The last month saw plenty of SEO news, though not as much as July. In this SEO news recap for August 2022, there’s more in the way of significant updates and incidents that occurred on Google’s side.
And some of these incidents were very bad, like when a Google facility caught fire and resulted in a massive outage for a day. Thankfully, however, Google – eventually – recovered.
This month’s news roundup includes Google algorithm updates, changes to Google Search Console, and more comments from John Mueller.
Enjoy.
Google’s New Product Reviews Update Kicks In
Since the beginning of 2022, there have been several versions of the product reviews update.
Barry Schwartz noted that “most of the tracking tools are still not really picking up on the Google Product Reviews update. But we did start to see chatter where SEOs are drilling into specific sites and noticing big ranking changes.”
While chatter was not as widespread on the forums as it usually is, Twitter saw more activity from the product reviews update than usual.
Here are some screenshots of visibility changes *just starting* to show for sites impacted. I’m sure the tools will show much more visibility swings starting tomorrow. Again, GSC and GA show much more of the impact. pic.twitter.com/BnbU1jBEOh
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 30, 2022
John Mueller: Don’t Just Read, Do SEO Also
At the beginning of August, John Mueller had a lot to say about a recent request. He responded that perhaps the reader should stop just “reading SEO blogs” and begin doing SEO as well?
This is another level of snarkiness than we usually see from John.
But, at the very least, it was refreshing to see John back up SEO professionals actually doing SEO as opposed to simply reading SEO blogs.
There is a BIG difference between practicing SEO on a daily basis and someone who reads blogs occasionally.
And we have to agree. Unless you practice SEO on a daily basis, you cannot gain competency by reading just a couple of blogs.
Catching up on email after vacation & co, one of the things I would have liked to reply with to sites asking for SEO tips …
Maybe you should stop reading SEO blogs and instead do something useful for your site & its users?
— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) August 2, 2022
… brought to you by another otherwise great site, with a passionate owner, that has devolved into the trap of “17 best WIDGETS for QWERTY in 2022” with a compilation of mediocre content. You want to rank better again? Then do better again.
— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) August 2, 2022
Dump the crap. Dump the filler. Get to the point. Don’t rehash. Make useful things that you’re proud of. Use affiliate links if you want, but don’t be an affiliate: be real, be yourself.
— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) August 2, 2022
Sitemap 50,000 Limit Based on Location URLs
The one thing that most SEO professionals know about sitemap files is that they can contain a physical maximum of 50,000 URLs.
What we don’t know, however, is what’s counted among those 50,000 URls.
John Mueller stated on Twitter that only the location (or <loc>) URLs are counted. Not alternatives as well.
Here is the recap of that conversation:
Just <loc> URLs.
— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) July 28, 2022
Google Adds Asian-Owned Business Attribute to GMB Profiles
In a move towards further diversity and inclusion, Google has added the “Asian-owned Business” attribute to Google My Business profiles who are applicable as such.
It’s a brand-new label that can be added in Google Maps and Google Search, “making it easier to find Asian-owned businesses in their own community,” Google said.
New Google Content Guidelines for Bloggers, Hosts, E-Commerce, and More
In Google’s SEO guidelines, they added new links that link to further guidelines depending on what you do in the Digital Marketing community.
They added links that included: best practices for Bloggers, best practices for e-commerce sites in Google Search, establish your business details with Google,
guidelines for web hosting services, and how to keep redacted information out of
Google Search.
All of these links add a new dimension of guidelines for SEO professionals who are looking to improve their search presence.
These links were added to Google’s “Overview of Guidelines” page.
Google Adds Support for Structured Data on Review Pages
Google announced on their developer blog that they have added new support for more structured data. Specifically, on review pages that address pros and cons, you can use pros and cons structured data.
You can find instructions for this particular structured data here.
Google Search Plagued with Indexing Issues, Outages, and More
Around August 9th, Google suffered a major outage throughout the night that still impacted results throughout the morning of August 10th.
There were many, many complaints about things like pages not in the index, very poor quality and dated results, along with large scale indexing issues.
The thing behind this event was a fire at a Google data center.
This was reported in an sfgate.com article talking about the fire:
Three electricians who were transported to a local hospital with burn injuries after an arc flash outside a Google data center are now in stable condition, according to a Google spokesperson.
The full extent of their injuries is unknown; the Council Bluffs Fire Department and Police Department, in addition to the Nebraska Medical Center, don’t have more details to share at this time, they each told SFGATE. The three individuals who were injured are not Google employees, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation.
