Although this is the Thanksgiving holiday week, it was not slow at all in terms of search news and changes. First, we had an unconfirmed Google search ranking update earlier this week, which is unnerving. Google was caught testing augmenting featured snippets with links to third-party sites that the site itself did not add. Google also ranked, by accident, its own Google-generated web stories and […]
This week, we had another unconfirmed Google algorithm update on November 17th and 19th. Google said there may not be another core update before the end of the year. Google said some updates can be jarring but they prefer to spread the updates out smoothly. Google’s manual actions are disappearing from Search Console, it seems like a bug. We learned more about Google Passage Indexing, […]
This week in search I covered more chatter around tremors in the Google search results, a possible Google update. Google said the Page Experience Update will launch in May 2021, and will come with a visual indicator or label in the search results. Don’t try to cheat your core web vital metrics with iFrames, it won’t work. Google Webmaster Central has changed its name to […]
I start off this week’s video recap with the monthly Google Webmaster Report, where you can quickly catch up on the past month in Google webmaster topics. There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update around November 4th. Google said the internal code name for implementing BERT in Google Search was named DeepRank. This was said in a movie, a really well done […]
This week was less about Google and more about Microsoft Bing and even Apple. The Financial Times wrote an article that says what we have been covering for a while, Apple is working on a search engine – but maybe now it is almost ready to go live? Microsoft Bing has been having their own indexing issues. Google Search Console’s coverage report is delayed again. […]
It has been an interesting week at Google, from being sued by the Department of Justice for anticompetitive practices to passage indexing questions and clarity. I first talked about how Google’s new Passage Indexing is really Passage Ranking and that I got Google to publicly post something for all those who doubted my coverage. Google passage indexing is also different from featured snippets and I […]
It was a super busy week in the SEM world this week, a ton of things to talk about this week. Yesterday, Google announced a slew up updates, I broke down what is important for SEOs to know about including BERT updates, passage indexing, subtopic understanding and much more. We reported twice this week about ranking fluctuations and tons of complaints from SEOs around indexing, […]
This week, I posted the monthly Google Webmaster Report, catch up quick there. Google shared more details on the canonicalization issue and mobile-indexing issues, including progress reports. Google did say they will annotate the Search Console reports for those issues. Web Stories are now on Google Discover, towards the top, and Google published policies, best practices and more examples in its search docs. Gary Illyes […]
Well, well, well, this week we had not one, not two, but three different indexing issues that Google confirmed. The first was Monday night with issues indexing news content. The second was around canonicalization issues that I believe started on September 23rd. The third was around mobile-indexing issues. I go into these topics in detail in the video, to catch you all up. Google announced […]
This week in search we saw a lot of ranking fluctuations in Google Search starting around Wednesday. Bing talked about some big AI improvements it made that helped with autosuggest, people also ask, intelligent answers and more. Google has made a small but interesting change to its local ranking documentation. Google added new schema to pass along shipping details for products. Google said context around […]