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October 2022 Google SEO News Recap

Hennessey Digital
November 2, 2022

by Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish is Lead SEO at iloveseo.com, Hennessey Digital’s sister site and leading source for SEO industry news, tips, editorials, and more.

Read More About Brian
Contents
  1. Suspensions of Google Business Profiles were spiking
  2. Google says to ignore anything that talks about link juice
  3. New Google ranking update responsible for ranking swings
  4. Google Business Profile Insights traffic had an unusual spike
  5. In many areas, it's rare for people to search visually
  6. HTML lang attribute still not used by Google
  7. Structured data can help identify content types
  8. Product reviews update
  9. Bingbot has a new user agent
  10. Google Search ranking update happened around October 13th
  11. Google spam update rolls out
  12. Yet another Google algorithm update
  13. Google Analytics brings back query data
  14. Google says human-written content isn't necessarily helpful
  15. A consequence of the Google spam update
  16. October was another month full of changes
LinkedIn

In the past month, we’ve seen a bit more aggressive algorithm updates than usual, especially with the spam update and other updates kicking in.

We’ve also seen some interesting confirmations, new happenings on the Google side, and even more in the way of developments in Google’s ongoing fight against spam.

October even saw more comprehensive crawling from Microsoft’s new Bingbot user agent. In addition, some glitches occurred in Google Analytics, along with additional deflections on link juice and Google Business Profile suspensions occurring at an alarming rate.

So sit back, grab that cup of Joe, and enjoy our October 2022 Google SEO News recap!

Suspensions of Google Business Profiles were spiking

The beginning of October saw a few spikes in the suspensions of Google Business Profiles.

Barry Schwartz noted a much higher level of these suspensions spiking over the past couple of weeks.

Basically, what was happening was a higher than typical number of Google Business Profiles were being suspended on Google Maps: not only were they suspended, but they were also being entirely removed from the search results.

Users over on localsearchforum.com were describing events where they updated their Google Business Profiles after posting to them, and the profile had been suspended. This happened to at least 3 profiles that they were aware of.

Another user described the fact that they had tons of clients in a queue for doing an update on their listing. Apparently everything they even tried doing ended up leading to a suspension.

Local SEO Jason Brown noted in the thread that:

“Changing categories can trigger a suspension. I know that Google was suspended business profiles for updating the hours and that was a bug and shouldn’t be happening. Getting suspended for creating a post is not normal and sounds like a bug.”

Jason also noted that:

“Google doesn’t want you to edit the business profiles once it’s verified. You need to ask, do I really need to make this edit to enhance the business profile? Adding service areas doesn’t impact rankings, so if you are not ranking in that area, it won’t benefit you by adding it. Yes, there is a major backlog on reinstatements. They are averaging 22 days and if there is an uptick in suspensions, they delay can increase. The worst was 6 weeks to hear back.”

The Google Business Profile help forums also had a very high number of users who were complaining that their businesses were being suspended.

Google says to ignore anything that talks about link juice

John Mueller was asked by Twitter user Gyan (@Gyan92593415) about link juice. They asked John:

@JohnMu
its heard on internet that link juice is lost by giving outbound links, on the other hand, if websites are given good outbound links for reference, then the trustworthiness of article increases. These 2 are contradictory. For me both are necessary, what should be done?

John explained that anything regarding link juice discussed on the Internet should be ignored. He reiterated: “Make awesome websites with content that’s useful and inspirational to real people.”

New Google ranking update responsible for ranking swings

Early October also saw a new Google ranking update that saw massive Google ranking swings.

Glenn Gabe observed on Twitter that the examples of sites with these ranking swings indicate machine-learning models that are having a hard time figuring out a site. He pointed out that the site would drop and surge around major updates, including product reviews updates.

He noted that this site just dropped again with the September product review update, and some additional observations, below:

Clearly, there are situations where things aren’t quite so clear when the Google algorithms are working to understand a site!

Google Business Profile Insights traffic had an unusual spike

Also in early October, reports began surfacing about spikes in traffic to Google Business Profile insights reporting platform.

In short, the data showed large spikes in traffic that were unaccounted for. The two Google products that showed these spikes were Google Maps along with Google Local.

The complaints first began on localsearchforum.com. More specifically, these spikes are happening within the auto dealership industry.

George Nenni was the first to report about this in one thread:

“We track GBP searches, views and actions for around 200 new car retailers, through a Jepto API into Data Studio. We are noticing more than half of these profiles received strange spikes in searches and views, but not actions. It is the same data we are seeing directly in the GBP dashboard (attached). We track separate profiles for sales, service, parts and body shop departments for each dealer. The issue is only happening with the nested department listings.

