SEO Market Updates: January 2021

Join Fusion’s SEO team as we round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google Search Console’s Multiple Updates and Errors

Google Search Console Mistakenly Send Messages To Users

Google Search Console users received messages informing that they are currently impressions due to domains not being verified as a domain property. These errors arose when the domains that Google were asking users to verify weren’t owned by the user.

https://twitter.com/badams/status/1354481943518334981

 

Google have confirmed that this is a bug within their system.

New Google Search Console Report for News Publishers

Google have released a dedicated report for news publishers within Google Search Console. The new performance report will show data from news.google.com and from the Google News app (available on Android and iOS). However, this report will not display traffic data from the new tab within Google Search, which is available within the standard performance report when applying the filter Search Type = News.

Google have also confirmed that all data is aggregated by page. This means that if a single site provides multiple Google News results in a single user session, each result is credited to the page URL it points to (rather than to the property containing the page).

Index Coverage Improvements in Google Search Console

Google have rolled out improvements to the index coverage report within Google Search Console, with a focus on providing a more accurate state to existing issues in order to help users resolve them easier.

The updates Google have implemented include the following:

  • Removal of the generic “crawl anomaly” issue type – all crawls errors should now be mapped to an issue with a finer resolution.
  • Pages that were submitted but blocked by robots.txt and got indexed are now reported as “indexed but blocked” (warning) instead of “submitted but blocked” (error)
  • Addition of a new issue: “indexed without content” (warning)
  • Soft 404 reporting is now more accurate

These updates are currently available for all users.

Google Will Start Crawling Sites Over HTTP/2

Users are currently receiving notices via Google Search Console that their site can support HTTP/2 crawling and that this has been implemented.

HTTP/2 crawling allows Google to crawl a site faster and more efficiently but doesn’t have an effect on organic rankings.

Core Web Vitals Comes To Chrome 88

With the release of Chrome 88, users will now have access to Core Web Vitals via the performance panel of the inspector too.

After recording the loading of a page, Core Web Vitals metrics, such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), will display.

A Large benefit to viewing Core Web Vital performance information via the performance panel is the ability to hover over specific metrics, such as CLS, which will highlight the elements on the page which causing the issue. This will give webmasters a clear view on which elements are causing page experience issues and if these are unique page elements or template elements that can be resolved on multiple pages.

 

If you found this update useful, check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with the team today.

SEO Market Updates: December 2020

Join Fusion’s SEO team as we round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google’s December Core Algorithm Update

Google confirmed that they released a broad core algorithm update on 3rd December.

This is the first broad core algorithm update Google have released since May 2020.

Consistent with past broad core algorithm updates, these are much more significant and look at providing an overall improvement to the algorithm. As these updates focus on the general improvement of the algorithm, there are no specific focus points in regards to optimisation.

For more information on how to assess site content which has been negatively affected by this update, we would recommend reading our post on the January broad core update, in which we provide a list of questions site owners should use to optimise their site.

Google Display Page Experience Icons in Search

Within Google’s initial announcement that their page experience algorithm will be released in May 2021, Google confirmed that they will also be releasing a visual indicator within the search results page. Users have spotted instances of Google testing this feature recently.

The four-point star icon (as shown above) will be displayed beside results when the page passes the core web vitals threshold.

As this is currently a test from Google, it’s worth noting this feature is subject to change or removal.

New Google Maps Features

We have also seen several updates come to Google Maps this month.

Search Results in Google Maps

Search results now display within Google maps. This is currently being displayed within business listings.

Ensuring search results for a business adds a new level of visibility. As the search results add another method of access to a site, this could potentially lead to users accessing another site if a business’ search results contain listings for competitors or other alternative sites.

Google My Business Messages Come to Google Maps

Google have expanded the ways in which business owners can access Google My Business messages from customers and ways in which customers can message businesses. Previously only accessible via Google My Business and text, customers and business owners will now have the ability to send and access messages via the Google Maps business listings.

Customers can also start a conversation under any post within a business listing and customers will also be prompted to send a message if the business misses a call made via a listing.

Google have also implemented more detailed lists of search queries used to access a business listing within the Google My Business performance insights.

WordPress Plugin Contact Form 7 Leaves 5+ Million Sites Vulnerable

One of the most popular plug-ins on WordPress, with over 5 million active instillations, Contact Form 7 allows businesses to add multiple contact forms to their site. The plug-in recently announced that they have discovered a high-severity unrestricted file upload vulnerability in version 5.3.1 of the plug-in, and older versions. Possible consequences of this security breach include:

  • Possible to upload a web shell and inject malicious scripts
  • Complete takeover of the website & server if there is no containerization between websites on the same server
  • Defacing the website

Contact form 7 have now released a patch to resolve this issue. It is highly recommended that any sites using this plug-in, update to version 5.3.2.

If you found this update useful, check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with the team today.

SEO Market Updates: November 2020

Join Fusion’s SEO team as we round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google announce when core web vitals will become a ranking signal

From Google’s internal studies and industry research, they determined that users show they prefer sites with a great page experience. As a result of this research, Google announced they were looking to integrate page experience as a page of the ranking algorithm.

Page Experience can be split into the following categories:

  • Page loading speed
  • Interactivity
  • Visual stability
  • Mobile friendliness
  • Safe browsing
  • HTTPS
  • No intrusive interstitials

Due to Covid-19, this algorithm update was initially put on hold in order to allow businesses to focus on effectively responding to the new challenges presented by the virus.

Google announced on Tuesday that they will start rolling out Page Experience as a ranking signal in May 2021.

To find out more information on this algorithm update and how we can provide insight into the performance of your entire site, please read our dedicated blog post.

Google Search Console Updates

Disavow Tool

Google announced on 17th November that they’ve finally migrated the disavow tool to the new Search Console interface.

https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1328696581776924674

Although Google have informed that they can assess which links can be trusted and which can’t, without the usage of this tool, it is still recommended for sites to utilise the disavow tool for the following scenarios:

  1. You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site.
  2. The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.

Crawl Stats Report

Google announced that improvements for the crawl stats report within Google Search Console have now been implemented. The new version of the report will now include the following features:

  1. Total number of requests grouped by response code, crawled file type, crawl purpose, and Googlebot type.
  2. Detailed information on host status
  3. URL examples to show where in your site requests occurred
  4. Comprehensive summary for properties with multiple hosts and support for domain properties

On top of these new implementations, Google’s crawl stats report contains:

Over-time charts

A time series chart which provides a view on crawl statistics over time.

Grouped crawl data

Groups crawl request data by response, file type of the fetched URL, purpose of the crawl request, and Googlebot agent.

High level & detailed information on host status issues

Provides details on the site host status over the last 90 days.

For domains with multiple hosts, Google Search Console will also provide a summary for all site hosts, containing information on each hosts crawl requests, trend and status data.

Remove Outdated Content tool

Google have updated the Remove Outdated Content tool which is now consistent with the theme of the new Google Search Console layout. The Remove Outdated Content tool is used to have Google update search results for pages or images that no longer exist, or pages that have removed important (sensitive or critical) content. The tool is also available to any user and is for use on sites that the user does not own.

Google experience issues with manual actions

Manual actions are issues which Google will display to users and are generated by human reviewers that have determined that a pages on a site are not compliant with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Many users experienced issues within Google Search Console, in which these manual actions were being removed from their site properties, despite not yet resolving them.

WebP support is being rolled out in Safari

What is WebP?

WebP is a modern image format, which provides both lossy and lossless image compression. The compression offered by WebP image is much more effective than compression provided by PNG and JPEG image formats, with an average 24% reduction in file size. This is an image format which is usually recommended by Google within their Page Speed Insights as an alternative to traditional image formats, in order to reduce page loading times.

What browsers support WebP?

When compared to other next-gen image formats, such as JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR, WebP images are supported by a larger amount of browsers. Browsers which support WebP images are the following:

  • Microsoft Edge
  • Firefox
  • Firefox for Android
  • Chrome
  • Opera
    • Opera Browser
    • Opera Mini
    • Opera Mobile
  • iOS Safari
  • Android Browser
  • Chrome for Android
  • UC Browser for Android
  • Samsung Internet
  • QQ Browser
  • Baidu Browser

Soon to be added to this list is Apple’s Safari browser. After receiving no support from Safari until version 13.1 (released March 2020), the browser looks to be providing for WebP for Safari users with MacOS 11 Big Sur and later.

With Google’s page experience algorithm being released May 2021, converting images to WebP format can provide a quick win in regards to reducing image sizes and page speed.

If you found this update useful, check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with the team today.

SEO Market Updates: October 2020

Join Fusion’s SEO team as we round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google Release New Google Analytics

Google Analytics has received a large update with the introduction of Google Analytics 4. This update looks to combat major shifts in consumer behaviour and privacy-driven changes to long time industry standards, by providing new and intelligent insights with machine learning at its core.

These updates will take changes like restrictions on cookies and identifiers, which create gaps in data in to consideration. Key new features include the following:

Smarter insights to improve your marketing decisions and get better ROI

Google’s new machine learning models can now alert users to significant trends in their data, such as products seeing a raising demand because of new customer needs.

Utilising churn probability (churn = customers lost during time period / customers at beginning of period), Google’s machine learning models will also be able to help predict the future actions of customers and allow users to efficiently invest in retaining customers and create audiences to reach higher value customers.

This will also have deeper integration with Google Ads, creating more focused insights for paid channels.

Google’s new approach also looks to create clearer insights between the web and apps, such as being able to see conversions from YouTube engaged views that occur in-app and on the web in reports.

A more complete understanding of how customers interact with your business

Google Analytics looks to provide user centric reporting, rather than segmented reporting (e.g. performance by device or channel). Rather than segmenting performance for insights, users will now be able to have a more complete view of how customers interact with their business.

For example, you can see if customers first discover your business from an ad on the web, then later install your app and make purchases there.

With simplified and re-organised reporting, Google look to provide clear insights on customers across their entire lifecycle, from acquisition, to conversion, to retention. With this complete view, users will be able to see which channels are driving new customers and understand the actions these customers take.

How to use these new features

Google Analytics 4 insights will be available to new properties by default. For existing properties, Google recommend creating a new Google Analytics 4 property to run alongside existing properties in order to start collecting data, as historical data from existing properties cannot be exported from existing properties.

Microsoft Releases Free Analytics Software

Microsoft have released their new analytics software, Microsoft Clarity. This user behaviour centric tool looks to provide insight on exactly how users interact with your site, utilising features such as:

  • Session Playbacks
  • Heatmaps
  • User Experience Insights

This tool is free and GDPR compliant. Microsoft have also announced that the tool will be completely scalable and will work for the largest websites, while remaining free and has also been optimised to not slow down sites.

Session Playback

Session playbacks will allow users to view individual session recordings, allowing a view on how individual users interact with the site. This feature will allow users to see how customers interact with and navigate their site, this can help pinpoint any areas of frustration from a customer’s perspective, resulting in lost engagement.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps will provide a bulk view on where users have clicked, scrolled and moved around a site. This will allow users to view which parts of a page drive the most engagement, allowing them to streamline navigation and content.

This bulk view of the session playback feature will be useful to understand overall user behaviour.

User Experience Insights

The user experience focused insights Microsoft Clarity will provide, include:

  • Clicks that go nowhere
  • Rage clicks
  • Excessive scrolling

Just like the heatmap tool, these metrics will provide valuable insights on highlighting areas of frustration that customers have displayed when navigating the site, allowing users to tackle customer experience issues on their site that would otherwise be hidden.

Microsoft Clarity will also integrate with Google Analytics. This integration will put a link to Clarity’s session playbacks within your Google Analytics dashboard.

Google Remove “Request Indexing” From Google Search Console

After the indexing issues Google started to experience last month. Google have now disabled the “request indexing” feature of the URL inspection tool, within Google Search Console.

As stated in the above tweet, this feature is expected to return after a couple of week and standard Google indexing is not affected by the removal of this tool.

In regards to the indexing issues Google have been experiencing, they have provided an update that this issue is effectively resolved and any URLs that still experiencing issues should shortly be restored.

If you found this update useful, check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with the team today.

SEO Market Updates: September 2020

Join Fusion’s SEO team as we round up last month’s major industry updates.

Googlebot to start crawling over HTTP/2

Google are bringing an update to Googlebot, set to be released in November. This update will allow Googlebot to crawl pages using HTTP/2.

For more information on this update, please see our recent dedicated blog post.

Google Release free shopping listings

Google have announced the release of free shopping listings for UK users. Free shopping listings were originally released to US users in April 2020, with plans to release this worldwide by mid-October.

In order to display products in these free Google shopping listings, users will need to opt in when signing up to Google Merchant Centre. For existing users, enable this option by navigation to Growth > Manage Programs > Surfaces Across Google.

Google experience canonicalization & indexing issues

Google confirmed they had been experiencing issues in September, in regards to canonicalization and mobile indexing.

As mentioned in Google’s tweet, both issues caused some pages to not be indexed. Regardless of the indexing issues, Google have confirmed that no action is required from site owners to resolve these issue. This is set to be fixed by Google.

Google will be providing updates on the progress of these issues being resolved in the above twitter thread.

Google’s new news showcase

Google have announced the release of a news showcase. This will be available soon on Google News and iOS, and will also be added to Google Search and Discover in the future.

This showcase will display news segments from Google approved publishers. Around 200 leading publications across Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the UK and Australia are currently signed partners. This showcase is currently available to users in Germany and Brazil, and will be rolled out worldwide at a later date.

If you found this update useful, check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with the team today.

Googlebot to start crawling with HTTP/2

Google has announced an update to Googlebot, set to be released in November. This new update will now allow Googlebot to crawl selected sites over HTTP/2.

https://twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1306563662740705282

HTTP/2 is the successor of both the HTTP/1 and SPDY protocols. Due to the limitations of HTTP/1.1, SPDY was created by Google engineers in 2009 with the aims of reducing web page latency speeds and improving web security. HTTP/2 was based on Google’s SPDY protocol but was able to provide a large improvement on performance. After its release in 2015, HTTP/2 was embraced by all browsers, with Microsoft dropping any support for SPDY quickly after HTTP/2’s release and Google Chrome dropping SPDY support in 2016.

The benefits of this update are centred around making crawling more efficient, in terms of server resource usage. Google are now looking to start with crawling a smaller number of sites over HTTP/2 and expanding this out over time.

There is no discernible reason as to why a site would need to opt out of this update, however Google have noted that should a site wish to opt out, this can be done by instructing the server to respond with a 421 HTTP status code when Googlebot attempts to crawl your site over HTTP/2. Failing this, sites can also contact the Googlebot team (however, this solution is only temporary).

 

SEO Market Updates: April 2020

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google Revert Chrome 80 Cookie Updates

In light of COVID-19, Google have temporarily rolled back the use of SameSite cookie labeling. SameSite cookie labeling was introduced as part of the Chrome 80 release, which took place at the start of February, for more information on this, please see our SEO market updates for January 2020 blog post.

Google will provide further updates on the implementation on SameSite cookie labeling via a dedicated Chromium updates page.

Google Warns Users When Search Results Are Poor

Google have released an update for Google Search and will now display a warning for users when they believe that the results are not to their standards.

Although Google consistently look to improve search results, with the improved language understanding of its BERT algorithm, or the daily updates on improving search rankings, Google have recognized that there are still occasions they don’t have the available information for some searches.

Previously, Google would either display low quality search results, with no warning, or display no search results.

For searches that would previously display low quality search results, Google will now display a warning to users that it has not been able to find any great matches for the user’s search query.

