February 2025 Google Webmaster Report

Feb 3, 2025 - 7:51 am 77 by

Google Webmaster Report

While this month was not as busy as last month, it was still a pretty stressful month for a lot of site owners and SEOs. I was expecting more core updates this past month, but we had none, whereas the previous report, we covered three confirmed Google updates.

So what did we have with Google Search in the past month? Well, we had a bunch of ranking volatility hit, starting with a weird Google local ranking bug, then we had some core ranking volatility in mid-January, then Google deployed something that caused some tracking tools some issues - it was a big deal for some. We had more volatility around the 20th, then the 24th and then the 29th.

Google updated its search quality raters guidelines with 11 new pages around spam. We also learned that Google can show sites with manual actions in the AI Overviews for now. Google said core updates don't impact site names. Google clarified its site reputation abuse policies throughout and then began additional enforcement in Europe and in Germany. Google also updated its manual actions for news and discover a while back, but we didn't notice until later.

Google may be testing Gemini 2.0 powered AI Overviews in the wild. Google AI Overviews work with Circle to Search. Google also launched Ask for me as a search labs experiment and a new daily listen feature which is an audio version of Google Discover.

Google Search Console added hourly data exports and sped up the timeframe for the performance reports in 30 minute intervals.

Google dropped breadcrumbs from mobile search snippets. We confirmed the page annotations opt out does indeed work.

Google may have fixed the Google Maps pin attack exploit. Google also added chat with WhatsApp in Google Business Profiles.

Plus a heck of a lot more - see the list below:

Google Updates & Volatility:

Google SEO: Google AI: Google Search Console: Google User Interface: Google Local & Business Profiles: Google Misc:

For last month, check out the January 2025 Google Webmaster report.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

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