SEO update from 22/12/21

Google December 2021 Product Reviews Update

Remember the update I described in the Dec. 22 article? That one has finally been rolled out. Google has confirmed the end of the update, which (if all goes well) should also reduce chats on relevant forums.

The purpose of this update was to more thoroughly test the authority of product reviews (think “best food processor of 2021” articles).

Good to note here is that many SEO specialists are happy with this, especially that they can go into Christmas with peace of mind. The update took 20 days with this end date.

A side note of my own

On a side note, it is not a problem to respond to updates immediately, but it is recommended to think carefully about your updates first. I often see that it is common for a website (often affiliate) to respond directly to an update in a certain way (often not the best response).

Don’t have critical technical errors in your website? No problems with your server? Not a heavy case of duplicate content?

Go celebrate Christmas and come back next week. If you have been heavily hit by a core update, it often takes months to recover anyway (of course, it’s easy to talk if you haven’t been hit yourself).

Bug in Google Ads

Google has confirmed a bug in Google Ads with DDA (Data Drive Attribution). It seems that the root of the problem involves data delay. The data can come in as much as 24 hours later, which means that some of the data content is no longer correct in your GA.

Crawl budget <100k URLs

This is an important one! Up to and including 100k URLs, the impact on crawl budget (or rather, the importance of crawl budget) will not be great. John Mueller indicates the following in this regard:

“100k URLs is usually not enough to affect crawl budget (it’s <1/minute over 3 months), and if it’s noindex/404, we won’t crawl them that often. With robots.txt it’s rare we’d show them in search, site:-queries don’t matter.”

  • John Mueller (Google – December 2021)

Now I have to nuance this with my experience in these types of issues. In practice, John does come very easily with such issues. With a website with 100k URLs, certain changes take quite a long time to be picked up by Google. Clients of mine experience problems as low as 5k URLs. Consider deeper pages (3-4 clicks from home page).

I would say, test it out. Change a page title of a deeper page and see how quickly Google picks it up. Is this a number of days? Or several weeks?

Additional news: DuckDuckGo gets a desktop variant

With an average of 100 million searches every day, DuckDuckgo is a growing player to be reckoned with. The privacy-based search engine now also gets a desktop browser. DuckDuckgo’s app is the most downloaded app in Android; with the launch of its own browser, this number is likely to rise.

To illustrate. Google’s browser is Chrome. DuckDuckGo’s browser is DuckDuckGo.

Senior SEO-specialist

Ralf van Veen

Senior SEO-specialist
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This article was originally published on 22 November 2023. The last update of this article was on 22 November 2023. The content of this page was written and approved by Ralf van Veen. Learn more about the creation of my articles in my editorial guidelines.