The warning will also direct users to Google’s search tips page, which provides information on how to fully utilize the search functionality of Google.

Google Now Track Fewer Pages Within Google Search Console

Google have announced that they are currently tracking fewer pages within Google Search Console in order to improve the performance of the reporting. This will have an effect on the following reports:

  • AMP
  • Mobile Usability
  • Page Speed
  • Rich Results

Due to the changes made, Google have informed that users should expect to see a decrease in the number of items and pages tracked in these reports. 

AMP’s New Protocol

AMP have released a new secure protocol in order to resolve the issues of users having to wait for server-side paywall process, mainly for users logging in or paying to view content.

The new protocol will move this process away from server-side to client-side. Moving premium content to this protocol will significantly reduce loading time associated with waiting to be verified, whilst providing the same amount of encryption.

Check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.

An SEO Guide to SSL Certificates

What is an SSL certificate?

In short, an SSL certificate is a digital authentication certificate which provides a site with HTTPS encryption. This certificate is then used to verify the legitimacy of a website and will allow that website to display to its users that it is trustworthy, as well as providing those same users with HTTPS-level encryption, further protecting non-sensitive information, names, passwords and banking details.

The benefits of HTTPS level encryption include:

  • Providing security for users from man-in-the-middle attacks and protecting the user’s data, in line with GDPR
  • Increase in organic rankings, based on additional trust signals
  • Displaying a padlock next to the site’s URL as a visual clue to users informing them that encryption is active on the site

How does an SSL certificate benefit SEO?

With search engines pushing towards a more secure web, websites with HTTPS level encryption (as opposed to HTTP) can see positive effects when it comes to rankings.

Many browsers are also displaying warnings to users when they visit a site without HTTPS encryption, such as Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome displaying these warnings:

Sites will also receive warnings if any resources used on the site are not HTTPS encrypted, this is called mixed content warning. A few months ago we released a post detailing how Google Chrome has cracked down on mixed content, along with how this should be treated. Resources that have been targeted by Google Chrome include:

  • JavaScript and CSS
  • iFrames
  • Audio, video, and image files

Ensuring all these resources are served using HTTPS encryption will safeguard the site from being negatively impacted by “insecure site” warnings.

If an SSL certificate fails or is invalid, browsers such as Google Chrome will display a warning that the user’s connection is not private. This warning is much more severe than the “mixed content” warning and will need to be resolved as soon as possible.

How to get an SSL certificate?

For most sites, SSL certificates are provided as part of a web hosting subscription, such as SiteGround, BlueHost and Host Gator. Although these SSL certificates will usually be low-level, domain validated SSL certificates, suitable for sites that don’t receive a high amount of traffic and require minimal encryption.

All types of SSL certificates can be purchases from dedicated service providers, such as Comodo SSL Store or Digicert or domain registrars, such as NameCheap and GoDaddy.

There are many types of SSL certificates that will be suitable in different scenarios and can be split into 3 main types:

Domain Validated Certificates (DV)

Perfect for SMEs and offers minimal encryption, these are also the cheapest certificates that don’t require verification of the site owner’s information. Domain validated certificates provide just enough encryption for browsers to display the HTTPS padlock within the address bar.

Organisation Validated Certificates (OV)

A tier up from domain validated certificates, organisation validated certificates provide an extra level of trustworthiness and involves a manual investigation to take place on the information of the organisation applying for the SSL certificate. This certificate is ideal for sites that use customer login information (excluding payment specific information).

Extended Certificates (EV)

These offer the highest level of encryption and also require the highest level of validation. Extended certificates are recommended for sites that require sensitive customer information, such as payment card information for ecommerce sites.

Each of these certificates will provide sites with a padlock within the address bar, however will provide users with a varied amount of security for users.

How much is an SSL certificate?

Prices for SSL certificates can vary depending on level of encryption, level of verification and added benefits provided as part of the service. Splitting prices into the 3 types mentioned in the “How to get an SSL certificate?” segment, these can fit into the following price margins (pricing is approximate):

SSL Certificate TypePrice PointApproximate Cost
Domain Validated (DV)££5-£150/yr
Organisation Validated (OV)£££15-£1,000/yr
Extended Certificate (EV)££££50-£2,300/yr

What is the recommended validity length of an SSL certificate?

With a bill being passed on 1st March 2018 reducing the maximum validity length of DV and OV SSL certificates from 39 months to 825 days (around 27 months), EV SSL certificates are already limited to a maximum lifetime of 27 months, and 13 months for validity information. So, what is the recommended length of a SSL certificate’s validity across browsers? And is it better to have a longer or shorter validity time?

To answer the latter question, a shorter validity time on an SSL certificate can be seen to provide a higher amount of security as authenticity checks will need to be performed more often.

In regards to the recommended validity length of an SSL certificate, Apple have placed themselves at the front of this conversation by announcing that as of 1st September 2020, they will be setting a hard trust limit of 398 days, as opposed to the current acceptable duration of 825 days. This means that any certificates issued after this date for longer than 398 days will not be trusted by Apple products. Google have also been seen to show some interest in shortening their trust limit to around one year, although nothing has been passed as of yet.

With trust limits currently sat at 825 days across all browsers until 1st September 2020, any certificates purchased before this date can be valid for up the full 825 days and be trusted across all browsers. For certificates purchased after 1st September 2020, we would recommend ensuring that validity lengths are kept under 398 days, in order to keep within Apple’s (and all other browsers) trust limit.

If you found this useful then please check out our other blog posts, and if you’re interested in finding out more about how we can help with your organic rankings, get in touch with us today.

SEO Market Updates: February 2020

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google’s Search Algorithm Updates

Outside of broad core algorithm updates, which Google announce on a semi-regular basis, Google also provide several small and focused algorithm updates every day. These smaller updates can have a varied impact on a site’s rankings, but all work towards a central goal of improving the accuracy and functionality of Google’s Search.

From tracking the impact of the daily search algorithm updates that Google release, using tools such as SEMRush Sensor and MozCast, we can that organic rankings saw a large amount of movement from the 9th – 12th February.

SEMRush Sensor:

MozCast:

Rather than having an effect of specific categories of site, such as news and retail, these updates had a large impact on rankings across all sites.

If your site has been been negatively affected by these updates, we would recommend reading our summary of Google’s BERT algorithm update, and looking to optimise the site with this in mind.

Google Improves Data Exports in Search Console

Google have updated the way in which we can export data from Google Search Console. Previously, specific data was exported by navigating to the specific data view; such as queries, pages and devices in the performance report, then exporting view’s information individually.

With Google’s latest update, users will now only have the option the export all views within a report. This means if a user wants to export information from the performance report, this will contain information from all views displayed in separate tabs (View Sample Dataset). This can be exported into Google Sheets, an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs, or as CSV files within a ZIP folder.

Despite this update, Google Search Console will continue to limit users to 1,000 rows of data. In order to export a larger amount of data, this will need to be done with 3rd party resources; such as the Search Analytics for Sheets plug in for Google Sheets, or with Google Data Studio (limited to 5,000 rows).

Google Search Console Adds the Review Snippets Report

Google has introduced the review snippets report within Google Search Console, this report will be available under the enhancement segment within Search Console dashboard.

Review schema allows allows webmasters to highlight reviews on a site, this schema can then be viewed by search engines, such as Google, in order to populate rich results; including knowledge panels and search results.

This review snippet report will be available under the enhancement segment within Search Console dashboard, and will provide details on any issues surrounding the review schema that has been implemented on a site, along with the pages that have been affected by these issues.

Review snippets will also be available within the performance report, under the search appearance view. This will allow users to access the impact of having review snippets appear on an organic listing and how this affects performance.

Google Looks to Implement Mobile First Indexing Across All Sites

Google has been sending notifications, via Google Search Console, to users with sites that are currently preventing Google from implementing mobile-first indexing, due to errors present on the site.

With Google setting a deadline of the next 6-12 months that they expect mobile-indexing to be applied to all sites, if any users receive this warning from Google, we would recommend resolving any issues that have been flagged in order to correctly prepare the site for this change.

Check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.

SEO Market Updates: January 2020

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google’s January Algorithm Update

Google released a broad core algorithm on 13th January, which was rolled out over the following 2 weeks. We covered the initial release of this update in a dedicated blog post, which provides a rundown of the update and some useful optimisation information.

Looking at SEMRush’s sensor tool, we can see how the algorithm impacted UK rankings:

As with all broad core algorithm updates, these target the entire algorithm, rather than having a specific focus, such as site speed or content. Due to this, if a site it negatively impacted by this update, we would recommend checking aspects within Google’s core update help sheet, or checking out the checklist in our blog that covers the January 2020 core update.

Google Chrome 80

Google Chrome 80 is due to be released at the start of February. It will contain updates that impact cookies, push notifications and mixed content.

Cookies

Google are recommending that developers define the cookies that a site uses. With the option to choose between two settings (SameSite=Strict or SameSite=Lax), web developers will be able to define if a cookie is to be sent in first party or same-site content (Lax is a good choice for cookies affecting the display of the site, with Strict being useful for cookies related to actions your user is taking). Google also provided the following caution surrounding how these will impact the site’s security:

“Neither Strict nor Lax are a complete solution for your site’s security. Cookies are sent as part of the user’s request and you should treat them the same as any other user input. That means sanitizing and validating the input. Never use a cookie to store data you consider a server-side secret.”

Push Notifications

The infamously annoying pop-up notification requests that appear on sites are currently within Google’s scope to tackle.

Google have recognised common complaints surrounding push notifications from websites and are looking to block these, as well as enroll their “Quiet UI”.

They will be looking to block push notifications for the following scenarios:

  • For users who consistently block push notifications.
  • For websites that have low opt-in rates for their notifications.

Google’s new “Quiet UI” will alert users that these notifications have been blocked; giving the user an opportunity to unblock the notification.

Quiet UI will be available on both desktop and mobile devices.

Mixed Content

As mentioned in a previous blog post, Google are looking to crack down on mixed content on sites. From Google Chrome 79 to 81, Google will be looking to implement stricter rules on how they treat mixed content. With Google Chrome 80 due to be released, Google will implement the following rules:

  • Mixed audio and video resources will be auto-upgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 80 will be released to early release channels in January 2020. Users can unblock affected audio and video resources with the setting described above.
  • Mixed images will still be allowed to load, but they will cause Chrome to show a “Not Secure” chip in the omnibox. We anticipate that this is a clearer security UI for users and that it will motivate websites to migrate their images to HTTPS. Developers can use the upgrade-insecure-requests or block-all-mixed-content Content Security Policy directives to avoid this warning.

With stricter rules being implemented, we would recommend ensuring all resources have been migrated to https. For more information on Google Chrome’s plan to deal with mixed content, please see our dedicated blog post.

Google Updates Their Search Page Design

After rolling out the new search page design on mobile devices in May 2019, Google have now implemented these changed to desktop search pages.

This new design looks to add site icons to organic searches, while removing the green, highlight AD marker from ads and replacing it with a more discreet, and bolded, AD marker.

After rolling this out, Google has announced that they will be experimenting further with the desktop design.

Google Search Console’s New Removals Tool

Google have launched the new version of the removals report within Google Search Console. This report will contain the following features:

  • Temporary removals will allow users to remove specific content from Google Search results.
    • ‘Temporarily remove URL’ will hide the URL from Google Search results for about six months and clear the cached copy of the page.
    • ‘Clear cache URL’ clears the cached page and wipes out the page description snippet in Search results until the page is crawled again.
  • Outdated content segment will provide information on removal requests made through the public Remove Outdated Content
  • SafeSearch Filtering section will display any pages on a site that have been reported to Google by users as adult content using the SafeSearch Suggestions

WordPress Look to Add Lazy-Loading as Default

Documentation surrounding WordPress’s 5.4 update suggests that WordPress are looking to implement lazy-loading as part of WordPress core. If added, this will be implemented by adding the loading attribute to img tags within the html on the page, rather than adding this with JavaScript code.

Currently, the loading attribute is compatible with the following browsers:

  • Google Chrome
  • Chrome for Android
  • Android Browser
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Opera

Google Adds Popular Products to Search

Available only to US users at present, Google have released a “popular products” segment within Google Search pages.

This new segment is an extension of Google Shopping and will display products in relation to the users search, as well as a list of sites that sell time item, the price this is sold at and reviews for the product.

It is free for participating retailers to appear within these search features, as long as the products adhere to Google’s best practices.

Check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.

Google Release January 2020 Broad Core Update

Yesterday, Google announced that they have released a broad core algorithm update.

Unlike the small changes Google make to their algorithm on a daily basis, designed to incrementally improve how the Google algorithm interprets and ranks pages (e.g. Page speed, EAT and meta data) and are usually barely noticeable. Broad core algorithm updates, as the name suggests, are much more significant and look at providing an overall improvement to the algorithm.

Although Google does not provide any specific information on what to look out for if a site is affected by the update, they do recommend that any sites or pages that are hit by this should be assessed against the following criteria where relevant:

Content and quality questions

  • Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
  • Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
  • Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
  • If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
  • Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
  • Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature?
  • Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
  • Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

Expertise questions

  • Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?
  • If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely-recognized as an authority on its topic?
  • Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?
  • Is the content free from easily-verified factual errors?
  • Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life?

Presentation and production questions

  • Is the content free from spelling or stylistic issues?
  • Was the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
  • Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
  • Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
  • Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?

Comparative questions

  • Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
  • Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

We would also recommend ensuring that page speed is also factored into these checks, as this remains an important rankings factor for Google and all other search engines.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.

SEO Market Updates: December 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google Co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin Step Down

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, announced that they have stepped down as CEO and President of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The role of CEO was given to Sundar Pichai, Google’s current CEO. Sundar sent the following email to Google employees on 3rd December

Hi everyone,

When I was visiting Googlers in Tokyo a few weeks ago I talked about how Google has changed over the years. In fact, in my 15+ years with Google, the only constant I’ve seen is change. This process of continuous evolution — which the founders often refer to as “uncomfortably exciting” — is part of who we are. That statement will feel particularly true today as you read the news Larry and Sergey have just posted to our blog.

The key message Larry and Sergey shared is this:

While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!

With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it’s the natural time to simplify our management structure. We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet’s investment in our portfolio of Other Bets. We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we’re passionate about!

I first met Larry and Sergey back in 2004 and have been benefiting from their guidance and insights ever since. The good news is I’ll continue to work with them — although in different roles for them and me. They’ll still be around to advise as board members and co-founders.

I want to be clear that this transition won’t affect the Alphabet structure or the work we do day to day. I will continue to be very focused on Google and the deep work we’re doing to push the boundaries of computing and build a more helpful Google for everyone. At the same time, I’m excited about Alphabet and its long term focus on tackling big challenges through technology.

The founders have given all of us an incredible chance to have an impact on the world. Thanks to them, we have a timeless mission, enduring values, and a culture of collaboration and exploration that makes it exciting to come to work every day. It’s a strong foundation on which we will continue to build. Can’t wait to see where we go next and look forward to continuing the journey with all of you.

– Sundar

Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin will remain active as co-founders, shareholders and board members of Alphabet.

Google Roll Out BERT for 70+ Languages Worldwide

After its initial release in October 2019, which was covered in our blog, Google have announced that their new natural language processing (NLP) algorithm, BERT, is being rolled out for 70+ languages.

