The Featured Snippet is the official SEO newsletter of Performics, dedicated to keeping you up to date with the latest SEO industry news, trends, and events. See below for the latest version of The Featured Snippet:
In the December 2022 issue of The Featured Snippet:
On December 5, Google began to roll out the December 2022 Helpful Content update. Google Search’s helpful content system generates a signal to better ensure people see original, helpful content written by people rather than spam content designed specifically for search engines.
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On December 14, Google started to roll out the December 2022 link spam update. This iteration of the link spam update focused on finding purchased links and detecting domains whose primary function is to link to other sites.
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On December 15, Google updated its Quality Rater Guidelines, adding several new sections and 11 new pages of content. Notably, Google introduced the concept of “Experience” alongside “Expertise”, “Authoritativeness”, and “Trustworthiness”, changing the acronym from “E-A-T” to “E-E-A-T”.
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On December 5, 2022, Google released continuous scroll for desktop search results, which was first released on mobile in October 2021. Continuous scroll allows users to see more search results without having to click to the next page. Continuous scroll is currently available for English US results, but may be available to a wider audience in the future.
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On December 14, 2022, Google launched a new status dashboard to let users know when there are disruptions to crawling, indexing, and serving in search results. According to Google, “This dashboard reports widespread issues occurring in the last 7 days, with some details and the current status of the incident.”
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On December 5, 2022, Google began to roll out new search refinement topics under the Google Search bar. According to Google, “systems automatically display relevant topics for you based on what we understand about how people search and from analyzing content across the web.”
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Microsoft announced that in early January 2023, the new BingBot will go fully live and run all of Bing’s crawl activity. This update can impact websites that are not properly set up for the new user agent, which was initially announced in 2019.
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Google is providing the ability to search for topics within a specific video. The feature will jump searchers to moments in the video where topics are being discussed. This new feature is being mainly tested in India, while some searchers in the U.S. may have access to it as well.
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Web Light is no longer being used by Google and has been retired as of December 2023. Web Light was intended to provide searchers experiencing a slower internet connection with content at a faster rate. However, with the increased access to fast-speed internet connections with smartphones, it is no longer needed.
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Google Question Hub has been decommissioned as of January 5, 2023. The announcement first came in mid-December to alert users that the beta test has ended and users have until March 6, 2023 to retrieve their data. While Question Hub provided users with rich content opportunities, Google is testing out a new Content idea feature through Search Console. Content ideas provides a list of topics that the domain in Search Console could pursue.
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Search Central Live, an event series hosted by the Google Search Central team, provides an opportunity for people to meet and learn from the Google Search team and other SEO industry experts. The most recent event happened in Singapore on November 24, 2022. These events are a great opportunity to learn first-hand how to use Google’s products and how to handle common challenges that users face. A few interesting topics were discussed included Search Console features, crawling for big sites, getting pages indexed more quickly, and JavaScript SEO.
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On December 22, Screaming Frog released version 18.0, also known as “Willow”. The most important aspect of this update is GA4 integration. You’re now able to connect your Screaming Frog account to Google Analytics 4 and pull in data in a new crawl. You can connect the two platforms by going to Configuration > API Access > GA4. Other updates in version 18.0 include: parse PDFs, validation tab, in-app updates, authentication for scheduling, and new filters.
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