Goodbye Suckers Whiteboard Message From Outgoing Googler

Google’s John Mueller said again that Google Search does not use “engagement” as a factor for ranking or other purposes in Google Search. Google Search does not know if your web page has a high or low level of user engagement metrics and even if it did, it does not use it for ranking purposes, John said.

Google’s John Mueller said he would not recommend that you remove old content or old news from your news site for SEO reasons. He said “I don’t think you would get a lot of value out of removing just old news.”

There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update on January 11, 2022. This would be the first real unconfirmed update for the 2022 year. I am seeing both chatter spike up starting on January 10th and continue through today. Plus, many of the tracking tools are showing big movements in the Google search results.