Google users worldwide reported a brief outage on Monday that affected Gmail, Maps. and Images search, but Google says that was due to a software update issue, and was unrelated to the arc flash incident in Iowa.
“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online,” a spokesperson wrote.
People Also Ask Results Rise While FAQs Drop
August 9th also saw some People Also Ask results rising within the search results. Both RankRanger and Semrush were showing the same increases in these types of results.
However, there was a significant drop in FAQ results.
There were also changes to other types of rich results, including sitelinks, but it’s still likely too soon to tell regarding what’s going on with these.
Google Does Not Consider Dynamic Rendering a Long-Term Solution
It has long been said by Google that dynamic rendering is not a good thing and should not be used. They have always said it was a workaround but recently, they made some updates.
During the month of August, we got more word from the horse’s mouth. Google updated their guidelines for dynamic rendering, stating that it’s a workaround, and should never be considered a long-term solution.
Google originally announced the existence of dynamic rendering in 2018. Basically, this was a way to assist Google in crawling and indexing JavaScript content. The major change Google made as of late was to the help documentation on this topic.
They said: “Instead, we recommend that you use server-side rendering, static rendering, or hydration as a solution.”
In addition, they also mentioned:
On some websites, JavaScript generates additional content on a page when it’s executed in the browser. This is called client-side rendering. While Google Search executes JavaScript, there are JavaScript features with limitations in Google Search and some pages may encounter problems with content not showing up in the rendered HTML. Other search engines may choose to ignore JavaScript and won’t see JavaScript-generated content.
Dynamic rendering is a workaround for websites where JavaScript-generated content is not available to search engines. A dynamic rendering server detects bots that may have problems with JavaScript-generated content and serves a server-rendered version without JavaScript to these bots while showing the client-side rendered version of the content to users.
Google’s New Helpful Content Update Rolls Out
The end of August saw one of the more significant algorithm updates to hit Google in recent years. Dubbed the “helpful content” algorithm update, Google announced this update on August 18, 2022. And yes, Google actually named it the “helpful content” update.
Google explained the following in their announcement:
We continually update Search to make sure we’re helping you find high quality content. Next week, we’ll launch the “helpful content update” to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people. This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search, and our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content.
Even If You Didn’t Write It, Google Could Still Count It Against You
Over on Twitter, John Mueller explained that even if you didn’t write something (such as the case can be with user generated content (or UGC), it can still count against you.
The question the SEO professional on Twitter asked John was: @JohnMu websites which collects USG reviews have a lot of thin / low quality content. Obviously only few rank, which is fine. But will this hurt the overall website? How to prevent it? For example, use review structured data markup? Or use noindex tags for user generated content?
John Mueller responded with the following: “What’s a USG review in that situation? In general, user-generated content or not, what you publish & make available for search is what is used by search engines. There’s no “but the site owner didn’t write that personally, so don’t count it against them” aspect.”
Basically, if you have any user-generated content on a site, Google will count it against you. The reason why is because you allowed it to be published.
Here is the series of tweets answering this question:
What’s a USG review in that situation? In general, user-generated content or not, what you publish & make available for search is what is used by search engines. There’s no “but the site owner didn’t write that personally, so don’t count it against them” aspect.
— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) August 19, 2022
We’ve recommended that for a while now, yeah.
— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) August 19, 2022
SEO Pros Split on Helpful Content Update
Barry Schwartz discussed a poll that ran shortly after the helpful content update was announced.
Aleyda posted a poll to Twitter and this poll showed at least half of SEO professionals feel like their content is all helpful and they aren’t worried about getting hit by the Helpful Content algorithm update.
Half of SEO pros who responded to Aleyda’s poll explained that they aren’t worried because of this. The other 50 percent said that they are in “wait and see” mode because they are not exactly sure how the update is going to impact them.
Are you concerned from Google’s announced Helpful Content Update outcome in your sites?
— Aleyda Solis 🇺🇦 (@aleyda) August 18, 2022
Most feedback from the SEO community as the helpful content update is rolled out says that the update looks like it’s very weak and quite slow.
In typical Googler fashion, John Mueller said on Twitter that he would wait for several days in order to see how this update ultimately impacts websites:
I’d give it a bit more time.
— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) September 1, 2022
Indeed, it sounds like Google is working to profile certain (large???) groups of sites for potential hits before everything is fully turned on.
The final results of this update are going to be interesting.