News and Insights
A roundup of Google updates from September 2021
October 11, 2021
The SEO community is ever-changing and evolving. Despite its dynamic nature, it offers several opportunities to those who want to achieve success in Search Engine Optimisation.
September has seen quite a few changes in the SEO sector that lead to a drop for some websites and a rise for others. Google delivers new updates about every 2.5 hours, and Bing discharges somewhere around five updates every month. SEO agencies monitoring multiple websites experienced large movements across SERPs during the summer, but September was a moderate month in terms of updates.
Here are a few updates in the SEO industry that the search engines rolled out in September. Also, check the latest SEO news and Google roundup update of August if missed.
Google link spam update
The link spam update deployed by Google is aiming to remove all the spammy backlinks that affect the user’s experience, website rankings and website authority. With the new backlink update, the search engine is trying to ensure that the guest posts and sponsored blogging posts are following the backlinking strategies correctly.
Our SEO agency in London deems that the main aim of the update is to make it easy for the algorithm to spot the spam links. The update will help nullify the link spam and might have a huge impact on several industries. If website owners do not use the best practices, they might also see a drop in their website performance.
TFR-BERT Update
TFR and BERT are two Google search updates that now work together. BERT is one of the biggest Google updates. It stands for Bio-directional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is a natural language learning AI tool that improves the ability of Google to understand our queries and provide the best search results possible. TF-Ranking is another artificial intelligence natural language learning tool but reads the data first and foremost.
Google search ranking algorithm update
As written by the Search Engine Roundtable, the month of September witnessed yet another Google Search Ranking update in the last week of the month. Although the update is still not confirmed, it seems to be a major update according to the tracking tools and many comments that were gathered from the community.
This update began on Friday morning i.e. 24th September. The next day it cooled down. A lot of SEO community chatter was seen about this update. An example is below:
My website, which has long had poor rankings at around 18-20, is now dropping like a stone. I looked a few minutes ago and it was position 46 (I’m searching from the UK). Everyone else will probably see it even lower I’d imagine.
Comment taken from WebMaster World
You can find many more such comments at WebMaster World.
MUM technology update
Google has announced its new MUM technology update and new search result features. These announcements provide new and different ways to search and give SEOs opportunities to make their websites visible and improve search rankings. MUM is the Multitask Unified Model. It is similar to BERT as it is built on a transformer architecture but is 1,000 times more powerful when it comes to multitasking. Google has provided a new way of searching that uses the MUM technology along with the Google Lens. It allows the user to click a photo and put in a query.
For example, if a user has a problem with one of the parts of his bike, they can take a picture of that part and ask for ways to fix it. Google will be able to match the solution to fix that part. It will save the user’s time as they will not have to search for the particular part’s name and then search for a solution tutorial.
As per the Search Engine Land, there will be a potential update coming soon in early 2022. A user can take a photo of the pattern on a shirt and ask Google to find the same print or design on socks. The user can also do it by typing and then search it on Google. But there are chances that he may not get the exact pattern he is looking for or will have to filter a lot to find what they want.