Anyone seeing similar, or have explanation?

I looked through threads for existing, hopefully not already answered!”

Another local SEO professional wrote:

“We’re seeing similar trends for a few of our clients in the car and restaurant verticals since July too. It’s been mostly from maps and direct searches. Haven’t been able to pin point where it’s coming from or if Google is tracking it differently now.

Being the uptick was mostly from direct searches, I would expect actions to improve directionally but that hasn’t been the case. If anyone knows what could be causing this increase in impressions you would be my new favorite person.”

Jason Brown, another local SEO professional, explained that he thinks this reporting spike is likely a bug.

In many areas, it’s rare for people to search visually

One SEO professional, Martin McGarry, asked John Mueller on Twitter about visual search. More specifically, he asked whether Google cares if they use the same image from Unsplash (a stock photography platform) that’s on 10,000 other websites.

John explained that if you’re focusing on web-search, you can go for it. Utilizing stock photos is just fine. He also explained that for image search, it’s harder to succeed with stock photos. Ideally, for image search, you would want more unique photos.

He also commented that searching in a visual way is quite rare in many areas.

Another user asked John what he meant by “visually.” Whether this meant Google Lens searches, or when a user searches a keyword phrase and then clicks on the image option from the search results.

John explained he was talking about both when he was talking about “searching visually.”

HTML lang attribute still not used by Google

It has been known for a while now that the HTML lang attribute is not used by Google. This is different from the international HREFLANG attribute. Instead, the HTML lang attribute is a code declaration that shows up at the top of the heading of your document.

John explained the following and reiterated this on Twitter last month:

John has explained in the past that they don’t use the HTML lang attribute at all. And, if you have HREFLANG links, Google is going to use those. So, if you use both, Google will always ignore the HTML Lang attribute.

Structured data can help identify content types

Google’s Danny Sullivan explained over on Twitter earlier in October that structured data, while not used for ranking, can help Google identify certain types of content like product reviews.

He also explained that this is the same case in terms of how Google uses many signals to understand content.

However, it’s not the same as ranking, and they (Google) would not solely depend on it because not everyone uses it.

Product reviews update

On Twitter, earlier in October, Danny Sullivan also explained that the product reviews update is something tha tworks on the page-level, although Google can and does take action sitewide.

His additional comments explained that if a site has a lot of product review content, then Google is more likely to take action against that site.

These comments come after many people online expressed confusion about the product review update and how it’s applied to any given site:

Bingbot has a new user agent

Back on July 27th, Fabrice Canel of Bing announced a new Bingbot user agent. He also explained that it was at five percent of all URLs being downloaded.

Earlier in October, Fabrice announced that the new Bingbot has now downloaded 50 percent of all URLs.

Not bad progress at all.

Google Search ranking update happened around October 13th

Around October 13th, Barry Schwartz reported on a Google update that remains unconfirmed. He explained that over that last 24 hours or so, they were seeing some SEO forum discussions and that the SEO rank tracking tools began lighting up as if there were a major update going on.

Barry attributed changes in these rankings in Google Search to Google organic searches as well as Google search over that 24-48 hour time frame.

He also reiterated that it is unconfirmed and that Google has not announced any major update, but he is continuing to see major signals in this regard.

This thread over on Webmaster World talks about the ongoing situation with regard to these particular updates. Quite a number of SEO professionals were talking about some shifts in ranking and issues with their sites as a result.

“Anything you’re seeing now is not related to this September core update (rollout completed 2 weeks ago).

Time to close the thread maybe?”

“Yes, another drop today, BUT also googlebot is hammering my site like crazy.

Is like they want to have an up-to-date version in the DB!”

“Another day, another downgrade.
When you enter the teeth of “the Google”, you are crunched to nothing.
Another drop.
I can see the bottom now!

I have the impression that now the “Product review” category got much larger in a sense and this is causing problems.”

“I can show you site after site that is 100% really helpful and formerly top ranking content that has been smashed to the tune of 50% traffic lost. These sites talk about products in the sense of how to fix or modify them but they do not promote them, review them or make a buying suggestion at all. Zero affiliate links and in many cases the products are long out of production.

None of that mattered so yeah, it suggests something else is going on. Perhaps the product review update is mislabeling non-review pages?

Quote within a quote from another user: “I have the impression that now the “Product review” category got much larger in a sense and this is causing problems.”

