With the Google December 2022 link spam update and helpful content update both still rolling out, SEOs are worried that Google may have one more Google algorithm update up its sleeve before the year’s end. Well, it will not happen, said John Mueller from the Google Search team.
No more core updates this year. John Mueller said on Twitter, “FWIW, just to be clear, there’s no core update lined up for the rest of the year.”
Rankings might not be stable. But like I said before, the link spam update and helpful content update both still rolling out, so ranking volatility may still occur until those are done rolling out. And of course, rankings are never static, new content is being added daily, and Google is crawling and indexing those new web pages and the signals that come from those pages.
John added on Twitter, “that doesn’t mean there won’t be visible changes; the linkspam & HCS updates are still rolling out, and, Search continues to reflect changes across the web.”
So SEOs still may have their work out for them throughout the next couple of weeks leading up to the holidays.
The tweet. Here is John’s tweet:
FWIW, just to be clear, there’s no core update lined up for the rest of the year. That doesn’t mean there won’t be visible changes; the linkspam & HCS updates are still rolling out ( https://t.co/wgdE0g7SDr ), and, Search continues to reflect changes across the web.
— John Mueller is mostly not here 🐀 (@JohnMu) December 16, 2022
Why we care. With many SEOs and marketers already starting to take off for the holidays, some may be doing so with a little anxiety as these updates finish to roll out. That being said, core updates tend to be the most volatile updates and so far, the helpful content updates and even this link spam update, seem relatively minor in terms of the footprint it had across the web.
Sure, if your site was hit by an update, you will feel the ranking declines and traffic, but it seems like most sites were not yet impacted by these updates. And with no core updates scheduled for the next couple weeks, hopefully some of you can enjoy the holidays and new year.
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About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.