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October 2021: This Month in Search

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October’s top SEO stories included Google’s rollout of continuous scrolling on mobile search in the US and changes to Google’s advertising and monetization policies to reduce climate change denial content. There was also an update to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, with changes including an expansion of the YMYL (“Your Money, Your Life”) content categorization, definition of “lowest quality content” and more.

In other Google news, the “summer of updates” appears to be continuing into the fall, with unconfirmed algorithm updates being reported frequently throughout the month. In addition to these potential rankings updates, Google has been busy rolling out a number of new features and testing others, including persistent search, search refinement bubbles in the autocomplete dropdown, a Local 5-pack (instead of the typical 3-pack), and query-based Google Suggest footers. John Mueller shared some insights and clarifications around a variety of topics including the new MUM algorithm, using CSS to hide links, how Google responds to a site move, and more. 

And for some seasonal fun, check out this roundup of Google Halloween search trends for 2021 🎃 

October’s Top Stories

Google to prohibit advertising and monetization of climate change denier content: in early October, Google announced a policy change around content  “which contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. Effective Dec 6, 2021, climate change deniers will be banned from advertising or monetizing content on the Google network, including Youtube, Google-served ads and publisher content. Google will use a combination of human reviewers and automated systems to enforce the new policy.

Google adds continuous scroll to mobile SERPs: in mid-October, Google announced that they were bringing continuous scrolling to mobile search (leading to a lot of SEO jokes about how everyone now ranks on page 1, as well as some questions, including how this change impacts metrics like GSC impressions data, what the change means for advertisers, and speculation that it will potentially improve the content discovery process for searchers).

Google updates Quality Rater Guidelines: on October 19th, Google published an overview of its updated Quality Rater Guidelines, making a number of updates and revisions. The top five changes include definitions of YMYL content and “upsetting-offensive”, significant changes to the “lowest page quality” section, and how to research reputation information for content creators and websites, as well as general consistency and clarity edits. 

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Read on for our roundup of what else is new in search this month:

Industry News and Updates

General News 

GSC and BWT Updates