which is certainly new as we’re used to seeing it on the top.

They have also been testing highlighting text in the featured snippets, along with some people on the Twitter-sphere reporting to have seen Google testing highlighting text in the “people also ask” section.

Google periodically goes through different testing periods of its core features to help improve user experience, but so far there’s not word on how this could affect SEO.

New HTTPS report in Search Console

Google are gradually rolling the new HTTPS report in Search Console over the next few months. This comes after feedback from the release of the Page Experience Report last year in Search Console included frequent requests of users wanting Google to provide more information regarding HTTPS status of the site.

The report will get you insights about your HTTPS pages served on Search and will list issues that prevent pages from being served as HTTPS. You can read more about this update here.

Tuesday 13th September

Review bribery, a thing of the past?

Google has updated its Google Maps reviews guidelines, “deceptive and fake engagement guidelines”, to now disallow making requests for revisions or removals of a negative review through offered discounts, free goods or services, or other incentives.

The full guidelines can be found here.

Monday 12th September

Broad Core Update rollout

Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the year following its last update four months prior in May ’22, here’s what we know so far:

Name: Google September 2022 Broad Core Update
Launched: September 12, 2022 at around 11:25 pm ET
Rollout: It will take about one/two weeks to roll out
Targets: It looks at all types of content
Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages
Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more

Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future.

Today we released the September 2022 core update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: https://t.co/sQ5COfdNcb

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) September 12, 2022

Friday 9th September

Google Helpful Content Update Rolled Out

2 weeks after the start of rolling out the HCU, Google has now confirmed it has finished rolling out the update. People had started noticing significant fluctuations and volatility in Google Search results, whether this is something that will slow down is something for us to keep an eye out for.

Stay tuned here for more information about the HCU.

Monday 5th September

Helpful Content Update seems… minor?

There’s been lots of discussion around the new HCU from Google that’s currently in the stages of being rolled out, from what we can see from different SEOs, only 20% noticed ranking changes since the update according to a poll in Aleyda Solis’ twitter. Interesting, whether it’s accurate or not is anyone’s guess but until we know more information from Google themselves, I think it’s best to take the poll with a pinch of salt.

Friday 2nd September

Google testing UX around e-commerce search

Google has been testing more e-commerce features this week, the “explore products” feature comes with product images and also without product images. You might be used to seeing the usual “Shopping” tab which gives you reams of images of products you search for linked back to their websites. The Explore products feature will show you popular brands from the web that fit your search criteria, and it doesn’t require a product photo to be provided. What you’ll see instead is a brand strapline, their logo, web page link, and a rating system from Google reviewers.

The future of UX for e-commerce on search is bright, we think.

Thursday 1st September

Time to stop stressing over those word counts!

There’s nothing worse than writing content and looking down at your word count and realising you’ll probably need to spend more time fleshing out your article with more words plucked out of thin air (because who hasn’t struggled with reaching word counts from time to time). Well, there’s a Google News article content error titled “Article too short”. It references the note to “make sure your articles have more than 80 words” Google’s Danny Sullivan has said they’ll probably remove that stipulation because people shouldn’t stress about word counts, apparently.

It's unlikely people are generally writing too "short" if they have helpful content and adding a bunch of words in the mistaken belief they need to go "long" isn't making the content more helpful but less.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 31, 2022

Wednesday 14th September

New HTTPS report in Search Console

Google are gradually rolling the new HTTPS report in Search Console over the next few months. This comes after feedback from the release of the Page Experience Report last year in Search Console included frequent requests of users wanting Google to provide more information regarding HTTPS status of the site.

The report will get you insights about your HTTPS pages served on Search and will list issues that prevent pages from being served as HTTPS. You can read more about this update here.

Tuesday 13th September

Review bribery, a thing of the past?

Google has updated its Google Maps reviews guidelines, “deceptive and fake engagement guidelines”, to now disallow making requests for revisions or removals of a negative review through offered discounts, free goods or services, or other incentives.

The full guidelines can be found here.

Monday 12th September

Broad Core Update rollout

Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the year following its last update four months prior in May ’22, here’s what we know so far:

Name: Google September 2022 Broad Core Update
Launched: September 12, 2022 at around 11:25 pm ET
Rollout: It will take about one/two weeks to roll out
Targets: It looks at all types of content
Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages
Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more

Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future.

Today we released the September 2022 core update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: https://t.co/sQ5COfdNcb

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) September 12, 2022

Friday 9th September

Google Helpful Content Update Rolled Out

2 weeks after the start of rolling out the HCU, Google has now confirmed it has finished rolling out the update. People had started noticing significant fluctuations and volatility in Google Search results, whether this is something that will slow down is something for us to keep an eye out for.

Stay tuned here for more information about the HCU.

Monday 5th September

Helpful Content Update seems… minor?

There’s been lots of discussion around the new HCU from Google that’s currently in the stages of being rolled out, from what we can see from different SEOs, only 20% noticed ranking changes since the update according to a poll in Aleyda Solis’ twitter. Interesting, whether it’s accurate or not is anyone’s guess but until we know more information from Google themselves, I think it’s best to take the poll with a pinch of salt.

Friday 2nd September

Google testing UX around e-commerce search

Google has been testing more e-commerce features this week, the “explore products” feature comes with product images and also without product images. You might be used to seeing the usual “Shopping” tab which gives you reams of images of products you search for linked back to their websites. The Explore products feature will show you popular brands from the web that fit your search criteria, and it doesn’t require a product photo to be provided. What you’ll see instead is a brand strapline, their logo, web page link, and a rating system from Google reviewers.

The future of UX for e-commerce on search is bright, we think.

Thursday 1st September

Time to stop stressing over those word counts!

There’s nothing worse than writing content and looking down at your word count and realising you’ll probably need to spend more time fleshing out your article with more words plucked out of thin air (because who hasn’t struggled with reaching word counts from time to time). Well, there’s a Google News article content error titled “Article too short”. It references the note to “make sure your articles have more than 80 words” Google’s Danny Sullivan has said they’ll probably remove that stipulation because people shouldn’t stress about word counts, apparently.

It's unlikely people are generally writing too "short" if they have helpful content and adding a bunch of words in the mistaken belief they need to go "long" isn't making the content more helpful but less.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 31, 2022