December 2020 Google Webmaster Report

Dec 3, 2020 - 7:51 am 5 by
Filed Under Google Updates

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November was a pretty busy month where Google gave us a date for the launch of the page experience update and with that, Google will be testing a visual indicator or badge in the search results for this. Google released several unconfirmed Google algorithm updates this month but we have yet to see an official core update since May 4th - it has been over 7 months - and we might not see one throughout the rest of the year. And we learned that DeepRank is the code name for BERT.

Google tested some weird augmented link overlays on featured snippets that upset SEOs and publishers. Google also ended up ranking its own AI generated web stories, but that was a mistake and removed them all from search.

The folks at the Google Search Console team were busy with launching an outstanding new crawl stats reporting section, they migrated the disavow tool, fixed the manual actions bug and more. On top of all that, Google did a huge migration from Google Webmaster Central to Google Search Central. But still, the request indexing tool is not working.

There was a lot on the local from too with a big spike in suspensions, and concerning increase in business hijackings. Google also launched a bunch of new features in local and Google Maps. Google did tons of UI tests as well.

To catch up on last month, see our November webmaster report. I should note, the current ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is chatting up the unconfirmed Dec 1 update.

Here is a break down of the more important stories you may want to catch up on:

Google Search Algorithm Updates:

Google Search: Google Search Console: Google SEO: Google Local & Maps: Google User Interface:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

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