This is the full list of languages that will BERT will now understand:

  • Afrikaans
  • Albanian
  • Amharic
  • Arabic
  • Armenian
  • Azeri
  • Basque
  • Belarusian
  • Bulgarian
  • Catalan
  • Chinese (Simplified & Taiwan)
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Estonian
  • Farsi
  • Finnish
  • French
  • Galician
  • Georgian
  • German
  • Greek
  • Gujarati
  • Hebrew
  • Hindi
  • Hungarian
  • Icelandic
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Javanese
  • Kannada
  • Kazakh
  • Khmer
  • Korean
  • Kurdish
  • Kyrgyz
  • Lao
  • Latvian
  • Lithuanian
  • Macedonian Malay (Brunei Darussalam & Malaysia)
  • Malayalam
  • Maltese
  • Marathi
  • Mongolian
  • Nepali
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Punjabi
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Serbian
  • Sinhalese
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Swahili
  • Swedish
  • Tagalog
  • Tajik
  • Tamil
  • Telugu
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Ukrainian
  • Urdu
  • Uzbek
  • Vietnamese

Google Update Their Search Quality Guidelines

Google were discovered to have updated their search quality guidelines at the start of December. These guidelines are used by human quality raters to evaluate websites and search page results and are used to help improve Google’s search algorithm.

These updates are important and provide the ability to see how Google think in regards to how sites and content should be viewed. This allows us to better understand how to present content and ensure guidelines are adhered to, such as E-A-T.

Within the updates provided in December, Google have been changing the word “user” to “person” and have also informed that raters should “Keep in mind that users are people from all over the world: people of all ages, genders, races, religions, political affiliations, etc”. These updates may be a result of Republicans’ allegations of anti-conservative bias within the company’s search results in the U.S., in which Google have denied such biases.

Google Chrome 79 Has Been Released

Google released the Chrome 79 on 10th December. In our previous blog post, we informed that Google will be cracking down on mixed content, starting from version 79 of Google Chrome, to version 81. This means that this is the first version of Google Chrome that will take steps towards warning users about mixed content of sites.

Google’s steps towards cracking down on mixed content will be as follows:

  • In Chrome 79, releasing to a stable channel in December 2019, Google will introduce a new setting to unblock mixed content on specific sites. This setting will apply to mixed scripts, iframes, and other types of content that Chrome currently blocks by default. Users can toggle this setting by clicking the lock icon on any https:// page and clicking Site Settings. This will replace the shield icon that shows up at the right side of the omnibox for unblocking mixed content in previous versions of desktop Chrome.
  • In Chrome 80, mixed audio and video resources will be auto-upgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 80 will be released to early release channels in January 2020. Users can unblock affected audio and video resources with the setting described above.
  • Also in Chrome 80, mixed images will still be allowed to load, but they will cause Chrome to show a “Not Secure” chip in the omnibox. We anticipate that this is a clearer security UI for users and that it will motivate websites to migrate their images to HTTPS. Developers can use the upgrade-insecure-requests or block-all-mixed-content Content Security Policy directives to avoid this warning.
  • In Chrome 81, mixed images will be auto-upgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 81 will be released to early release channels in February 2020.

For more information on these updates, please visit our dedicated blog post.

Windows Implements Bing Visual Search In The Window Search Bar

Bing’s visual search works in a similar way to Google Lens, both will allow users to use search with an image, or a selected part of an image and also include text recognition within images, which can also be users to search.

Windows users will now have access to usilise Bing visual search from the start menu. This feature is currently only available for U.S. users and will be shortly rolled out to international markets. With windows still controlling around 78% of worldwide desktop operating systems, this new feature may have a positive impact on Bing’s market share for search engines, depending on the success of the implementation.

Google Warn That Some Data In Google Search Console Is Not Accurate

Google have warned that, due to internal issues, data in the performance report for Discover will be inaccurate between 8th December and 13th December. This issue has since been fixed.

Check out our latest Social Media market updates for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.

SEO Market Updates: November 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google Chrome Will Warn Users of Slow Sites

Google have announced their plans to display warnings to users on how quickly a site may load when using Google Chrome.

Rather than immediately setting a page speed score that pages will need to hit in order to avoid receiving this warning, google plan on setting a very lenient criteria and increasing this over time.

For more information on this update, including details on how to avoid receiving this warning, please see our dedicated blog post…

Google Search Console’s New Page Speed Report

As Google continues to stress the importance of page speed in regards to site performance and rankings, they have released the new speed report within Google Search Console.

Utilising data from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report, this report will split pages into 3 categories; fast, medium and slow. This will also allow webmasters to see what issues are slowing pages down. The below table shows how Google defines slow to fast pages:

Fast Moderate Slow
FCP <1s <3s >=3s
FID <100ms <300ms >=300ms
  • FCP (first contentful paint): The time from when the user requests the URL until the browser renders the first visible element in the URL. This is important because it tells the reader that the URL is actually loading.
  • FID (first input delay): The time from when a user first interacts with your page (when they clicked a link, tapped on a button, and so on) to the time when the browser responds to that interaction. This measurement is taken from whatever interactive element that the user first clicks. This is important on pages where the user needs to do something, because this is when the page has become interactive.

Although Google has classified this report as “experimental” and have informed that they will continue to improve this, the page speed report is currently available to all users, rather than being part of a closed beta.

Google Launch Site Kit for WordPress

In order to improve integration between Google products and WordPress, Google released Site Kit. Site Kit is a WordPress plugin which will provide the following benefits:

  • Easy-to-understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard
  • Official insights from multiple Google tools
  • Aggregated insights from Google products, distilled in a dashboard that your clients or other teams can easily access. No need to copy data from multiple products to compile reports for clients.
  • Site performance stats and improvement recommendations that come directly from Google – webmasters will be getting the latest best practices recommended by Google products.

Enabling this plugin will give users access to the following Google tools:

This plugin is free to install here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/

Product Filters Added to Google Search Console

Google have announced the addition of the new product filter within the search appearance report of Google Search Console. This new filter will report on the performance of product rich results, as shown below:

This new report will provide a dedicated view of the performance of the product within Google search, which can help with viewing trend data and comparing these results with other rich results.

Check out our latest Social Media market updates for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.

Google Chrome Will Display Warnings For Slow Sites

In a further push to make websites take loading speeds seriously, Google have announced a new range of plans to help pre-warn users on how quickly or slowly a site may load.

“We think the web can do better and want to help users understand when a site may load slowly, while rewarding sites delivering fast experiences.” – Addy Osmani, Ben Greenstein and Bryan McQuade from the Chrome team

The plans include the rollout of warning messages within load screens on slower websites,  alongside a new green progress bar for sites with faster load times, both seen in the examples below:

Rather than implement strict criteria for what is and isn’t a fast site immediately, Google plan to gradually increase this over time. Google’s long-term goal is to clearly badge sites that load quickly or slowly for users, with further plans to expand the badging of sites to cover a range of signals beyond just site speed.

Google recommend using the following resources to help identify areas where improvements to site speed can be made:

Google also suggest checking web.dev/fast in order to learn the best practices for site performance.

To add to the above list, we would also recommend also utilising the following resources:

These additional resources will be able to provide valuable insights on page speed performance, and can be used alongside Google’s own resources.

Check out our latest SEO and Social Media market updates for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.

SEO MARKET UPDATES: OCTOBER 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE’S NEW ALGORITHM: BERT

The biggest news of the month came with the announcement of a new search algorithm from Google, BERT. A natural language processor (NLP), BERT provides Google with a heightened ability to understand the context of search queries.

For example, the algorithm can assist Google to determine when prepositions such as “on” or “to” matter to the entire meaning of a phrase. This ultimately helps Google to display a result which best matches search intent, as in the example below comparing a pre and post-BERT result for the same query:

Google have stated that BERT is working alongside the existing RankBrain algorithm, and will affect around 10% of all search terms and structured snippets.

BERT is currently live for search terms using U.S English, and will be rolled out for other languages in the near future.

For more information on BERT, take a look at our dedicated blog post…

GOOGLE CRACKS DOWN ON MIXED CONTENT

With the next few iterations of Chrome planned to release over the next few months, Google have announced that these forthcoming updates will be taking incrementally harsher stances against mixed content.

Mixed content refers to instances where both HTTP and HTTPS resources, such as images or iFrames, are contained on a site.

Chrome is currently on version 78, and by release 81 Google expect to have implemented the below updates:

  • In Chrome 79, set to be released to a stable channel in December 2019, Google will introduce a new setting to unblock mixed content on specific sites. This setting will apply to mixed scripts, iFrames, and other types of content which Chrome currently blocks by default. Users will be able to toggle this setting by clicking the lock icon on any https:// page and selecting the Site Settings option. This is set to replace the shield icon displayed at the right side of the address bar in current versions of desktop Chrome, which is currently used to unblock mixed content.
  • In Chrome 80, set to be published to early release channels in January 2020, mixed audio and video resources will be auto-upgraded to https://. If these resources then fail to load over htttps:// they will be blocked by Chrome. Users will be able to unblock any mixed audio or video resources via the method released in Chrome 79.
  • Also in Chrome 80, mixed images will still be allowed to load, but will cause Chrome to show a “Not Secure” chip in the address bar. We anticipate that this is a clearer security UI for users and that it will motivate websites to migrate their images to HTTPS. Developers can use the upgrade-insecure-requests or block-all-mixed-content Content Security Policy directives to avoid this warning.
  • In Chrome 81, mixed images will be auto-upgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 81 will be released to early release channels in February 2020.

For more information on these updates within Chrome, please see our dedicated blog post…

GOOGLE DEPRECIATE CORPORATE CONTACT MARKUP

Corporate contact markup , often implemented with the contactPoint schema, allowed companies to add their contact information to Google’s knowledge panel.

In October, Google announced that this method of adding corporate contact information to knowledge panels is now depreciated. As an alternative, if a company is verified as an official rep of a Google knowledge panel, they will be able to suggest changes to corporate contacts via the knowledge panel support page.

AUTOMATIC LAZY-LOADING HAS COME TO CHROME LITE USERS

Automatic lazy-loading is a feature enabled for all Chrome 76 users, allowing images and iFrames with the `loading` attribute to be lazy-loaded with the following options:

  • auto: Default lazy-loading behaviour of the browser, which is the same as not including the attribute.
  • lazy: Defer loading of the resource until it reaches a calculated distance from the viewport.
  • eager: Load the resource immediately, regardless of where it’s located on the page.

Now, this feature has been made available for lite mode users in Chrome 77. Chrome 77 will allow any <iframe> or <img> with the loading attribute value of `auto` to be eligible for Lite Mode’s automatic lazy-loading. This includes <picture> elements and CSS background images.

In Google’s experiments, native lazy-loading of images and iframes yields a ~10% reduction in bytes downloaded per page at the 75th percentile and an 8% reduction in overall downloaded bytes for the median user. Automatic lazy-loading also led to a 1-2% improvement in First Contentful Paint at the median, a 2% improvement in First Input Delay at the 95th percentile and a 0.7% improvement in median memory reduction per page.

Native lazy-loading is currently supported by the following browsers:

  • Chrome 76+
  • Chrome for Android 78+
  • Android Browser 76+
  • Opera 64+

GOOGLE ADD NEW VIDEO REPORTS TO SEARCH CONSOLE

Two new video reports are now available to users of Google Search Console, providing information on video content displayed within search results, the video search tab, and Google Discover.

The first of these reports is the Video Enhancement Report, which allows webmasters to see any errors and warnings for any video schema implemented on a website.

The second of these reports is the Video Performance Report. This will allow users to view the performance of videos within the video tab and main search page, by segmenting by “type = web”. Users will also be able to view Google Discover video performance by using the “search appearance” tab.

For users utilising the VideoObject schema these reports will allow a quick view on how videos are performing, along with providing an overview of whether schema is implemented correctly.

 

For information on last month’s major industry updates for social media, please see our monthly social blog…

Meet BERT: Google’s New Search Algorithm

BERT, or the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is the new search algorithm released by Google. BERT is a natural language processor (NLP) that is capable of providing Google with further understanding behind the intention of a search query, rather than relying solely on key terms within the query in order to understand user intention.

This new algorithm is going to allow Google to do a much better job of finding useful information for search queries, particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query.

Looking at the below examples, we can see how BERT is able to understand more complex, content driven search terms, in order to provide more relevant search results.

BERT is currently live for search terms using the English language and Google will be looking to apply this to other languages in the future.Google have labelled BERT as “representing the biggest leap forward in the past five year, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of search”. This no understatement from Google, as BERT will work alongside RankBrain and is expected to affect 10% of all search terms, along with affecting structured snippets.

As BERT is a deep learning NLP algorithm that is designed to process and learn how language is used, the only way to optimise content for this is to ensure that content is relevant, informative, useful and most importantly, written for humans.

Google Cracks Down on Mixed Content

Google has announced that they will be cracking down on page resources in order to ensure that https pages can only load https sub-resources. This change is going to be gradually enforced in different steps throughout the next few updates of their browser, from Chrome 79 to Chrome 81 (We are currently on Chrome 77).

These steps will be implemented as below:

  • In Chrome 79, releasing to a stable channel in December 2019, Google will introduce a new setting to unblock mixed content on specific sites. This setting will apply to mixed scripts, iframes, and other types of content that Chrome currently blocks by default. Users can toggle this setting by clicking the lock icon on any https:// page and clicking Site Settings. This will replace the shield icon that shows up at the right side of the omnibox for unblocking mixed content in previous versions of desktop Chrome.
  • In Chrome 80, mixed audio and video resources will be auto-upgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 80 will be released to early release channels in January 2020. Users can unblock affected audio and video resources with the setting described above.
  • Also in Chrome 80, mixed images will still be allowed to load, but they will cause Chrome to show a “Not Secure” chip in the omnibox. We anticipate that this is a clearer security UI for users and that it will motivate websites to migrate their images to HTTPS. Developers can use the upgrade-insecure-requests or block-all-mixed-content Content Security Policy directives to avoid this warning.
  • In Chrome 81, mixed images will be auto-upgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 81 will be released to early release channels in February 2020.

Ensuring that all resources are migrated to https can be done within a CDN, web host or content management system. We would recommend focusing on migrating these in the order that they will be blocked within Google Chrome:

  1. Scripts, iFrames will be targeted in December 2019
  2. Audio, video and images will be targeted in January 2020

This is important because any non-secure resource could be blocked by Chrome – including images, videos, audio, JavaSript/CSS files, and even tracking pixels and scripts, both internally and externally hosted.

Chrome is still the leading browser across all devices and is currently standing at 63.72%, with the closest competitor being Safari, at 16.34% market share. It’s plausible that other browsers could follow suit and also block mixed content.

Google Chrome Market Share - October 2019

We would recommend that all resources are migrated to https as soon as possible, as this will remove the risk of users not being able to correctly view your site and will also ensure that your content is not blocked by Google in January 2020 when they remove the option to unblock resources.

SEO MARKET UPDATES: SEPTEMBER 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

BROAD CORE ALGORITHM UPDATE

Google announced that they were releasing a broad core algorithm update on 24th September.

Although broad core algorithm updates have no specific focus and are released in order provide a more general improvement in search results, Google have suggested “focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can” as “that’s what our algorithms seek to reward.” Google have also recommended that sites continue to consult the search quality rater guidelines in order to view Google’s ideology on what a qualities a site should possess in order to rank well within search. Google have also recommended the following resources in order to help understand the search quality rater guidelines:

GOOGLE UPDATES NO FOLLOW & INTRODUCES SPONSORED AND UGC TAGS

Google have updated the guidance on how they will treat nofollow tags, alongside introducing 2 new tags to be used in specific circumstances:

rel=”nofollow”: Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.

rel=”sponsored”: Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.

rel=”ugc”: UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.

