Informed Webmaster

...There is some significant chatter in the SEO industry around a possible new years update that started late December 31, 2019 and throughout January 1, 2020. The chatter is high but similar to the Christmas update chatter, the tracking tools are not showing huge signs of an update...

I am seeing some early signals of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update starting today, January 7, 2020. There is some chatter within the SEO community and some of the tools are picking up on ranking fluctuations.

Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the January 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this blog post for more about that:

What webmasters should know about Google’s core updates

...The January 2020 Core Update is now live and will be rolling out to our various data centers over the coming days.

This January 2020 core update does seem a lot bigger than the September core update, at least based on early signals and chatter within the SEO industry.

For those who have asked, the update is mostly done, though as with any core update, it may take to two weeks to fully complete.

If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat it in the first page of results. This declutters the results & helps users locate relevant information more easily. Featured snippets count as one of the ten web page listings we show....

This change launched yesterday for 100% of our search results globally. There’s no change to the overall set of web results we are showing. There are still ten unique listings, as before. Deduplicating simply means we’re no longer showing any of those unique listings twice....

Deduplication does not happen for video featured snippets. It does for a featured snippet-variant that may resemble a Knowledge Panel on desktop, to the right side of results. This will likely stop later this week and resume when those move inline with main results....

Deduplication does not happen with other features, such as Top Stories or Interesting Finds. Deduplication also only happens for the exact URL in the featured snippet and only within the first page of results....

Some have noted that a deduplicated URL may appear on the second page of results. This is not a guaranteed position, nor by design, nor might it stay that way. Deduplication does not purposefully move the deduplicated URL to the second page....

This is going to be a hard one to judge because I see chatter within the SEO community and also many of the tracking tools are lighting up. These are all signs that there was a Google search ranking algorithm update. But truth is, this can be directly related to the featured snippet deduplication change on January 22nd.

What I am saying is that the tools might not be ready to process the change and thus are showing changes to what is listed in the Google search results for the queries they track. Also, SEOs might be noticing those changes in those third-party tools and potentially also noticing changes in traffic because of the deduplication efforts.

Let me start off by saying that while there is a nice amount of chatter in the SEO community signaling some sort of Google update in the past few days, it is hard for me to be very confident because of all the changes Google made in the past week or so. But we do have chatter and some, not all, of the tools are showing changes as well. So there may have been a Google search ranking update in the past few days.