November was a busy month for Google Search news, including two new updates rolling out right across Thanksgiving and leaks from an ongoing anti-trust trial in the US. The more skeptical among you may think that Google is releasing multiple updates to distract us from that anti-trust trial and the secrets being revealed about how Google ranking works. Danny Sullivan (Google’s Search Liaison) was also very busy and he found himself under attack, as was the whole SEO community, by an article published in The Verve.
November 2nd – November 2023 Core Update
Core Updates are usually released every three months. It was surprising then for the October 2023 Core Update (October 5th to October 19th) to be followed so closely by a new Core Update released on November 2nd. In a Google Search Central blog post, A Q&A on Google Search updates, Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan explains why: “We have different systems that are considered core to our ranking process; this month’s core update involves an improvement to a different core system than last month.”
Barry Schwartz reported on November 8th that the impact of the update seemed to be important based on rank tracking reports and chatter in forums.
Local SEO expert Joy Hawkins reported on November 7th that the update was having a “wild” impact on local results too.
Volatility calmed down from November 8th and although the update was rolling out until the end of November, through Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the impact seemed to be limited to that first week.
The update stopped rolling out on November 28th. If you spotted changes to ranking in SEOPress Insights in November, it is possible that only the changes between November 2nd and November 8th are related to the Core Update because there was another update released …
November 8th – (the last) Reviews Update
Unusually, Danny Sullivan’s article A Q&A on Google Search updates gave forewarning of a new Review Update to be released a week later. The November 2023 Review Update was released on November 8th and announced via a post on X by the @googlesearchc account (although it appears that Danny Sullivan wrote the post because it refers to the Q&A article as “my email”).
The Reviews system, previously known as Product Reviews system, was first launched in December 2021 and was designed to reward high quality reviews (and combat low-quality reviews made to promote affiliation links with little new content). It was expanded beyond products over various updates to include reviews on video games, restaurants, holiday destinations, services and other subjects as well as multi-product comparison reviews.
Danny says in his article that the November 2023 Reviews Update is the last time Google will communicate on an update to this system as improvements will be happening at a regular and ongoing pace from now on.
This update was released simultaneously with the November Core Update and at the time of writing, it has still not finished rolling out. Blogs with product reviews including reviews of Black Friday deals may have been concerned about the timing of this update. However, it appears that the main impact of the update happened in the 4 days after its release. The rollout may have been paused over the Thanksgiving holiday period.
Bug in the October Core Update
Google reported on November 1st through the Google Search Status Dashboard that it had fixed a bug in the October 2023 Core Update that was affecting Google Discover traffic for some sites. This bug lasted 26 days from October 5th to November 1st.
But in a post on November 17th, Lily Ray she said that she was receiving lots of messages from sites who lost all their traffic from Google Discover, News or Top Stories from early October and had still not gotten that traffic back.
Danny Sullivan (him, again) intervened in the discussion on November 17th asking for more examples and then again on November 20th to say that they had enough examples and that Google was now working on general improvements to the algorithm. With a Core Update rolling out during this period, it is thought that traffic can only come back for these sites after the next Core Update. Which may be in December, although 3 Core Updates in 3 months will be extraordinary.
The Verge vs Google and SEO
On November 1st US magazine, The Verge published an article. The people who ruined the internet that described a typical SEO as “a hustler: a content goblin willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash. A nihilist in it for the thrills, a prankster gleeful about getting away with something.”
It caused a lot of negative reaction from the SEO community including the article SEOs & Google Didn’t Ruin The Internet & The Internet Is Not Ruined by SEO Roundtable as well as a personal blog post from Danny Sullivan who felt compelled to respond to some quite personal attacks. We love you, Danny!
The article also led to search marketing professionals dressing up as alligators or bringing inflatable alligators to SEO conferences in November. Read the article to find out why 😊
Google SGE released in 120 countries
A post on X by the @Google_Comms account on November 8th shared Generative AI in Search expands to more than 120 new countries and territories. The Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a large-scale beta test of Google search results with AI-generated responses (something Google has said it intends to release for all users). After initial tests in the US, Japan and India, SGE is now available for 120 countries, but not in Europe. To sign up to the experiment (and add SGE to your Google searches) go to the Google Labs website.
Notes on Google Search
Google also released a new experience for Google Search called Notes. This allows Google Search Users to add notes to search results. A note will be associated with a snippet and can be read by other Google Search users. Text from notes will be indexable by Google and may help pages rank for terms included in notes. This is just an experiment but it seems like a radical change to SERPs.
Instructions for joining the experiment and full documentation are here.
Danny Sullivan tells SEOs to “Buckle Up”
While speaking at BrightonSEO San Diego on November 16th, Danny Sullivan warned that more major updates were coming to Google Search soon and that some website owners should “Buckle up!” In a post on X he shared his slides from the conference starting with the message, “Google will never get everything right, but we’ll keep on working to show the most helpful content we can.”
Information gleaned from the Google anti-trust trial
The US DOJ vs. Google anti-trust trial entered its 3rd month in November and the audiences of Google Search vice-president Pandu Nayak, have revealed some previously secret information about how Google works.
Some highlights are Google does use AI to replicate what Quality Raters do (IS4), it does use user interaction as a ranking signal and it has 3 deep-learning AI dedicated to understanding content. Pandu says that Google’s index contains 400 billion documents and that there are over 100 ranking signals.
A good full account of the latest revelations is Natzir Turrado’s Google’s Algorithms Uncovered: How the Search Engine Works According to Leaked Documents. SEO Rountable also focused on Google Search’s 3 Pillars of Ranking Via DOJ Documents. While Cyrus Shepard focused on Google’s Index Size Revealed: 400 Billion Docs (& Changing).
Full transcripts can be found on The Capitol Forum page US v Google Antitrust Trial Transcripts.
It is also worth mentioning that the verdict of the trial may have big repercussions to search results and the integration of Google Search on mobile devices and browsers.
SEO Made Easy videos
Danny Sullivan wasn’t the only member of the Google Search team to have been very busy in November, Martin Splitt added 3 new videos to the SEO Made Easy series he started in September. Recorded in English, some videos have audio in multiple languages (we can assume generated by AI, we certainly don’t recognize Martin’s voice in the French version).
- Three ways to improve your content
- 5 Reasons for using Google Search Console
- 3 tips for setting up a sitemap