For further information on these changes and the impact they have made, please see our Google Updates Nofollow Links blog.

FRESHER DATA IS INTRODUCED TO GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Following an announcement on 23rd September 2019, users will now have access to more recent data within Google Search Console.

Previously, users were required to wait a couple of days for data within Search Console to become available, meaning that site performance from over the weekend would become available around Wednesday. With the implementation of fresher data users will now have access to information from as soon as the previous day, which will then be processed and replaced with the final data within the same time period as usual (around a couple of days).

GOOGLE INTRODUCES AUTO DNS VERIFICATION FOR SEARCH CONSOLE

Following their release of domain groups in Google Search Console allowing users to views combined data driven by their whole domain, Google have released auto DNS verification in order to make it easier for users to verify their domain.

By clicking on “add property” from the property selector from the drop down sidebar, then choosing the “Domain” option, users will now be met with a step-by-step guide from Google. This will guide users through the steps of verifying their domain.

GOOGLE OFFICIALLY RETIRES THE OLD SEARCH CONSOLE

After releasing the new Google Search Console back at the start of 2018, Google have gradually migrated across functionality from the old Search Console to the new version, alongside new exclusive tools. The time has now come for us to say goodbye to the old Search Console, as Google closed accessibility on 9th September 2019.

Although the old Search Console has been closed, Google are still allowing access to the below legacy tools that are yet to receive a replacement on the new Google Search Console interface:

  • Remove URLs tool
  • Crawl Stats
  • Robots.txt Tester
  • URL Parameters Tool
  • International Targeting
  • Data Highlighter tool
  • Messages report
  • Crawl rate settings
  • Email preferences
  • Web tools

GOOGLE UPDATE USE OF REVIEW RICH RESULTS

Google have been looking into how review schema is currently being used by webmasters, finding many invalid and misleading implementations of this structured data. Google have made some algorithmic updates in order to improve the helpfulness of review markup, and have also limited the display of rich review results to only the following schema types:

Review markup that is applied to any schema that is not included within the above list will be ignored by Google.

GOOGLE ADDS OPTIONS FOR SITES TO PREVIEW CONTENT ON GOOGLE SEARCH

With structured data and featured snippets consistently increasing in importance within search, Google have expanded functionality for webmasters to inform them how they would like pages to be displayed within rich results. These include the following:

Using robots meta tags

The robots meta tag is added to an HTML page’s <head>, or specified via the x-robots-tag HTTP header. The robots meta tags addressing the preview content for a page are:

  • “nosnippet”
    This is an existing option to specify that you don’t want any textual snippet shown for this page.
  • “max-snippet:[number]”
    New! Specify a maximum text-length, in characters, of a snippet for your page.
  • “max-video-preview:[number]”
    New! Specify a maximum duration in seconds of an animated video preview.
  • “max-image-preview:[setting]”
    New! Specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either “none”, “standard”, or “large”.

They can be combined, for example:

<meta name=”robots” content=”max-snippet:50, max-image-preview:large”>

Using the new data-nosnippet HTML attribute

A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the “data-nosnippet” HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements. With this, you can prevent that part of an HTML page from being shown within the textual snippet on the page.

For example:

<p><span data-nosnippet>Harry Houdini</span> is undoubtedly the most famous magician ever to live.</p>

These new implementations will provide site owners with the power to limit the amount and type of content in the structured data.

IPAD TRAFFIC IS CHANGING WITHIN GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Due to updates within iPad OS, Apple have changed the user agent for the iPad, meaning iPad traffic will appear as desktop traffic. With Apple currently in control of 72% of the tablet market share worldwide, site owners should expect to see a reduction in tablet traffic and an increase in desktop traffic, with a specific increase in Safari users. This change took place in September 2019.

SEO MARKET UPDATE: AUGUST 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates

GOOGLE’S NEW ALGORITHM UPDATE FOCUSES ON FINDING FRESH CONTENT

At the start of the month, Google’s Vice President of Search, Pandu Nayak, released a blog detailing the focuses of a Google algorithm update that was released in February 2019.

As shown above, the main focus of this update is to ensure that featured snippets contain fresh, helpful information.

Although the outcome of this update is very positive for data accuracy within many featured snippets, this also means that we will expect to see much more movement with information that is featured within these snippets with Google prioritising fresher content.

GOOGLE EXPERIENCED FURTHER INDEXING ISSUES

Early this month, Google experienced some issues that meant newly published pages where prevented from being indexed.

The indexing issues are similar to the ones that took place in May 2019, in which users saw a delay in some pages performances that were published during these issues, due to these being indexed late. This mostly affected news publications, as articles didn’t make it onto Google search, news or discover whilst issues persisted.

Along with this issue, Google also experienced issues with the URL inspection tool within Google Search Console. These issues have since been resolved.

GOOGLE UPDATE TESTING TOOLS ALLOW GOOGLEBOT EVERGREEN RENDERING

Google announced that most of their testing tools now support the evergreen Chromium renderer. This is has now been implemented within the following tools:

This update will allow these tools to render JavaScript and will continue to update along with Chromium.

In the above image, we can see that within the mobile testing tool, this is now able to render ES6+, Web Components and 1,000+ new web platform features.

PLAYABLE PODCASTS ARE NOW AVAILABLE IN GOOGLE SEARCH

During the Google I/O event in May 2019, Google released the news that podcasts are now available in Google search (more information on this in our May 2019 blog). This month, Google have announced that podcasts will now be playable within desktop and mobile search results.

Google have also implemented a “podcast series” table within the result page which holds many of the top podcast series relating to the search query.

LESS THAN HALF OF GOOGLE SEARCHES RESULT IN A CLICK

SparkToro released a study on how people interact with Google search results in 2019. This study found that June 2019 was the first month to see zero click searches accounted for 50.33% of 40 million+ searches within the United States, this is the first time that zero click searches have surpassed 50%.

The study also shows how zero click searches have seen a gradual increase since 2016.

The increase in zero click searches is due to the increase in featured snippets within Google search results providing information relevant enough for users to never feel the need to enter a website.

Although an increase in zero click searches means a drop in all website traffic for Google search channels, such as Organic and Paid, due to most zero click searches being more informational, this increase will affect top of the funnel traffic much more than any traffic further down the funnel for businesses.

GOOGLE SPOTTED HIGHLIGHTING TEXT ON SITES

Users have spotted Google highlighting text on a website after clicking through to the site from a featured snippet.

The text that is highlighted is dependent on the text that is displayed within the snippet. The page will also automatically scroll to the highlighted text.

 

SEO MARKET UPDATE: JULY 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates

GOOGLE LOOK TO FORMALISE ROBOTS.TXT FORMATTING

Although the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) has been the unofficial format for robots.txt for the past 25 years, Google released a webmaster blog post on 1st July confirming that they have submitted REP to The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in order to officialise the REP. Along with submitting REP to the IEFT, Google also updated its robots.txt spec to match REP.

https://twitter.com/LizziHarvey/status/1145766318680858625

Alongside the act of making REP an internet standard, Google also announced that they have made their robots.txt parser open source; this is currently available to view on GitHub.

GOOGLE REMOVE SUPPORT FOR NOINDEX WITHIN ROBOTS.TXT

Google announced that they no longer support noindex directives within robots.txt files, reasoning that this has never been an official directive within the REP.

In order for webmasters to update their sites for this change, Google have provided the below alternatives:

  • Noindex in robots meta tags: Supported both in the HTTP response headers and in HTML, the noindex directive is the most effective way to remove URLs from the index when crawling is allowed.
  • 404 and 410 HTTP status codes: Both status codes mean that the page does not exist, which will drop such URLs from Google’s index once they’re crawled and processed.
  • Password protection: Unless markup is used to indicate subscription or paywalled content, hiding a page behind a login will generally remove it from Google’s index.
  • Disallow in robots.txt: Search engines can only index pages that they know about, so blocking the page from being crawled usually means its content won’t be indexed.  While the search engine may also index a URL based on links from other pages, without seeing the content itself, we aim to make such pages less visible in the future.
  • Search Console Remove URL tool: The tool is a quick and easy method to remove a URL temporarily from Google’s search results.

Google also sent warnings to Google Search Console users.

Robots.txt warning - GSC

Within the warning, Google notified users that on 1st September 2019, noindex directives within robots.txt files will no longer work.

GOOGLE RANKING ALGORITHM UPDATES

With Google admitting that they made around 3,200 changes to Google Search within the past year, either with the release of new features or regular updates, it’s safe to assume that multiple updates to Google’s algorithm take place daily. A Tweet from Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed this back in 2017, stating that Google release on average 3 daily updates.

Despite being armed with this knowledge, we still see articles and tweet every month asking if any algorithm updates have been released recently, or that an “unconfirmed” algorithm update took place, but only on a specific day.

Unconfirmed Algorithm Updates

The only truth behind any of these updates is that Google release multiple smaller updates on a daily basis, these smaller updates focus on specific aspect of site ranking, such as site speed. Large broad core updates are released less frequently, having a much broader focus that looks to provide a more generic improvement to Google’s search algorithm.

The best way to track if any of these daily updates affect you is to keep an eye on your site’s traffic and rankings and look out for any sudden changes, aided with the use of online tools. Tools such as SEMRush’s sensor can provide details on times in which algorithm updates produced more movement within search rankings, categorised industries and which of these were affected the most, and with the use of an account,  the ranking of sites alongside google algorithm updates to see how these were effected on a daily basis.

CUSTOMER PHOTOS ARE COMING TO GOOGLE SHOPPING

Rolling out for the US within July, Google new feature will allow customers to post their photos, along with a review, which will be displayed within the product listing.

This feature can only currently be implemented with Yotpo, PowerReviews, Bazaarvoice, and Influenster. Google have also confirmed that they will be looking to expand on this list in the future.

GOOGLE TESTS SHAREABLE SEARCH RESULTS

Google has been spotted testing a new feature within Google’s search results which allows users to share, open a cache of the page or open the page in a new tab.

Although this is currently a test and may or may not make it past the testing stage, it would be interesting to see how users interact with this feature compared to just sharing the page once they have clicked through.

GOOGLE DATA STUDIO ADD TREEMAP

The newest edition to data visualisations within Google Data Studio is the treemap.

Added to 18th July, this new graph will allow users to view data organised into dimension hierarchies and create drill down options, such as product brand > product category > product.

SEO MARKET UPDATE: JUNE 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates

BROAD CORE ALGORITHM UPDATE

Google pre-announced and rolled out a ‘big’ search algorithm update on June 3rd, which took five days to finish due to the servers and data centres around the world. It took a focus on all ranking signals, including E-A-T, so this influenced initial trends for sites bringing traffic increase and drops, primarily from 20% to 90% each way. Concluding results saw large publications such as Daily Mail, which saw the 50% drop in site traffic the day following the algorithm update.

Rather than thinking of Google algorithm updates as Google changing their mind on ranking signals and random sites being punished as a result, it seems clear that these updates are Google pushing sites to improve UI, content and site optimisation in a positive direction. Sites that have been “punished” as a result of broad core algorithm updates were most likely getting away with bad/unfavourable practises in the past, such as the Daily Mail using sensationalist headlines to drive clicks.

GOOGLE INTRODUCE XML SITEMAPS TO WORDPRESS CORE

Developers at Google have proposed a plan to integrate basic XML Sitemaps in WordPress Core, as well as an XML Sitemaps API to extend functionality for developers and webmasters. This introduction could mean one less third-party plugin to rely on and a feature that will be able to offer wider compatibility and support.

Poorly optimised plugins can slow down our site and negatively impact your organic traffic, so this implementation could provide a positive improvement in site speed, which is still one of the main ranking factors for many search engines, including Google and Bing.

GOOGLE REMOVED PREFERRED DOMAIN SETTINGS FROM SEARCH CONSOLE

The tool which allowed webmasters to set a preferred domain (displayed in the image below) has now been removed from Google Search Console

With the new Search Console, Google are now able to pick the preferred domain for you, based on the various signals that Google ingest, such as canonicals. This prevents duplicated content that can be competing against each other in the search results by sending multiple different URL’s to the canonical URL.  Google have not said if they’ll communicate canonical URL changes in the index so you will need to ensure that your canonical URL listed in Google has stayed the same.

GOOGLE CAUGHT ILLEGALLY SCRAPING LYRICS FROM GENIUS

Genius has accused Google of scraping their content and serving it directly in its search results. Genius switched up their quote mark styles to form a unique Morse code which spelt “red handed” in order to catch Google out. In this case, Genius are impacted negatively because Google are using info boxes to display lyrics as a rich result, keeping users on Google rather than sending them to the creators’ website. This dramatically decreases the click-through rate for Genius.

Google have said to include attribution to the third party providing the digital lyrics text so that users and site owners will be able to know where the licensed content was sourced from.

MILLIONS OF FAKE BUSINESS LISTING SPOTTED IN GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Google Maps is carrying millions of illegitimate local listings, growing drastically each month. The fake listings push real businesses lower down in the search results which impact their ability to reach customers and makes it easier for these customers to be targeted by scammers. Google are failing to take down fake business listings and verify the real ones which is turning local businesses to paid ads to regain their search visibility.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS INTRODUCES SEARCHABLE SHORT NAMES

Desires for a simple URL to promote a user’s businesses have been met with searchable short names. This gives users a unique way of targeting a business. This will be a global namespace and could have competition for rankings and handles between similarly named businesses.

GMB have added more branding and promotional tools for businesses, including:

  • Logo
  • Cover photo
  • Dynamic photo module
  • Welcome offers
  • Promotional assets

These features furthermore verify the users profile to help their brand to be more effectively promoted.

GMB have also introduced ‘Local Favourite’ which offers a badge to the top 5% of local businesses in a category, increasing preference over other businesses so search result ranking will be less important.

NEW GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE FEATURES

Google announced two new features to the Google Search Console. You can now search within the mark-up quickly to find the spot in the mark-up that you want to adjust. You are also able to copy the code and mark-up and then experiment with it without impacting the original, giving you the chance to see if the tweaks you make pass validation and result in the outcome you want. These features make debugging issues with your mark-up for structured data issues faster.

https://twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1143162650332979202

GOOGLE NO LONGER USES SOCIAL PROFILE MARK-UP FOR KNOWLEDGE PANELS

Google have deprecated social profile markup, which means that Google automatically discover the social profiles to include in the knowledge panels. You are still able to specify your preferred social profiles and suggest a change if you are an official representative to claim a knowledge panel.

SEO MARKET UPDATE: MAY 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates

GOOGLE I/O

With Google I/O having taken place from May 7th-9th, we were treated to several announcements on features that have been and are due to be released for Google search, these include:

  • Googlebot Evergreen
  • FAQ and How To structured data
  • Podcasts & Full Coverage in Google Search
  • Google Maps AR mode
  • Google Lens features

We will dive further into these new features below.

Googlebot Evergreen

Google announced that Googlebot is now running Chromium 74, from previously running Chromium 41, which was released in 2015. This major update now means that Googlebot supports over 1,000 new features, this includes:

Google Developer Martin Splitt provided more information on the new features that Googlebot supports.

https://twitter.com/g33konaut/status/1126412496754159616

Despite these major updates in Googlebot’s ability to render JavaScript, any JavaScript on a page is still only rendered on Googlebot’s 2nd crawl of the page, meaning that there is still a delay to Google indexing JavaScript content.