YouTube videos flooded the results; bigger, indeed.

Anyway, if you suspect either update for a large traffic loss, and it would be unlikely anything else is to blame given the timing, check your internal links.

  • Make sure internal links are truly topical and helpful to have on the page doing the linking
  • Don’t keyword stuff. The link needs to make clear WHERE it is going and WHAT a visitor will find there. “Widget Grease” is bad anchor text, it doesn’t tell you where you are going or what you will find. Does it go to a review page? To another site to buy some? “Visit our widget grease guide”, or other verbiage/signal, is needed to tell visitors where they are going and what to expect if they click.
  • Reverse the flow? You don’t need to create a lot of internal links to prop up an already well ranked page on a new-ish informational site. Consider adding them where they make sense on pages Google already favors to make the value flow more deeply into the site.

Remember: Google doesn’t even fully evaluate a page it feels isn’t ready for prime time. You see this in Search Console when looking up user metrics and you find “not enough data” and find the same.

Helpful content includes internal links but the anchor text has to be informative too. Source: Removing a related content plugin that wasn’t exactly helpful on many pages. A month later a lot of the content seems to be coming back to life and internal links were added manually to the top 4-5 pages only, according to G traffic/impressions.

Propping a good page up with lots of links from lesser pages is less effective than linking from a good page to pull up a lesser one, but it has to make sense.

*grasping at straws like everyone else*

Tiring, isn’t it?

Google spam update rolls out

Around October 19th, Google began rolling out the new October spam update. This update completed rolling out in less than around 42 hours.

Barry Schwartz noted that the previous spam update occurred in November 2021 and it took eight days to roll out. He also noted that other spam updates have taken just 24 hours to roll out.

The overall assessment of this update includes the fact that it has had a pretty major impact on the sites that it hit, but the net that was cast was not widespread.

Barry did not see a lot of complaints throughout the SEO community as he normally would have from other updates.

Yet another Google algorithm update

Google finally confirmed that the October 2022 spam update actually ended up finishing on Friday, the morning of October 21st.

Everything in the online communities and rank tracking tools reflected the nature of the spam updates, so nothing surprising really stood out there.

However, October 22nd saw renewed concern and discussion amongst the online SEO communities about this update. Also, major swings were observed in the rank tracking tools, which has likely indicated a major update was underway.

Google Analytics brings back query data

Earlier in October, a bug occurred in which Universal Analytics was missing all of its data after the 1st of October.

Thankfully, now it is fixed as of October 27th and Google has replaced all of the back data.

John Mueller himself confirmed the issue on October 5th, and explained that the team was looking into it:

Google says human-written content isn’t necessarily helpful

On October 23rd, one SEO professional asked John Mueller on Twitter about human-written content and how it relates to the new Google spam update.

They observed that the “Google spam update is punishing a lot of human-written content. They commented that they are sure this update must be very helpful for consumers out there, but for sure the update needs a lot of correction.”

Google’s John Mueller explained that just because a piece of content is written by humans does not mean that it is helpful and good content. John also emphasized the point that he would really focus on making things awesome, unique, compelling, and that people would recommend to their friends. Don’t just set a low bar for “technically okay” content and expect to do well in the Google search results.

A consequence of the Google spam update

Over on Twitter, SEO professional Mark Williams-Cook posted that one of his sites was hit hard by the spam update.

He confessed that it was a really bad, really spammy website that he had created. One other user asked if he was using AI content on it. He explained that no, he was not.

He also mentioned that this is exactly what the site was designed for and that it was not actually monetized.

Mark also explained that he is not scraping articles or anything significant that others wrote or relied on for income. Most all of the content was programmatic stuff.

He also explained that he has a bunch of sites that he owns that he just runs tests on. If one of them tanks, basically this is a canary in a coal mine in terms of what SEO bad practices to avoid.

In addition, Mark went further and said that the site’s content was scraped PAA content – around 10,000 auto-generated pages.

October was another month full of changes

As was the case for September 2022 in SEO, we can see that October is more of a bumpy month when it comes to Google algorithm updates. From spam updates to product reviews, many webmasters were experiencing near-total algorithmic losses as a result.

Which just goes to show: don’t make Google too angry. At least, don’t do it on a site that you plan to monetize and earn revenue from.

You may live to regret that decision!

Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish is Lead SEO at iloveseo.com, Hennessey Digital’s sister site and leading source for SEO industry news, tips, editorials, and more.

Read More About Brian

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