Ranking data during the December 2022 Google helpful content update and link spam update - Search Engine Land

Google is now rolling out two different Google search algorithm updates simultaneously, the December 2022 helpful content system and the December 2022 link spam update. The helpful content update started on December 5th, and the link spam update started on December 14th. Both updates are not finished rolling out, in fact, Google said that the helpful content update “is going to take longer” to complete than the two-week timeline previously given.

I asked several data providers to send me data on what they are seeing with the Google search results during these updates, keep in mind, it is somewhat hard to look at data in aggregate and say this ranking volatility is related to one update over another. But nevertheless, I wanted to share what the data providers are noticing.

Data providers

RankRanger. Let’s start with RankRanger who sent us data broken out by the start of each update. Generally, but not always, the first few days after an update is rolled out by Google is where you’d see the most volatility. So they went with that premise and sent us data on each update.

Here is an overview of the RankRanger risk index showing volatility by day:

The December 2022 helpful content update was less impactful and less volatile than the first helpful content update, according to RankRanger. You can see from the chart below the average position change was less in December than in August.

Diving deeper, you can see that the average top three, top five and top ten search results, the...

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