FAQ AND HOW-TO SCHEMA

Google released support for FAQ and How-To schema during Google I/O. These schemas come with new rich results within Google’s SERPs.

FAQ schema can be applied to pages that contains a list of questions and answers around a specific topic. This is unlike QAPage schema, which is relevant for pages that allow users to submit answers to a single question, such as forums.

Example of FAQ Schema rich results:

How-To Schema can be applied to pages that provide step-by-step instructions in order to complete a task, such as “how to tie a tie”. For any instructions for food and drink related topics, ensure that the Recipe Schema is used instead.

How-To Schema can be displayed in a standard and an image rich result within Google SERPs.

Standard snippet:

Image snippet:

Ensure that any pages with How-To Schema implemented comply with the content guidelines provided within Google’s How-To Schema help page.

PODCASTS & FULL COVERAGE IN GOOGLE SEARCH

Announced at Google I/O, podcasts will be shown within search. Google have informed that they will be able to transcribe and index a podcast’s content in order to display results for relevant searches, rather than relying on the podcast title to display the contents of the podcast. Podcasts will also be displayed within Google’s “full coverage” segment, which previously displayed within Google News, will now be able to display within SERPs.

Full coverage displays a large range of information on a searched topic, such as top stories, videos, informational pages, podcasts and related queries.

GOOGLE BRING AR TO GOOGLE MAPS

Currently only available on Google Pixel smartphones, Google Maps now has the ability to enter AR mode, which will allow people to receive directions through their camera.

With this feature being especially useful for anyone visiting a city and trying to locate local restaurants, business and points of interest, it is becoming more of a priority to ensure that any bricks and mortar stores have been added to Google My Business and the location pins are accurate.

As an addition to this, Google Maps will support incognito mode, allowing users to hide their activity, such as places searched or directions used. Google have also been testing branded pins within Google Maps.

No announcement has yet been made in regards to how these will be implemented.

NEW GOOGLE LENS FEATURES

Google have released several features for Google Lens, most of which are focused on restaurants. Google Lens will now have the ability to recommend popular dishes and also find reviews on specific dishes on a menu by pulling information from Google Maps information.

GOOGLE UPDATED THE SEARCH QUALITY RATERS GUIDELINES

Google have updated the search quality raters guidelines in order to expand and modernise a couple of points, mainly surrounding E-A-T and interstitials. In regards to the changes mate to E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), Google have added emphasis to focusing on page quality over E-A-T on non-YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) pages and also that everyday expertise can be assessed based on the talent/skill level depicted in cases where the content creator is demonstrating formal or everyday expertise but is not doing any harm.

Google have also added further information on how to deal with interstitials and have now been included within segments discussing that if these are to be used, they should be clear with easy-to-close buttons.

GOOGLE MAKES MOBILE-FIRST INDEXING A DEFAULT FOR ALL NEW SITES

Google have announced, via their webmaster central blog, that commencing 1st July, all new and previously unknown sites will have mobile-first indexing enabled as a default.

As shown above, users will be able to check for mobile-first indexing by using the URL inspection tool within Google Search Console.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE ADDS NEW REPORTS

3 new report have been added to Google Search Console this month. The first of these reports is the unparsable structured data report, this will allow users to view a list of structured data found on a site that cannot be parsed due to serious syntax issues. The final 2 reports are the Logo and Sitelinks searchbox reports, similar to the unparsable structured data report, if a site is using logo schema or Sitelinks searchbox, Google will inform of any errors it is detecting.

GOOGLE ANNOUNCED BROAD CORE ALGORITHM UPDATE

For the first time, Google has pre-announced that they are due to release a broad core algorithm update on 3rd June 2019. Unlike the daily algorithm refinements that Google makes daily which have a specific focus, such as site speed, broad core algorithm updates focus on all ranking signals.

GOOGLE DISPLAY FAVICONS WITHIN RESULTS PAGES

Announced on The Keyword, Google released a new design on their search result pages. Within the redesign, Google have added favicons to Google search results.

Along with the addition of favicons, Google has also redesigned how ads will be displayed within SERPs and have received criticism in regards to ads and organic results with favicons looking very similar.

SEO MARKET UPDATE: APRIL 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE’S DE-INDEXING ISSUES

At the start of April, Google was found to have had with de-indexing pages for many sites, with both Moz’s and SEMRush’s Google ranking trackers picking up on a change in page rankings across the web.

Google also seemed to have an issue with fully resolving this. After confirming on 10th April that this issue was fully resolved, many users still reported having issues with getting their pages indexed again. We have since received notification from Google that these issues have now been resolved.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE ADDS ANDROID APP TO SEARCH APPEARANCE FILTERS

On 8th April Google announced, via their Webmasters Twitter account, that users with an Android app associated with a website will now have the ability to filter the app’s performance within the performance report, via the search appearance filter.

Activating this filter will display the clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for the sites Android app.

NEW GOOGLE DISCOVER PERFORMANCE REPORTS

Google Discover was released in September 2018, as an upgrade of Google Feed. Google Discover delivers relevant content to a user based on their interest and browsing habits, including articles and video, along with featured snippets of information from different sites.

Within Google Search Console, a new performance report is now available, showing how sites perform within Discover. This is only available to for properties that have reached a threshold number of Discover impressions in the past 16 months.

This performance report will allow users to view Discover performance within the same format as the current search report, including filters and dimensions such as country and page.

CREATE CUSTOM SHORT URLS IN GOOGLE MY BUSINESS             

Google My Business users now have the ability to create a short name and URL for their business profile. Short URLs will be in the format of “g.page/[yourcustomname]”, and will make it easier to customers to access a business’ profile directly.

GOOGLE MAY RELEASE PAID FEATURES FOR GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Google My Business users started receiving questionnaires from Google this month, asking how much they would pay for services are already provided for free within Google My Business, such as business listings. The questionnaires also provided a list of packages that may become available for users to purchase in the future, asking users which one they would prefer.

Google also provided a list of the features within the packages they think could enhance a business’ presence, which may be added as paid services in the future. These include:

  • Promoted map pin: Show up prominently on Google Maps when a customer is looking at a map where your business in located
  • “Book” button on your Business Profile: Get an extra button on your business profile titles “book”. Google shows customers your availability (synced with your calendar system if you have one). Customers can either confirm a booking or request a timeslot.
  • Promote your “book” button: Get a “book” button on the Google.com search results, in addition to your Business Profile.
  • Verified reviews: Google verifies your reviews and shows an indication to consumers that your reviews are verified to help build trust in your business.
  • Remove ads from your Business Profile: Ads from other businesses will not appear on your Business Profile.
  • Verified Licenses: Google verifies your trade licenses and displays your verified licenses on your Business Profile.
  • Request quote: Get a “request quote” button on your Business Profile. Customers will enter details about their job. Requests come to you as a message in the Google My Business app.
  • Automated message responses: Answer some frequently asked questions (hours, services offered) so Google can respond automatically to customers on your behalf.
  • Automated response for reviews: Create messages so Google can automatically respond on your behalf to customers who leave a review.
  • Call reports and recordings: Get access to reports and recordings for all of your calls from Google My Business. This lets you evaluate quality and volume.
  • Google search results placement: Show up in a section near the top of the list on the Google.com search results.
  • Google customer support: Google’s customer support team helps you troubleshoot and get the most from your ad and Business Profile.
  • Offers: Promote a special offer or discount on your Business Profile.
  • Google Guarantee: Get a badge of trust on your Business Profile. If a customer isn’t satisfied, Google will give them their money back.
  • Get leads from competitor profiles: When a customer messages a business that offers the same service as you, Google will show your business to the customer so they can message you too. This will help you get more leads from Google.
  • Video on your Business Profile: Shows a video of your choice on your Business Profile to help customers learn more about your business.
  • Instant quote: Respond to customer quote requests with an automatic quote. You can customise the quote based on the details on the job.
  • Background check: Google performs a background check on your business, and shows this to consumers to build trust in your business.
  • Verified bookings: Google automatically tracks the bookings you’ve received from Google calls and messages, and shows this number to customers.
  • Featured review: Choose a review to display at the top on your Business Profile.

This is an extremely extensive list of features that Google is considering providing to paid users, with many features that will provide a large benefit to a listings local search presence.

GOOGLE DATA STUDIO UPDATES

Google Data Studio rolled out many new features over the past month, including:

Recent weeks also saw the implementation of chart drill-down, allowing users to define hierarchies within Cartesian charts, and allow these charts to be switched between hierarchies on view mode, such as switching from an annual view, to a monthly view, to a daily view.

Within the above chart, users can see sessions by month, by right clicking on the chart or using the charts component heading, users will have the ability to drill up (view sessions by year), or drill down (view sessions by day). Users will also be able to apply a sort to these results.

SEO MARKET UPDATES: MARCH 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE’S FLORIDA 2 ALGORITHM UPDATE

SEMRush Sensor for March 2019

On the 12th March, Google announced the release of a broad core algorithm update, quickly named by the industry as the “Florida 2” algorithm update, this was then renamed by Google to the “March 2019 Core Update” in order to simplify algorithm update names.

Although the algorithm update this saw a lot of reporting after taking place, due to March being a volatile month in regards to rankings, this update didn’t create much of a noticeable difference compared to the movements rankings were current seeing within March.

As this algorithm update is a broad core update, there is no specific changes that have taken place to Google rankings, but an overall update intended to improve the overall quality of SERPs.


Due to the algorithm update not having a specific focus, it is recommended that in order to optimise rankings following this, users should concentrate general improvements highlights within Googles guidelines, such as EAT and YMYL.

GOOGLE DROP REL=PREV/NEXT AS AN INDEXING SIGNAL

Announced on 21st March, Google confirmed that have retired rel=prev/next as an indexing signal.

Although this news was announced this recently, Google have also confirmed that they have not been using rel=prev/next as an indexing signal for years and recommend users to just keep using pagination as they have always done.

GOOGLE’S MOBILE FRIENDLY AND AMP TESTS NOW SUPPORT CODE EDITING

Google have announced support within their mobile friendly and AMP tests for code editing.

https://twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1110187975688839169

This update allows users to toggle between entering a URL and adding code to the tool. By adding code to the tool, Google will test this and display results to show if the code is mobile/AMP friendly, or if further edits need to be made to meet the criteria. If users don’t pass these tests, they will be able to edit code within the tool and re-run the tests.

GOOGLE PROPERTY SETS OFFICIALLY REMOVED FROM GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

After Google announced the removal of property sets from Google Search Console, discussed in last month’s blog, they have since been displaying notifications to inform users that property sets will be available until 28th March.

Although property sets are being removed from the old Search Console interface, these are being replaced by domain properties, which are available within the new Search Console interface.

NEW GOOGLE DATA STUDIO FEATURES ADDED IN MARCH

New features added to Data Studio within March include:

  • Custom Rolling Dates – These will allow users to set up custom date periods that meet specific needs, such as “last 90 days from yesterday” or “last 52 weeks from last week”.
  • Schedule Email Delivery of Reports – This new feature will send a PDF version of the Data Studio reports to specific users on a pre-determined basis.
  • Version History – Lets users view previous versions of a report and restore the selected previous version of the report, if needed.
  • Custom Canvas Size Per Page – Rather than have all pages uniform in size, this option allows users to have each page of a report a custom size by following this procedure: Edit the report – select page > current page settings > style menu – change the canvas size options from auto to the custom size.
  • Improved Table Formatting – Users will now be able to align columns left, centre and right within tables and can now also resize table columns individually, or resize multiple columns at once by holding shift while resizing.

These new features are extremely useful with Data Studio reports and show that Google will continue to provide features that make Data Studio more user friendly and useful.

SEO MARKET UPDATES: FEBRUARY 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE FOCUSES ON UPDATING THE NEW SEARCH CONSOLE

As Google aims to keep closing features from the old search console by March 2019, new features continue to be implemented in the new interface in order to improve usability and move as many users over to the new Search Console as possible.

The first of the updates to the new Google Search Console seen this month was the addition of a security issues section.

https://twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1090704842870255616

The security issues section will warn users that Google has found issues on their site that impact site security, including the following:

The tool will help webmasters find and fix any of the above security issues affecting their site.

The second of the updates is the consolidation of canonical URLs.

Google has now implemented an update within the performance section of Google Search Console which consolidates website traffic on canonical URLs. This update will unify all search metrics for a single piece of content into the canonical URL. The benefits of this update include combining data from pages with separate mobile and AMP pages.

GOOGLE LOOK TO REMOVE PROPERTY SETS FROM SEARCH CONSOLE

Google announced, via email, that they will be removing property sets from Google Search Console at the end of March 2019.

These property sets were used to aggregate data from a business’ different sites, such as combining http and https, or www. and non-www. sites.

As a replacement to property sets, Google recently announced the full release of a domain properties feature. Having been in beta since November 2018, these properties group data in a similar way to property sets, including protocols (http/https) and subdomains (m, www and further subdomains). Domain properties will only be available for DNS verified accounts.

GOOGLE RELEASES REDESIGNED TEST MY SITE TOOL

Google released the redesigned version of its Test My Site tool on 25th February. Within the redesign, Google has implemented several new features in order to produce more competitive reports.

The following features have been added to Test My Site:

  • Speed estimates for both an entire site and individual pages
  • Details on whether the speed of a site or page is faster or slower compared to the previous month
  • Information on whether a site or page speed score is ranked as Fast, Average, or Slow
  • How the speed score for a site or page compares to others in the industry
  • The potential impact of site speed on revenue
  • A detailed list of recommended fixes to increase speed on up to 5 pages on a site
  • A complete shareable report containing a summary of the above

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE ADDS PRODUCTS REPORT

With Google utilising structured data and displaying products within rich snippets on SERPs, they have now also released new ways for merchants to provide information and improve results for the products they sell.

Within Google Search Console, users will now be able to display product issues in a report that uses schema.org to annotate product information. The report will mainly display any pending issues for markup on the user’s site, and can also be used to validate if the issues were resolved.

Google are also planning on rolling out new features in Google Merchant Centre in order to allow users to provide up-to-date, high-quality information on products, which can be used on a product’s knowledge panel.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS EXPANDS RESOURCES FOR RESPONDING TO REVIEWS

Google announced, via a forum post, that users are now able to respond to reviews directly from Google Maps. Before this feature was released, replying to Google My Business reviews was only possible via the Google My Business mobile app. With this update, users will now have the option of using a desktop to reply to reviews.

Google’s tips for replying to reviews:

  • Be nice and don’t get personal. This isn’t just a guideline, it’s also a good idea as a business owner. It’s difficult to win an argument with a frustrated customer, and you want to avoid burning bridges. Keep your responses useful, readable and courteous. In addition, responses should comply with our local content policy.
  • Keep it short and sweet. Users are looking for useful and genuine responses, but they can easily be overwhelmed by a long response.
  • Thank your reviewers. Respond to happy reviewers when you have new or relevant information to share. You don’t need to thank every reviewer publicly since each response reaches lots of customers.
  • Be a friend, not a salesperson. Your reviewers are already customers, so there’s no need to offer incentives or advertisements. Tell reviewers something new about your business, or share something that they might not have learned from their first visit.

GOOGLE CREATE FEATURED SNIPPETS THAT COMBINE CONTENT FROM MULTIPLE CONTENT CREATORS

Google recently released a list style featured snippet,  combining content from multiple sites in order to display information on each of the items within the list.

