Google has announced some updates to its search rankings that have been rolled out in December 2022.
Having a site that ranks well in search engines such as Google is important, so it’s worth knowing how Google Serach ranks websites. These new December updates are, of course, only part of the picture, Google uses a whole range of signals when ranking sites. However, it is important to understand what will make your website rank better. In the last decade, Google Search has evolved to focus on content that is helpful to the user – it calls this “people first”. It seems obvious, but if users find your content useful, Google will want to serve it to them, over content that has been stuffed with keywords and offers no real substance of use to the end user.
The new updates include the Helpful Content Update, which was rolled out on 5th December, and Google’s Link Spam update, rolled out later on 22nd December 2022.
Google’s Helpful Content Update
This is about rewarding sites with “people first” content and penalising sites who have written their content for SEO purposes rather than actually being useful to site visitors. This is one of many signals Google Uses when ranking websites. The other major change is that it will work across websites in ALL languages, not just English language sites.
The advice from google seems relatively straightforward and is to remove unhelpful content from your website so you aren’t penalised for it.
Google’s Link Spam Update
This is essentially an update to Google’s SpamBrain, their AI-based spam-prevention system. Google states that “Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying…”
Your website shouldn’t;t have spammy links in it, its as simples as that – and if it does any credits from spammy links will be lost in this new rollout.
Google’s Updates
You can track google updates in the Google Search Central.
