SEO UPdate #4 (06-01-2022)

Welcome to yet another fourth SEO update and the first of 2022. Best wishes! Let’s start right away.

What all happened in December?

It’s safe to say that December was busy. Normally it should be a little quieter in December (they say) because most SEO specialists are on vacation. In this case, it was just the opposite (if I remember correctly, it was also busy last year with the December update (also a core update).

• The GSC went offline for a while for many people (I think this was particularly a problem in the United States, I was not affected myself). That was not the only thing, the GSC also falsely displayed erroneous redirects as notifications.

• The Log4j Web security problems occurred on Web sites and servers. Google wrote here about how you can use a 503 status code to update your website with a lower risk of losing your positions.
• The local search results have moved up and the folder is now shown to the right of the local search results (I sometimes see it this way and sometimes not).
• As discussed, GA4 now supports date from the GSC.

What has already happened in January?

There is already interesting news to share in January. Below we go through it in a nutshell.

• Google seems to be sharing more and more web stories. These are previews of short stories displayed directly in the SERP. See the full post here. Need help creating your own web stories? Watch this video where Google explains how to do this (different ways are gone through here).
• Confirmation from Google: affiliate links from external websites do require a rel=”affiliate”. For internal links (for example, for an internal link to a review of a product on your website), this is not required.
• John Mueller indicates here that the height of your stock has no impact on your organic ranking in Google.
• Ahrefs’ website audit now uses Crux data, where you can periodically test your website on this. Interesting, especially after the core web vitals update where mainly CLS / LCP / TTFB have become more important as stand-alone metrics.

This was it again. Hopefully you are back up to date and can pop for your clients or your own websites. Until the next one!