Snippets like the above have come under scrutiny recently due to the fact that Google does not display the source URL of the information until an item in the list has been expanded. Google has since replied to inform that the snippet is similar to standard SERPs but displays information horizontally, rather than the traditional SERPs and that the snippet falls in line with Google’s focus on supporting the wider search ecosystem.

SEO Market Updates: January 2019

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE SHOW RECENT SEARCHES IN SERPS

Google has announced that the release of new activity cards, which will appear in search results and display users’ recent activity.

 

The activity card will display sites users have previously visited for topics such as cooking, fashion, skincare and beauty, fitness, photography and more. However, cards will only be available if the user is logged into a Google account.

 

Just like bookmarks, users will be able to categorise and save recently visited pages. These saved pages can be accessed via menu at the top left of the search page (mobile only) and the Google app.

At present, the new feature is only available to logged-in U.S English users browsing via the Google app or mobile browsers, although it’s likely that an international roll-out will follow soon!

GOOGLE ANNOUNCES THE END OF OLD GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE FEATURES

On their Webmasters Blog, Google announced that they will be removing several features from the old Search Console, whilst also adding many features to the new Search Console.

Features Google will be removing from the old Search Console include:

  • HTML suggestions
  • Property Sets
  • Android Apps
  • Blocked resources

Many of the features being removed from the old Search Console have either been migrated to the new dashboard or to a more relevant Google tool, with the exception of HTML suggestions and property sets. Google now recommends using third-party tools for crawling page titles and descriptions as an alternative to HTML suggestions and currently have no plans to replace property sets.

Features Google will be adding to the new Search Console include:

  • Crawl errors in the new index coverage report
  • Sitemaps data in Index Coverage
  • New URL inspection tool
  • Structured data reports

Google plans to implement these new features towards the end of March 2019.

DUCKDUCKGO’S MAPS ARE NOW POWERED BY APPLE

As web users start to become more concerned about their online privacy, demand for services that help protect this, such as VPNs, continue to increase. This demand in privacy has caused DuckDuckGo’s recent rise in user base as the “search engine that doesn’t track you” recently reported to receiving 30 million private daily searches (still dwarfed by Google’s 3.5 billion daily searches) which was a 50% annual growth.

DuckDuckGo announced that map and address-related searches will now be powered by Apple via their MapKit JS. This will help power direct business searches, business type searches and nearby places searches.

DuckDuckGo’s local business is still powered by Yelp’s local business listings and a business will require a Yelp listing in order to display within map results.

GOOGLE DISPLAYS PDF DOCUMENTS IN FEATURED SNIPPETS

Recently spotted within Google’s search results, PDF documents are being displayed within featured snippets.

Although PDF documents are crawlable and indedxable, it’s unusual for Google to place PDF content within a featured snippet position.

Due to the limited functionality of PDF documents, most webmasters would generally recommend having an HTML equivalent to any information provided in PDF format.

GOOGLE UPDATE INSPECT URL TOOL IN SEARCH CONSOLE

Google has expanded the functionality of the URL inspection tool within Google Search Console.

Users will now be able see the HTTP response, page resources, JavaScript logs and a rendered screenshot of the page.

GOOGLE DATA STUDIO CAN NOW COMPARE CUSTOM DATE RANGES

Implemented on 24th January, charts and graphs can now display comparison figures for custom date ranges, with this feature previously being limited to comparing data to previous period or year.

Users will have the option to keep the custom comparison date fixed to the specific date range selected or on a rolling date window which will advance over time.

SEO MARKET UPDATES: DECEMBER 2018

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE ADDS RICH RESULTS FOR Q&A PAGES

Announced at the start of December, Google is expanding its rich results with the addition of question & answer pages.

Google's Q&A Rich Results

These rich results will display multiple answers to a question on eligible search results in order to help users find relevant information quicker within Google search results.

In order to appear within the Q&A rich results, site owners will need to implement QAPage Schema within their site, along with Question Schema and Answer Schema. Google has provided examples of how to implement this in JSON-LD format.

Within Google’s content guidelines, they have specified that this schema is not suitable for FAQ pages or pages where there are multiple questions per page. This schema should only be used on pages where the focus of the page is a single question and its answer.

GOOGLE UPDATES LOCAL PACK TO DISPLAY ‘SOLD HERE’ PRODUCTS

Google introduced a new feature within its local map packs which shows whether a searched product is sold in a store displayed within the view. Google will also display if the search product is mentioned within the site.

Google displaying sold here on local listing

This new addition to the Google local map packs will make it much faster for users to decide to visit a certain store or website if they can see that the company stocks the item.

GOOGLE ADDS “RESERVE A TABLE” BUTTONS TO LOCAL LISTINGS

Spotted on some local listings for restaurants, Google is testing new buttons which will allow users to reserve a table or look at available tables the following day directly from Google, rather than needing to visit the restaurant’s website.

Google adds reserve a table button to local listings

After releasing the ability to follow businesses via the Google Maps app in October, the new hotel local pack layout and Google My Business app (discussed in last month’s blog), we can see that Google does not intend to slow down on expanding the functionality of their local business tools.

GOOGLE INTRODUCES NEW STRUCTURED DATA FOR LIVE STREAMS

Introduced at the start of December, Google released a blog post announcing the support of new structured data which will allow users to create schema for live streams.

Google live stream schema example

The Broadcast Event schema allows users to set a broadcast as a live stream by setting the isLiveBroadcast property to true. Users will then have the ability to see if the livestream has already started or is due to start by adding a time and data (ISO 8601 format) inputting this into the StartDate property. Google has provided an example of this schema within a guide.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE MIGRATES REPORTS TO NEW SEARCH CONSOLE

Google confirmed via the Google Webmasters Twitter account on 13th December that they have fully migrated the following reports to the new search console:

  • AMP
  • Index Status
  • Manual Actions
  • Mobile Usability
  • Rich Cards
  • Search Analytics

These reports will no longer be available to view via the old Search Console dashboard and users will now be shown a message linking them to the report within the new Search Console dashboard.

GOOGLE ADDS BRUSHING TO CHART INTERACTION FILTERS TO DATA STUDIO

Adding chart interactions to reports can create interactive reports by allowing users to use charts as filters, as discussed in our previous blog post. Google has expanded the functionality of chart interactions to include brushing on time series, line charts and area charts. This will allow users to drag their mouse across an eligible chart and filter surrounding data based on the data selected within the chart.

Within the below example, we can see that the date range of the data is from 1st January – 8th January on the time series chart. Using the brushing filter, we can click and drag our mouse from 3rd January – 5th January in order to filter the report to display data from this date range. Right clicking and hitting ‘reset action’ will reset this filter.

This filter can be used in conjunction with other filters and chart interactions. By clicking on the data within the table or pie chart, we can further filter data to suit our needs.

GOOGLE DATA STUDIO ADDS COMMUNITY CONNECTORS AND VISUALISATIONS

As a new addition to Google Data Studio, Google has added the ability the allow anyone to build their own connections to any internet-accessible data source and create custom data visualisations which can be shared between users within the community.

Community connectors will allow users to develop connectors for sources such as:

  • Platforms for social media, CRM, search, finance, HR, advertising, etc.
  • Public and other open data sets.
  • Private company data.
  • Any data source or service that can be accessed over the internet using Apps Script.

Google has created a guide in order to help developers create their own visualisations and has got the ball rolling by creating their own custom visualisations which anyone can use to visualise their data.

Both of these new features are open source with a condition placed on custom visualisations requiring these to be made public.

SEO MARKET UPDATES: NOVEMBER 2018

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE

Updates that look place within Google SERPs and miscellaneous Google tools in November.

PAGESPEED INSIGHT REPORT REVAMP

Announced via their Webmaster Central Blog, Google have given the PageSpeed Insights report a facelift, along with assigning Lighthouse as its analytics engine in an attempt to help create more consistent results across Google’s auditing tools. The insights report will now also incorporate data from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).

The PageSpeed Insights will now provide the following information:

  • Field Data – displays real-world data, such as First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID), provided by the CrUX report. This report is updated daily and not all sites will have this data available for display.
  • Lab Data – simulating how a mobile device loads a page, this data is provided by Lighthouse and will display data such as First Meaningful Paint and Speed Index. The results from the simulation are summarised and used to provide a score between 0 and 100 to indicate how good a page’s performance is.
  • Opportunities – provides a list of suggestions on how to improve the page’s performance, these are ordered by how much of a performance improvement each suggestion should make.
  • Diagnosis – displays additional best practices in order to improve performance.

GOOGLE DISPLAYING MULTIFACETED FEATURED SNIPPETS ON DESKTOP

After being released for mobile searches this February, Google results have been spotted displaying multifaceted featured snippets within desktop results.

It is currently unclear if the same site can rank for both of the queries. Once this has been fully rolled out, site owners may see an uplift in traffic for pages displayed within these snippets, but also see a drop in traffic for standard organic results as these will be pushed further down within the SERP.

AMP ARE CHANGING HOW URLS ARE DISPLAYED

Many sites utilise AMP pages to help landing pages load near instantly, this has been seen to improve user experience, which can lower bounce rates, increase average session duration and ultimately help increase conversions. Regardless of those positives, the one glaring feature that has been receiving negative feedback since AMP pages release, has been the fact that the displayed URL makes it very obvious that users are on an AMP page, this can look confusing to users due to not displaying the sites URL as they expect.

AMP released a blog post on November, 13th to announce that they have begun a trial that will be available in Chrome 71 in which users can transform AMP URLs to look like the sites URL rather than an AMP URL.

For a demonstration of this new AMP feature, users will need Chrome 71 (or use Chrome Beta), visit https://g.co/webpackagedemo and search for “Learn AMP by Example” and click on the ampbyexample.com home page.

GOOGLE’S NEW HOTEL LOCAL PACK IS AVAILABLE

Google have released a new design for their hotel local pack which is currently displayed below paid results and above organic results.

The results are optimised to the search query used and the users Google account, if they are signed in. These results will also highlight hotels that the user has stayed in before and allow users to click on filters, such as guest favourites, budget options and luxury stays.

COMMENT ON LIVE SPORTS WITHIN GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS

This feature was originally added during the World Cup, but has since received a dedicated help sheet and management page that will allow users to view and manage all of their comments and reviews.

This feature is currently only available for some sporting events, such as Football. It is currently unclear if Google are looking to expand on events or topics in which commenting is available.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Updates that look place within Google Search Console in November.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE IS WARNING USERS OF UNCLEAR SUBSCRIPTION PAGES

In an effort to stop users from accidentally signing up to subscriptions or paying more than they expected, Google is cracking down on unclear mobile subscription pages by warning webmasters who aren’t following Google’s mobile billing best practices via Google Search Console.

Starting from Chrome 71, Google will also display a warning for all users who visit the mobile subscription page if the page still does not comply with Google’s best practices. This warning will appear on Chrome Mobile, Chrome Desktop and Andriod’s WebView.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE TESTS DOMAIN PROPERTIES

Currently only available to a limited amount of accounts, Google is testing domain properties within Search Console. These properties will group together subdomains, protocols and subpaths:

For example, if you define a Domain property as ‘example.com’, it includes example.com, any subdomains of example.com (for example, m.example.com, support.m.example.com, www.example.com, and so on), as well as any subpaths in any of those domains, on both http and https.”

Users will be allowed to define a domain using a public suffix (e.g. .com, .org, and .co.uk), only one public suffix can be used per property, so users will be unable to mix this data within Search Console (e.g. combining .co.uk with .com data).

The above table displays examples of what URLS Google Search Console will group, depending on what is defined as the property URL.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE DISPLAYS EVENT LISTING AND EVENT DETAILS IN PERFORMANCE REPORT

Available within the search appearance filters in Google Search Console, the event listing and event details filters will now allow users to view the performance of these within the performance report. The event schema will need to be applied to the event pages in order for Google Search Console to track the performance.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Updates that look place within Google My Business in November.

GOOGLE ADDS NEW FEATURES TO THE GOOGLE MY BUSINESS APP

The Google My Business App received an update mid-November. App users will now be able to post pictures, offers and events, view when a customer posts a review, messages or follows the user’s business listing within the new Customers tab, and view performance analytics which will be displayed from the homepage, all within the app.

In addition to the new app being released and the new ability to follow businesses, as discussed in our previous blog, Google My Business have also updated how messaging businesses works. Previously, messaging a business through a Google My Business listing would send an SMS to the business. Users are now being given the option to message through the Google Maps app rather than SMS if they prefer.

GOOGLE DATA STUDIO

Updates that look place within Google Data Studio in November.

GOOGLE DATA STUDIO ALLOWS USERS TO CREATE FILTERS WITH CHART DIMENSIONS

Released at the start of November, Google implemented the option to create filters from the dimensions of charts, tables and graphs. Within the below report, clicking on ‘United States’ within the pie chart will filter the results of the table to only display sessions for this location and vice versa. This filter will work on all grouped charts within the same data source.

Right clicking on the report and clicking ‘reset action’ resets all charts back to displaying their data without interactive filters applied.

SEARCH ALL FILTER CONTROLS ADDED TO DATA STUDIO REPORTS

The ‘search all’ filter was added to Google Data Studio at the start of the month and will allows users to filter data by phrases, numbers or regex.

EMBED EXTERNAL CONTENT WITHIN GOOGLE DATA STUDIO REPORTS

Using the new URL embed button within Google Data Studio, it is now possible to embed YouTube videos, web pages and Google Docs in order to create a rich, multi-media experience.

SEO MARKET UPDATES: OCTOBER 2018

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE ADDS NEW INSIGHTS TO SERPS

Many SEOs, including ourselves, started noticing at the start of October that Google was now providing us with a glimpse into our Google Search Console data when searching for a keyword.

Google Search Console Data in SERPs

This window will only appear if you are logged into Google Search Console and have a property that ranks for the keyword. If multiple properties rank for the same keyword, a drop-down menu will become available to allow users to switch between properties. There is also an option to ‘see ways to improve’ a keywords ranking, although, the same two suggestions will appear for every keyword:

  1. Compare this query to your overall data
  2. Find out how to use this information to make changes to your site so that you can increase your chances to show up for the queries that you care about.

IS DYNAMIC RENDERING GOOGLE’S SOLUTION TO READING JAVASCRIPT?

As an answer to search engines difficulty with reading JavaScript, Google believes that dynamic rendering could be the answer for some sites, and released a guide on how to implement this.

Although Google confirms that dynamic rendering is not the full answer to this problem, they recommend this as a workaround solution for public JavaScript-generated content that changes rapidly, or JavaScript that uses features not currently supported by crawlers:

Dynamic rendering will allow sites to deliver a static HTML to a crawler, so they can index the page’s information, while still displaying a JavaScript-heavy page to users, in order for them to experience the page as intended.

GOOGLE’S OCTOBER ALGORITHM REVIEW

Although we saw unstable fluctuations in average rankings, one of Google’s daily algorithm updates saw a much larger spike in fluctuations than on any other day. On 17th October the fluctuations had an impact across all industries according to SEO tracker tools. The only industries which seem to have been affected the least are sports, news and art & entertainment. The law & government, jobs & education and finance categories were affected the most, with other categories not far behind.

Google have said that their algorithm is constantly refreshing and that due to the large amount of updates that take place, they are unable to provide information on what changes have been made each day. As Google have not released a statement on what caused these fluctuations, we are unable to see the cause of this. Daily fluctuations were seen across October and we will possibly see this throughout December too.

GOOGLE SHUTS DOWN GOOGLE+

Google announced on 8th October that they will be closing Google+ over a 10 month period to give users full opportunity to transition, with an aim to close the site by the end of August 2019.

