There were no official updates to Google search algorithms in January 2024 and the Google Search Central website was eerily quiet with no blog posts at all in January 2024. The last post on December 31st was “This is over” – it meant the year 2023, but it makes it look like it meant the end of the blog too. Is Google Search Central dead? We don’t think so, perhaps the Search Relations team is just too busy working on the new SEO Starter Guide? More news on this below.
Unofficial updates Google Algorithm
Despite there being no news of official updates from Google, there were notable periods of volatility in Google’s results at the beginning of January and then again at the end of the month. Writing for Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz reported on these as updates on January 5th and 6th, January 9th and 10th and January 23rd and 24th.
Barry also spotted a strange pattern in volatility in which certain sites were dropping out of top results during the weekends and jumping back on Monday. On January 22nd he had confirmation from Google that in some cases this was due to a bug. Barry reports on research from Tomasz Rudzki that suggests that weekend ranking changes were effecting non-standard Top Level Domains such as .consultancy (example.consultancy), .care (example.care), .club, .info, .energy, etc.
Barry also wonders whether the bug can explain volatility experienced over weekends going back to November 2023. Users with SEOPress Insights should check on their historic, daily ranking history in WordPress to see if they can see changes over the weekends. This report from Barry may provide a useful explanation if you have experienced this sort of problem.
Changes to local search results in Europe
In a post on The Keyword blog, Google announced that it has made changes to search results in Europe in anticipation of the new rules set out in the Digital Markets Act, which comes into effect in March 2024. The US may see similar changes in the future depending on the result of the current antitrust suit filed against Google by the Department of Justice.
Changes include modifications to Google’s search results (SERPs) specifically for searches where Google displays results from Google Maps, Google Hotels or Google Flights. New page layout now shows a dedicated space for other Comparison Sites. An example of this is shown below in French search results where Google has translated “Comparison sites” by “Sites de lieux”.
This feature gives added prominence to well-known directories but also to Facebook pages and some obscure directory sites. It should further encourage site owners to list their sites in these directories. Featuring in well-known local or specialized directories can be a boost for your organic ranking. If you discover a new directory in the Comparison sites block when searching for you site, you should try and get listed in it.
Does Google have more spam in results than before
A few search engine specialists, with Lily Ray prominent among them, have been calling out what appears to be an increase in the visibility for spammy sites in Google search results over the past few weeks. Lily goes as far as to call it a “rampant spam problem”.
A recent study released by Leipzig University, Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines has been used by some to underline the problem, but in reality, the study was based on data collected from October 2022 to September 2023 and concludes that Google’s results got slightly better during that period.
However, the study and regular reports from Lily Ray do underline that there is a problem, and that Google has difficulty combatting spam consistently. In a post on January 8th, Lily called on Danny Sullivan to react to search results for “best weight loss gummies” that includes a “totally incoherent website blasted with spam” ranking in second place and a hijacked page from a .edu domain ranking 4th.
Danny responded to Lily through the @SearchLiaison X account with the promise that “changes are coming to better deal with such situations”. Suggesting that new Spam Updates are incoming.
Study shows SGE links differ from normal Google search results
SGE or Search Generative Experience is an opt-in experiment that allows users to add AI-generated replies in Google search results. It is thought that this feature will be integrated into all Google searches in the near future.
A study released by Authoritas on January 4th, revealed a surprising result from research carried out in December 2023 on 1000 commercial search results: 93,8 % of links featuring in AI-generated responses came from domains that did not feature in normal organic results.
We have tried testing this theory, but we have not confirmed these findings in our tests. In the two screen shots below for the search term “what is SEOPress” we can see in the first screen shot the AI generated response from SGE. This features links to the following sites:
- https://www.seopress.org/
- https://www.crazyegg.com/
- https://www.wpcrafter.com/
- https://www.cloudways.com/
- https://wordpress.org/
In the second screenshot, we see the top of the organic results with https://www.seopress.org/ ranked #1 and WordPress.org second. All the other sites listed in the first 10 results are identical to those listed in the SGE AI-generated response. This is not what we would expect according to results from Authoritas.
If the study from Authoritas does prove to be correct though it represents a quite major difference to what we expect from AI-generated responses in Google. It was widely believed that responses in SGE were generated from information found in the normal search engine results. The study seems to suggest that SGE is using another algorithm to rank pages before generating a summary of them. SGE could therefore represent not just a new way of presenting results but a brand-new search engine!
Updates to the SEO Starter Guide
According to a podcast released on January 25th, Gary Illyes, and Lizzi Sassman from the Google Search Relations team are busy editing the SEO Starter Guide documentation currently available on Google Search Central. The guide is extremely popular, being the most visited resources on the site – and also ranking very well for the keyword “SEO”.
The main objective is to simplify the content in this guide for first-time site owners and reflect the fact that website owners will not be editing HTML code but working with CMS like WordPress. Current editing means that 8000 words have been cut down to 3000 which is quite drastic, but we will have to wait for the publication of the new guide to see how much was really cut out or added.
