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December 2022 SEO Update

January 18, 2023 / Kristine Pratt / ,
SEOUpdate-December2022

As alluded to at the end of the November 2022 update, a big update hit in December, with several other newsworthy items impacting the search landscape ending the year with a bang. Google continues to place more and more emphasis on good content, with a second Helpful Content rolling out just a couple months after the first. And that ties into E-A-T (now with an extra E!), and how to help your website rank now integrated into the Quality Rater Guidelines. Here’s a breakdown of everything you need to know to help set your 2023 strategy up for success.

December 2022 Helpful Content Update

Google released its second Helpful Content Update of the year on December 5th, 2022 and finished rolling out on January 12th, 2023. If you couldn’t tell from the length of the rollout, it’s very impactful to  the overall search landscape. 

The purpose of the Google Helpful Content Update is to help individuals see original and beneficial content in their search results. Google’s sole purpose is to help users find what they’re looking for online. With that in mind, this update hopes to help satisfy their experiences with the helpful content they need. 

Doing things such as removing unnecessary, duplicate, or unhelpful content can help your content rankings improve with this update. Overall, it’s important to create helpful, reliable people-first content on your website.

Continuous Scroll on SERPs for Desktop

Also on December 5th, Google announced its use of continuous scroll on SERPs for desktops.We had inklings and hints this was coming for a while. Google first brought continuous scroll to mobile search back in October 2021, and it was only a matter of time before it came to all iterations of it’s search results. Now pages are no longer necessary for search engines with the use of continuous scroll. Or in SEO, the term “reach the first page of Google” is now irrelevant.

Google Search Topics Tool

In what proved to be a very busy week, Google created an easier way to help explore more on search with search topics released on December 6th. 

When you search on Google, you might see additional categories that can help define your search more.

Adding these categories to search results can hopefully help users find a more detailed answer to their search queries. For example, if you’re searching for “dinner ideas,” you might see topics like “healthy” or “easy.” Tapping on a topic adds it to your query, helping you quickly refine your search results with less typing.

Year in Search 2022 Google Trends

At the end of every year, Google creates a trend report that showcases the most popular types of trends individuals searched for in the past year. Whether the searches are based in a country or globally, you’re able to review certain trends about different categories.

This year, Google announced a new addition to their trend report which focuses on more local trends. With a new Local Year in Search addition, you can type in your zip code or click a populated city to see the popular search trends that happened in your local area!

Visual Elements Gallery

On Tuesday, December 13th, 2022, Google introduced the Visual Elements Gallery to help users identify the most common and impactful visual elements of a SERP page. 

There are 22 visual elements that Google considers for visual elements. Attribution, text results, video and image results, and exploration features are a few of the most important elements.

This new set up makes it easier for people to add new visual elements to the gallery as well as talk and learn about the elements that appear in SERPs.  

Google Search Status Dashboard

On December 14th, 2022, Google introduced a tool to help individuals understand the most current status of systems that impact search (such as crawling, indexing, and serving). 

Rolling this tool out is a hope for Google to be more transparent when disruptions happen online. Introducing this Search Status Dashboard to communicate the status of search moving forward.

December 2022 Google Link Spam Update

This Google spam update was released on December 14th, 2022 and finished rolling out on January 12th, 2023. 

The purpose of this Google link spam update was to fight link spam with SpamBrain. SpamBrain is Google’s AI-based spam-prevention system which helps detect spam directly. With this spam update, it can now detect both sides of buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.

E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience

E-A-T has always stood for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. On December 15th, 2022, Google updated their quality rater guidelines to add an extra E for experience.

Now known as “E-E-A-T” or, “Double E-A-T”, these are now known as the new updated search rater guidelines. The new E standing for experience focuses on the well-rounded knowledge someone has when creating content. Google hopes these updates better capture the nuances of how people look for information and the diversity of quality information that exists in the world.

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Kristine Pratt

Kristine is the Director of Marketing at Boostability. She brings a decade's worth of communications strategy work to the company. Kristine has a Masters Degree in Leadership and Communications from Gonzaga University and graduated from BYU with her undergrad in Broadcast Journalism. She's worked in television news, public relations, communications strategy, and marketing for over 10 years. In addition to being a part of the marketing team, Kristine enjoys traveling, sports, and all things nerdy.