Released in 2011, Google+ was Google’s answer to social media, after dominating the search engine market in the early 2000’s, taking over the online video industry in 2006, and surpassing Internet Explorer as the top web browser in 2012.

However, poor uptake by users has led Google to pull the plug on Plus. And so social won’t be an area that Google will compete in.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS ANNOUNCES NEW PRODUCTS FEATURE

Spotted by an SEO and posted on Twitter, Google has released a product collection and product menu on selected Google My Business accounts. This feature replaces the services menu and will allow users to add a product collection, along with products within the collection.

Google is yet to release any documentation providing more information on this feature or when it will be released from beta.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS RELEASES NEW MIGRATION TOOL & BRANDED INSIGHTS

Announced on 22nd October via Twitter, Google’s new migration tool will allow users with organisation accounts to easily migrate locations from a personal account into the organisation account.

Users have the option to remove the transferred locations from the personal account or keep the locations on both the personal and organisation account, Google recommends that locations are removed from the personal account and the personal account is added to the organisation account in order for the account the view the properties for the best experience. Other information on the organisation account migration tool includes:

  • Locations from several personal accounts can be added to the organisation account.
  • Users who opt to keep locations available on both the personal and organisation accounts, when a property is added on the personal account, this will not also be added to the organisation account.
  • Location transfer requests will only work for transferring locations from a personal to an organisation account, users will not be able to transfer locations between organisation accounts.

Google has also implemented the ability to see branded searches within the Google My Business insights. Branded searches will be classed differently to direct searches (a customer directly searching for the business’ name) and will display within the chart of the dashboard.

GOOGLE MAPS ALLOWS USERS TO CONNECT WITH BUSINESSES BY FOLLOWING THEM

Google announced on the 24th October via their blog, ‘The Keyword’, that users will be able to follow businesses within the Google Maps app in order to receive updates which will be displayed within a ‘For You’ tab in the app.

Businesses that are not yet open will also be able to connect with users before their open date. The business’ profile can be visible to users up to three months in advance of opening. This can be used to tease the opening date, make users aware of any opening events or keep people updated on the types of products or services soon to be provided.

NEW BOOK AND SCHEDULE BUTTONS INTRODUCED TO LOCAL GOOGLE RESULTS

Google has expanded on giving mobile users access to call a company from the local pack listings and has implemented ‘book’ and ‘schedule’ buttons which allow users to book or schedule a service within the ‘Reserve with Google’ platform.

Google has a full list of booking software companies that work with ‘Reserve with Google’ along with a list of companies they will soon be working with.

PUBLIC TESTING STARTS FOR GOOGLE ASSISTANT’S DUPLEX TECHNOLOGY

After Google’s incredible unveiling of Google Duplex, a new artificial intelligence to be implemented within Google Assistant that can converse with businesses on behalf of the user in order to accomplish tasks such as book a table at a restaurant or make an appointment at a hairdressers, Google has released a blog post confirming that they will begin public testing for Google Pixel users at restaurants within New York, Atlanta, Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Area.

We’re more than intrigued to see how this develops in the future!

SEO MARKET UPDATES: SEPTEMBER 2018

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

SEARCH CONSOLES RECEIVES A NEW LICK OF PAINT

On 4th September, Google announced on their Webmaster Central Blog that they’ve now fully released the new Google Search Console interface from beta testing.

Welcome to the new search console

The new Google Search Console interface was originally released at the start of January 2018. Alongside aesthetic updates, the main change this brought to the functionality of GSC was the ability for SEOs to download sixteen months of data – a large increase from three-months which was previously available.

Along with fully releasing Google Search Console from beta, Google has also implemented a ‘test live’ function within the URL inspection tool. This will now allow users to inspect live versions of a page rather than only being able to inspect the latest indexed version.

Not all features are available from the old Google Search Console within the new interface, but Google is still allowing users to use the old interface to utilise these missing tools.

BING INTRODUCES AMP SUPPORT

Bing released a blog post on 19th September announcing that it’s introducing Bing AMP viewer and Bing AMP cache, which enable AMP web pages to load almost instantly via Bing’s mobile search results.

As an average 30% of mobile users will bounce from a page that does not load within three seconds, the speed boost will bring a range of benefits to well-optimised sites.

Bing AMP NASA Example

Bing started rolling out its AMP viewer and AMP carrousel in the US on 17th September, for the news carrousel only, and will continue to roll this out across more sites and countries in the future.

GOOGLE ADDS CAPTIONS AND GOOGLE LENS TO IMAGE SEARCH

Announced on 27th September – the same day as Google’s 20th anniversary – Google Images received a couple of updates as a result of Google’s quest to make visual content more useful.

In order to make image search both more powerful and versatile, Google has added image captions, providing details of the page – such as the page title and site name – to give users a better understanding of the page behind the image.

Google will also be implementing Google Lens within image search. Once a user selects Google Lens on an image, Lens will detect objects within an image, allow the user to select any of them and provide similar images to it. Failing this, the user can draw on the image to select a desired area and will be presented with relevant images based on their choice.

Google Lens

 

Although this feature is not currently available, Google has stated that this will receive a full release within coming weeks.

Lastly, following in the footsteps of Instagram and Snapchat, Google has worked with the AMP Project to create AMP stories. This feature is currently only available for celebrities and utilises AI to create a timeline of facts and important moments of their life.

SMART ANSWERS BEGIN APPEARING IN SEARCH BOX

Within Google’s release of the latest version of their Chrome browser, they have announced that ‘smart answers’ can now appear within the search box. These answers can range from displaying rich results, providing local weather and translating foreign words.

Google Omnibox Example

GOOGLE ANNOUNCES SMALL ALGORITHM CHANGE

Finally, Google confirmed the release of a small algorithm update on 27th September.

Unlike the broad core update which took place on 1st August, Google considered this update less impactful, and didn’t cover it on their blog. However, it was noticed by SEOs due to shifts in site traffic and rankings.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s public search liason, commented:

Keep checking in with the Fusion blog for more updates from the leading services and suppliers in SEO today. 

SEO MARKET UPDATES: AUGUST 2018

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE ANONYMOUS QUERIES

Google updated how anonymous queries are displayed within Search Console, the result of which is that anonymous queries will no longer be included in chart totals when a “query not containing” filter has been applied.

These anonymous queries are queries submitted by only a few users as these can sometimes contain personal identifying information. These queries can equate to a small or large amount of data depending on the site, which can lead to a noticeable drop for some sites when viewing exclusionary query data such as non-brand terms.

GOOGLE BROAD CORE UPDATE

We covered the initial release of the broad core update in our July Blog, but wanted provide an update on how this has affected organic search results within August. This update, unlike Google’s focused updates that take place daily, focuses on a more general, widespread change which takes all aspects of SEO into consideration. The update caused some large fluctuations in rankings across many industries. Moz provided a week 1 cast of how the updated affected each industry via their MozCast system, this chart provides a breakdown of the top 20 categories that were affected by temperature (the hotter the temperature, the more Google rankings have changed).

MozCast Broad Core Results Week 1

NEW GOOGLE SCHEMA COMING SOON

During the Google Dance Singapore even Google revealed that they are currently testing three new types of display for the Q&A, FAQ and HowTo Schemas. Previews of the new displays show snippets filing the entire screen of a mobile results page, with an option to click and expand the answers or instructions.

A Google spokesperson released the following statement via Search Engine Land: “We’re always looking for new ways to provide the most relevant, useful results for our users. We’ve recently introduced new ways to help users understand whether responses on a given Q&A or forum site could have the best answer for their question. By bringing a preview of these answers onto Search, we’re helping our users more quickly identify which source is most likely to have the information they’re looking for. We’re currently working with partners to experiment with ways to surface similar previews for FAQ and How-to content.”

BING INTELLIGENT SEARCH UPDATE: HOTEL BOOKING, HOME SERVICES AND COUPONS

Bing announced on 3rd August, the release of 3 new intelligent search features all designed to help users save money. Bing’s hotel booking feature was originally released in May; now, in order to make this tool more powerful, Bing have implemented intelligent tips, a price trends view, and a comparison view.

Intelligent tips are displayed at the bottom of the feature panel and will provide users with information such as higher rated hotels at the same rate near the ones currently being searched for, whether there are cheaper hotels that are further away from the search radius, alongside further tips on saving money or having a better experience.

Bing Hotel Booking Feature

Bing also provides historical price trends within the date range users are searching to provide a view of times in which prices can typically fluctuate, this will allow them to make a more informed decision of when to book the hotel.

Bing hotel price trend data

A Price comparison overview has been added which breaks down hotel information and allows users to compare information such as hotel class, Wi-Fi and the hotels distance from key areas such as the airport.

Bing hotel price comparison

In addition, a new home servicing intelligent view allows users to determine the price range of service providers such as painters and plumbers for particular tasks like painting a 300sq. ft. fence. Due to the data for this being provided by Porch, it looks like this service is currently only going to be available to the US.

Bing service cost guide

Bing will now aggregate deals from first and third parts listings and display these when users search for retailers or coupons.

Bing coupons

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS MENU & SERVICE EDITOR

Allowing business to display services such as food menus and service lists with pricing via Google My Business has been a feature that Google have held in beta since April. However, in August, they announced that this feature will now be available to all relevant business via the Google My Business forums and will available for the following businesses:

  • Food and drink businesses can list menu items under “Menu.”
  • Health and beauty businesses can list services under “Services.”
  • Services businesses can list services under “Services.”

GOOGLE CAMEOS APP

Google released its ‘Cameos’ app at the start of August which allows celebrities to record short video responses to questions which are currently split into 3 categories; most asked questions about the celebrity, questions from fans and trending topics (e.g. what is International Women’s Day about?). These videos also show up within Google search results, but currently only display on mobile results for users within the US.

SEO MARKET UPDATES: JULY 2018

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

GOOGLE ROLLS OUT HTTP “NOT SECURE” UPDATE

On 24th July, Google confirmed via the Chrome Developers twitter account and Google blog post that any site not encrypted with HTTPS will be marked as “not secure”.

https://twitter.com/ChromiumDev/status/1021806746283651072

Google initially started to crack down on unencrypted sites in 2015 by prioritising HTTPS pages within the SERPs, which soon escalated into adding the “not secure” marker to any unencrypted password fields. This increasing implementation of warnings has now resulted in any unencrypted site receiving the “not secure” marker starting in the latest version on Chrome (68).

Google’s efforts to create a safer browsing experience for users have been extremely successful so far, with roughly 83% of the top 100 sites on the web now using HTTPS, up from 37% just two years prior.

The next step in Google’s campaign will come in October 2018, with plans to implement a red “not” secure warning when users enter data on any unencrypted page, which will be accompanied by the removal of the “secure” tag from HTTPS pages.

GOOGLE’S NEW SCHEMA MARKUP

In July Google announced support for the Speakable Schema.org property which can be used to identify sections within a webpage that are suited best for text-to-speech. This schema is currently in beta and is limited to valid news sites, and is also only available on Google Home devices for English speakers with the U.S.

The content guidelines from Google recommend that data is structured in the following ways when writing content for Speakable:

  • Content should have concise headlines and summaries that provide users with useful information.
  • If the top of the story is included within the Speakable structured data, it is recommended that the information is broken up into individual sentences to allow to content to read clearly in text-to-speech.
  • For optimal user experience, it is recommended to provide 20-30 seconds of content per section of Speakable structured data.

Although currently limited to valid news sites it’s expected that the mark-up will become available for all sites in the near future, allowing businesses to ensure that their site is primed for the increasing use of voice search.

GOOGLE’S SEARCH QUALITY RATING GUIDELINES UPDATE

Google released an updated edition of the search quality rating guidelines on 20th July. The extensive, 164 page PDF document provides a full guide for Google’s 10,000+ quality raters worldwide to adhere to.These raters evaluate and rate the quality of pages that appear in the top results on SERPs for lists of searches they are contracted to perform.

In this update of the search quality guidelines Google place more focus on the importance of the “beneficial purpose” of webpages, with a particular emphasis on flagging clickbait, fake news, conspiracy theories and pages which spread hate as low quality. Google has also placed a new focus on the authors of content, with quality raters required to research, evaluate and factor in the reputation of authors when rating a website or webpage.

GOOGLE’S BROAD CORE UPDATE

On August 1st Google released a new update to their broad core algorithm. Unlike Google’s “focused updates”, which are daily changes designed to focus on specific objectives like site speed or security, the broad core update is a more general widespread change to the algorithm, and is confirmed to be rolling out globally.

On Twitter, Google’s Danny Sullivan provided some clarification on the purpose of the update but ultimately confirmed that from an SEO perspective, there is no specific ‘fix’ for any traffic fluctuations this may cause.

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1024771254501306369?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Instead, Google has continued to place emphasis on the importance of “high quality content”, suggesting that SEOs take a “broad” approach to improvement that considers factors laid out within the official search quality rater guidelines.

Google states that it will continue to release core algorithm updates several times a year, to further tailor the SERPs towards their ideology of sites that provide the best user experience based on the request of the user.

NEW DATASET SCHEMA

On 31st July, Google released a blog post announcing its support for the dataset schema, making it possible for websites to display charts, tables or data directly within search results.

Within the blog, Google informed that “news organisations that publish data in the form of tables can add additional structured data to make the dataset parts of the page easier to identify for use in relevant search features”.

The below is an example from Google of what the dataset schema looks like:

Dataset Schema Example

Google explain that the purpose of this mark-up is to improve discovery of datasets from fields such as life sciences, social sciences, machine learning, civic and government data and more. Google states that the below site features can qualify as a dataset:

  • A table or a CSV file with some data
  • An organized collection of tables
  • A file in a proprietary format that contains data
  • A collection of files that together constitute some meaningful dataset
  • A structured object with data in some other format that you might want to load into a special tool for processing
  • Images capturing data
  • Files relating to machine learning, such as trained parameters or neural network structure definitions
  • Anything that looks like a dataset to you

GOOGLE’S MOBILE PAGE SPEED UPDATE

Following the initial announcement of 17th January 2018, Google confirmed via the Google Webmasters twitter account on 9th July that the page speed update was being rolled out.

https://twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1016276644321996800

Google states the update will only impact mobile rankings on what it considers to be a small percentage of the slowest websites on the internet.

Page speed has been an important optimisation factor within Google’s search results on desktop for years, with conclusive evidence from studies conducted by Google confirming that users find page speed as important on mobile. Alongside the move to mobile first indexing, the update reflects Google’s continuing focus on maximising user experience for mobile searchers.

GOOGLE UPDATE HREFLANG USAGE DOCUMENT

In early July Aleyda Solis, founder of Search Engine Land, discovered that Google had quietly updated their official documentation on hreflang usage to expand on existing guidelines and resources.

https://twitter.com/aleyda/status/1014993990125572096?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1014993990125572096&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seroundtable.com%2Fgoogle-updates-hreflang-official-documentation-26006.html

If a site has multiple versions of a page for different languages or regions, using hreflang code will help Google point users to the most appropriate version of the page by language or region.

In the new documentation, Google recommends indicating alternate pages for the following scenarios:

  • When keeping the main content in a single language and translating only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content, like forums, typically do this.
  • If content has small regional variations with similar content, in a single language. For example, a site might have English-language content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland.
  • If a site is fully translated into multiple languages. For example, both German and English versions of each page may exist.

SEO Market Updates: June 2018

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates. 

