December 2022 SEO Update

The end of 2022 was dominated by a considerable amount of good news for those who use SEO to promote their products and services online.

SERPs Continuous Scroll

The use of continuous scroll for SERPs on mobile devices had been around for over a year before it finally appeared on desktops in early December. This means that pages are no longer necessary for search engines to use the continuous scroll function. For the purposes of SEO being on the first page is no longer necessary.

E-A-T Update

Standing for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, this system gained another E for experience so it reads E-E-A-T. A “double E-A-T” if you will, this is the new rater search guidelines. The new “E” focuses on the knowledge someone uses when creating content. The goal is to better capture for searches how people look for information online.

Tool for Google Search Topics

Google has now made it easier to find more using search topics. This means that when you make your search, additional categories will appear that will help define and narrow the search even more. The result is that you can find more helpful answers to queries. For those using SEO, it makes it easier for users to find your content.

Helpful Content Update

Although the rollout took over a month to complete, it had a major impact on the Google Search environment. The Helpful Content Update augmented the ability of people to see beneficial and particularly original content when searching online. 

The update removed content that was not helpful, duplicated other content, or was just plain useless. For those who place an emphasis on content in their SEO strategies, this was an important update.

Google Link Spam Update

The update for December 2022 took a month to be fully developed, but it is designed to take on link spam using SpamBrain. An AI-based system to prevent spamming, this helps to detect spam in the early stages. The update now allows for the detection of both sides of buying sites and links for passing links that are outgoing.

Gallery of Visual Elements

The most common and powerful visual elements can now be seen using this feature that was released on December 13th. Google weighs 22 visual elements which includes image and video results, attribution, and text results as the most important. This makes it simpler for people to add new elements to the gallery along with learning about elements that appear in SERPs.

Search Status Dashboard

This helps people understand the most current status of systems that are used in searching, such as indexing, serving, and crawling. This makes it more transparent of what is happening when disruptions occur. In other words, the search status dashboard better communicates current events on statuses of searches.

Google Trends for 2022

Google publishes a trend report at the end of each year which highlights the most popular trends in topics people search for online. This allows marketers to review trends in different categories.

Google has added a new feature to the report that showcases more local trends. This means that you can type in your zip code or city to see what the popular searches were for your location over the past year.