For the last recap of this month, we have for you the December Google webmaster report where I summarize the most important Google SEO/webmaster related topics for the month.

There seemed to have been a Google update but Google wouldn’t confirm it, while we wait on Penguin. Google finally released their full search quality raters guidelines this past month. Google said clicks matter for local search, then retracted it. They also removed the location filter in the search results and added a bunch of features to the Search Console.

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has slow but typical chatter – nothing new to report today there.

There is a lot more, so see our summary below:

Google Algorithms:
Google: Despite Chatter, There Is No Update To Announce
Google: The Next Penguin Update Will Be A Huge Change, Real-Time
Google’s Gary Illyes: Penguin Won’t Be Released Unfinished
Matt Cutts: Google Released Their “Secret Sauce” With TensorFlow, Machine Learning System
Google: Only A Very Small Group Has Access To The Google Search Algorithms

Google Rankings Topics:
Google Publishes The Full Version Of The Search Quality Rating Guidelines
Google Admits Clicks Impact Your Google My Business Listing Rankings
Google Changes Statement On Clicks Impact Google My Business Rankings
Google To Target Deceptive Mobile Affiliate Traffic Networks

Google Local Changes:
Google Location Filter Option Changed In The Search Results
Google’s Near Parameter Still Lets You See Results By Specific Location
Official Details From Google On New Google+ Local Pages

Google SEO Topics:
New Google Search Console Notifications For SSL/TLS Mismatch Errors
Google Site Command May Return Featured Snippets
Google’s John Mueller: Expert Product Descriptions Not Critical For Rankings?
Google: Structured Data Not Currently Used For Featured Snippets
Google John Mueller: Top SEO Advice “Be Consistent”
Google: Don’t Follow Big Sites SEO, They Often Get It Wrong
Google Search Console Fetch & Render Shows Severity Of Blocked Resources
Google: Disavow File Has A 2MB File Size Limit
Overstock’s Stock Drops After Earnings Drop Due To Google Ranking Change
Google On When 301 Redirects Are Not Enough: The Moz Example
Google: Crawl Frequency & Ranking Higher Are Not Directly Related
Google: HTTP2 Support For GoogleBot Coming Soon, Maybe By End Of Year
Google No No: Linking Their Search Results To Twitter Search Results

Google App Ranking Topics:
Google Now Rank Apps Without Web Content & Can Stream Apps Without Installing Them
Google Does Use User Metrics For App Rankings But Not Web Rankings
Woes For Google Search Console Crawl Errors For Apps Continues

Google Search Related:
Accelerated Mobile Pages For Google Search Coming Soon
Google Search Smarter At Superlatives, Times & Complicated Queries
Google Launches Red Live Label & Live Blogs Schema Markup
Google’s Universal Assistant & Ambient Computing To Change Search As We Know It

For last month’s recap, click here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.