Here is our monthly summary of what SEOs and webmasters are talking about in terms of SEO and ranking changes at Google. Each month we cover a WebmasterWorld thread where webmasters and SEOs talk about every little change they see occur in their rankings and at Google.

The key points being discussed this month is the impact on holiday sales for the big shopping season which started a week or so ago. The key points from the thread are:

Google Referrals “Plummeting” This Holiday Season
Unrelated Search Results Displaying Instead
Exact Match on Product Names Not Showing Products
Larger Online Retailers Dominating
Some Small Retailers Claiming Great Success
Big Thing: Poor Customer Service Algorithm Now In Effect For Retailers (see first link below)

Here are recap links from individual stories we covered related to Google in the past month, these are specific to SEO related topics:

Algorithm
Google Now Degrading Rankings Of Some Merchants With Poor Service
How Google & Bing Use Twitter & Facebook In Their Ranking Algorithms
Google News Updates Algorithm & Drops Many Publishers?
Should Google Remove Q&A Sites From Search Results?

SEO
Google’s Site Operator Now Less Buggy & More Accurate?
Google Now Doing a Better Job of Indexing Flash (SWF) Files
Google Published Detailed Specifications on Robots.txt

Images
Google Image Search Update: November 2010
Google’s Report Offensive Images Back To Stay?
Google Social Search Coming To Google Images

Other
Google Hotpot: Friend Powered Local Recommendations
Google Won’t Admit Wrong: Shows More Results From Single Domain But Compact Style
Google Testing “Searches Related To” Above AdWords Map
Official: Google Phonebook Not Working (phonebook: operator)
Google Product Search Update & Google Shopper Android App
Google News Asking Publishers To Tell The Truth With New Syndication Tags

For last month’s recap, see the November 2010 Google Webmaster Report.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.