New ‘URL Inspection Tool’ released within Google Search Console

Google confirmed through the official Google Webmasters twitter account in late June that a new URL inspection tool had been released in Google Search Console:

https://twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1011215993602011137

Once provided with a URL that you own, the ‘URL Inspection Tool’ will provide crawl, index and serving information to allow users to check if an URL is being displayed. If errors are found within the URL, the tool will provide an error report detailing what issues it has found.

Google My Business Agency Dashboard

Google has released a new dashboard which allows agencies to access and manage multiple Google My Business listings from a single page.

Using the Google My Business agency dashboard, agencies will now be able to access the following features:

  • Manage all locations under one account: Manage thousands of locations within a single account rather than being limited to 100 locations per account.
  • Send and receive invitations to manage listings: Send, receive and manage invitations within a dedicated section of the agency dashboard.
  • Location groups: All locations within an organisation are required to be held within a location group to simplify location management. Agencies can send/receive invitations to co-manage customer’s locations group listings.
  • User groups: Create and manage groups of users to easily manage access to certain locations groups.
  • Search: Quickly search for locations within the account or specific location group.

Google Search Consoles API now has access to 16 Months of Data

Although Google has provided users with sixteen months of historical data since the release of the new Google Search Console interface, a tweet from the Google Webmasters account confirmed in mid-June that users can now access this volume of data through the Search Console Analytics API. As a consequence, sixteen months of data can now be integrated within CMS and other tools:

Bing Announce Support for JSON-LD within Webmaster Tools

A month after Bing started supporting JSON-LD markup, Bing’s principal program manager, Fabrice Canel, announced extended support for JSON-LD markup within Bing Webmaster Tools during his appearance at SMX Advanced.

Bing Webmaster Tools announcement of JSON-LD support

 

This will now allow users to enter their JSON-LD code into Bing Webmaster’s markup validator and receive debugging information.

SEO Market Updates: April 2018

Broad core Google algorithm update

Google confirmed via the Google SearchLiaison Twitter account that a broad algorithm update went out in the month of April:

This follows on from another broad update that went in last month. Google followed up this tweet by saying that there is no way to fix pages that may have lost performance from this update, but to instead keep on building good content.

The fluctuations from the update in search results lasted more than 10 days, appearing to begin on 17 April. Because this was a core update, it was not given an identifiable name and does not appear to target anything in particular.

Google replaces pagination with a “More results” button on mobile

Google have launched a change to their pagination on iOS and Android devices. Next and previous buttons have been replaced with a single “More results” button.

Instead of taking the user to a new page, the new feature loads the next set of results directly below the current set. When ads are loaded, these get inserted where the top of the next page would previously have been.

There have been mixed reactions to this change. Some SEOs said that this new functionality gives a poor user experience, while others said that it could make it more likely that users will make it to the second set of results than previously.

Google My Business adds lists of services

Google My Business has added a new feature within the management interface that allows some listing owners to create a list of their services for each map listing.

This was announced in mid-April on the Google My Business Help forums. It is available in addition to the food menu editor that is available for restaurants.

The service menu can be created and edited from the Google My Business dashboard. The menu must be created in sections and items can contain a name, price and description.

Editing the service menu in the Google My Business dashboard interface.

SEO Market Updates: March 2018

Google rolling out mobile-first indexing to more sites

Google has confirmed in a blog post that they have begun migrating sites that follow mobile best practices over to mobile-first indexing.

Some sites are now beginning to receive notifications in their Google Search Console properties that the site has been migrated:

Mobile-first indexing enabled notification in Google Search Console.

Google said that sites with content that doesn’t follow mobile best practice need not worry about this change, but also recommended that they begin to make their content mobile-friendly.

Google core update in early March

Our rank tracking tools detected very high volatility in the search engine results from 2 March to 10 March. Here’s what that looked like in SEMrush:

SEMrush graph of core Google algorithm update in early March.

There was a lot of chatter on the SEO forums during this time from webmasters that saw drastic changes in their traffic. Google confirmed that this was a core algorithm update on 12 March:

Google have not provided a name with which to reference this update.

Captions added to Google Images, taken from page titles

Google has added captions to their image results on mobile. The captions reflect the title of the page from which the image is sourced.

The new captions on Google Image Search.

The caption also contains the site’s domain. The caption previously contained only the domain. Adding the title gives the image more context; it also means that page titles have become even more important than before.

Bing adds support for JSON-LD schema

Bing confirmed to John Henshaw on Twitter that they now support parsing of JSON-LD schema metadata. Search Engine Land also received confirmation of the support.

https://twitter.com/henshaw/status/969740948166070272

Google has supported JSON-LD for the past 2 years and has recommended it for most of this time. Previously, Bing has only supported Microdata and RDFa.

Bing said that they are in the process of updating their schema verification in Bing Webmaster Tools to reflect this change.

SEO Market Updates: February 2018

Google Chrome to display “Not Secure” warning for non-HTTPS sites starting July 2018

Over the past few years, movements have been started to make the web more secure. Most recently, Google announced that they would begin to mark sites that are using insecure HTTP connections as “Not Secure” via a label in the address bar in the Chrome browser.

Pages with password fields served over HTTPS are already marked as “Not Secure”, but starting July 2018, all HTTP will be labeled. Install your security certificates now!

Possible major Google algorithm update

click for full size

SEMrush Sensor and other SERP tracking tools were showing high volatility in the search results around 20 February, leading many to believe that this was another major Google algorithm update. However, discussion in search forums leaves a general uncertainty over what this update might be targeting.

Google responded to comment with the usual statement that they make multiple minor updates every week.

“View image” and “Search by image” removed from Google Images

In the past month, Google has removed the “View image” and “search by image” button from image search results. This is in response to a new partnership between stock image provider Getty Images and Google, after Getty Images complained that they may be losing revenue since searchers are able to access images directly from search results, without ever visiting the site.

It’s now intended that searchers should view the image in the context of the site from which it originates, however, the response to these changes from Google Images users was generally negative.

Google now displays multiple featured snippets for broad search queries

Featured snippets on Google usually appear as a single box of text, a list or a table at the top of some search results pages, before the organic results; this is known as position 0. A featured snippet may appear when a page directly answers the searcher’s question.

Google has updated the display of featured snippets, so now 2 or more may be shown when the question is broad or could be answered in multiple ways. Google clarified in an article on their blog that this is to provide more “comprehensive” results. For site owners, this means even more opportunities to appear in a featured snippet.

SEO Market Updates: January 2018

New Google Search Console rolls out for more sites

Google have now opened up access for the new beta version of Google Search Console to all users.

The new interface comes with a number of improvements to user experience, as well as some new reports such as the Index Coverage report.

Until now, access to the new Search Console has been limited to a select number of beta testers. However, it was reported by SearchEngineLand on 22 January that it had become accessible to everyone.

There are still a number of bugs and some of the reports are missing while they are reconstructed. The old version will remain accessible alongside the new one for the forseeable future.

Page speed to become a mobile search ranking factor

Google announced on 17 January that they will be making updates to mobile search, meaning that mobile page speed will become a ranking factor. It is now more important than ever to audit your site and work on ensuring fast delivery of content.

The “Speed Update”, as Google called it, will come into effect in July 2018 and affect the ranking position the slowest pages in search results. This update demonstrates Google’s ongoing push for developers to deliver a better user experience.

Google also provided some tools that can be used to measure page performance, which included their own Lighthouse report and the recently updated PageSpeed Insights.

Google updates causing fluctuation throughout January

December saw a number of algorithm updates to Google search results, some of which were even confirmed by Google themselves. Updates have continued into January as webmasters reported changes in site traffic on forums; some positive, some negative.

Reports came in especially around 15 January, with search monitoring tools all showing high volatility around this date. Nothing regarding this has been confirmed by Google, but we are monitoring closely to see if anything changes.

103% increase in smart speaker sales

Adobe Digital Insights reported after their study on voice search that smart speaker sales increased 103% in Q4 2017 vs 2016. Smart speakers were very popular gifts for the recent festive season.

Voice assistant technology is improving daily and more companies are releasing new products to compete in this market. Research data reported on by SearchEngineLand shows that Google Home has now sold 44 million units in total, accounting for 40% of smart speaker sales over the holiday period.

There’s no better time than now to aim for position 0 in search results, with the majority of voice search answers coming from sites in this position.

 

SEO Market Updates: November 2017

Product card extensions

Google are trialling a new panel for product name searches, which includes a wealth of product information like critic and user reviews, shopping ads, videos, and stockist locations.

This answers several common user queries immediately without a second search.

However, it may also mean that promoting product pages organically for these searches is more difficult, as they are pushed down the page by this panel.

Mid-November Google update

Search position tracking tools were displaying high levels of fluctuation throughout November, especially on the 15th.

Some webmasters reported lots of movement with their sites; others none at all. Analysis showed that affected sites had lots of ads and thin content.

Google have not commented on this volatility.

Knowledge panel in local pack

For brands with physical locations and a knowledge graph entry, Google may now combine them when searching for the brand name.

The new display includes a list of map locations, as before, now headed with the brand name, logo and a follow button for Google Posts.

The About tab lists all the knowledge graph information, including the website link and  description from Wikipedia.

Google increases snippet length

Google have updated their SERP displays, increasing the average length of descriptive snippets shown under the links.

A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that this change was “to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches”.

It would not be necessary to update meta descriptions, however, as these longer snippets are often generated from the content in the body of the page.

SEO Market Updates: October 2017

Mobile-first index out for some sites

Webmaster Analyst Gary Illyes recently told a conference audience that Google’s mobile-first indexing has begun rolling out for “a few sites”.

Google is classifying sites based on how similar the mobile version is to the desktop version. Sites that have 100% similar versions are more likely to switch first.

Google can test the changes by rolling out to just a few sites first before the full switch next year.

Google testing blue “Instant” label

Google is testing a new label for AMP results, showing “Instant” in a blue colour instead of “AMP” in grey.

This could be a welcome change, as the average searcher may not understand the meaning of AMP or why the result is tagged as such.

We have also seen tests of the tag using only the AMP icon without accompanying text.

Book online from local listings

Google has started displaying a “Book online” button for eligible businesses in the US that have set the feature up in Google My Business.

The button integrates with 15 external booking providers and can help searchers book with a company in under 1 minute.

We hope to see this feature rolled out to other businesses in more countries soon.

Google ceases using country domains

Using Google’s country-specific domains no longer returns results for that location.

Instead, the users actual location is used, regardless of the domain used to conduct the search. Google say that this is to provide “the most useful information”.

This change affects search on both mobile and desktop. You can still change the country for the results from the preferences page.

SEO Market Updates: September 2017

Possible algorithm update on 16 September

There is a possibility, though unconfirmed, that Google pushed a major algorithm update on 16 September.

Search Engine Roundtable published observations of forum chatter around traffic changes, some down over 20%.

There were also clear signs of volatility on the SERP trackers. Google have not made a statement as to what caused this.

Apple devices use Google again

Apple will switch back to using Google for web search within Siri on iOS and Spotlight on Mac.

Search features on Apple devices were changed to use Bing back in 2014. Google and Apple have recently made an estimated $3 billion deal, but this may be separate from that.

While there is an option to change the default search engine used by the Safari address bar, users cannot change Siri’s search engine.

Google local pack “website mentions”

Google is beginning to display a label on local business listings where the business’ website mentions a specific phrase from the user’s search query.

The label is displayed underneath the business information and reads: “Their website mentions [phrase]”.

It was not previously thought that content played a part in local ranking, though this proves that Google can understand if site content is relevant to a business listing’s information.

Edit Google My Business listings on SERPs

Google have added a new feature which allows users who are logged into Google My Business to edit their listings directly from the search results.

Business owners can now manage the main display options when their local listing is displayed in search. This can be triggered by searching for the business name.

SEO Market Updates: August 2017

Chrome to show “not secure” warnings

Google has sent notifications to Search Console property owners with sites using insecure HTTP regarding plans to display a “Not Secure” warning in the address bar on pages with input fields.

This is the beginning of a long term push to increase web security by persuading sites to use the secure HTTPS protocol.

Google My Business action URL update

Google has expanded support for “action URLs” within local listings set up using Google My Business.

More business types can now set up additional URLs for online orders, reservations and appointments, which are then displayed within the listing in Maps and search.

This will make it easier for potential customers to carry out common actions with a business.

“Product” label in Google Images

Following last month’s expansion of the display of structured data in Google Image results, thumbnails which contain product information now carry a label on mobile.

At first glance, these appear like ads; however, they are instead triggered by valid Product schema markup on the target page.

Google may End support for site name

There is evidence to suggest that Google may soon cease displaying custom site names within search results.

The site name could be set up for a site by using the WebSite schema markup. The documentation for the search feature has, however, been removed from Google’s developer docs site, suggesting a change in support.

There is not yet an official comment on whether this feature has or will be removed.

SEO Market Updates: July 2017

Google switching off instant search

Google are removing the Instant Search feature after 7 years.

Launching in 2010, Google Instant Search served search results to users as they typed their query in the search field.

Google have said that they will be removing this in order to make desktop search more similar to mobile search which does not have this feature.

Google images showing more structured data

Recently Google Image Search has begun showing additional information when viewing individual image results.

This expanded recently to products, showing price and availability when certain items were searched for.

This has now expanded further to videos (showing a watch button) and recipes (showing ingredients, time and yield).

New Google SOS Alerts feature

There is a new Google feature which displays important information about an event which poses a threat to life.

The SOS alerts appear for relevant search queries and display top stories, maps of the affected location, emergency phone numbers and websites.

The data comes from well know response agencies and will provide important information to those in dangerous areas.

Messaging within Google My Business

Google is beginning to roll out a new feature for Google My Business users in the US which allows searchers to message the business directly from search results.

After setting up the service, messages can be received and responded to by the GMB manager via their phone.

Google’s Allo messaging app can be used to simplify this process.

SEO Market Updates: June 2017

Google Posts now available on GMB

Google Posts is now accessible for all businesses using Google My Business.

Updates shared on Google Posts will appear as part of the business’ map result, as well as in the web search results.

Previously, the Google Posts service was only available to presidential candidates for the American election, then later to a handful of small businesses.

Major Google Algorithm update

Tracking tools were showing high volatility in the search results near the end of June, indicating that a major Google update was likely.

RankRanger and SEMrush, amongst others, were showing high amounts of fluctuation for the sites they track, beginning on or around 25 June.

Google spokespeople have not confirmed or denied that any update occurred and there is little information on what this may be targeting.

EU Issues Google with a €2.4B fine

The EU has levelled a €2.4 billion fine against Google for it’s Shopping search, claiming that they have abused their power.

This is the conclusion of a decade-long case claiming that Google favours its own content in search results, harming competitors.

The search giant now has 90 days to offer an “equal treatment” solution or risk more fines.

Improvements to hotel search

Google has been gradually improving its hotel search with new features recently.

The updated layout now features a price range slider, a new layout with price labelling and the full number of hotels within the current view.

It is thought that these updates will help Google to compete with dedicated hotel search engines like Hotels.com and Expedia.

SEO Market Updates: May 2017

Week-long Google Update

A number of our reporting tools were showing dramatic changes for sites for a week in the middle of May.

Google spokespeople mention that they make regular updates which cause rankings to fluctuate. However, in cases like this, there is often a specific target for which they are attempting to improve the algorithm.

You can find out more on this extended algorithm update on Search Engine Roundtable.

Updated Hotel Review Features

Google have upgraded the features available in the reviews for hotels in the local listings.

Users can now see specific rating averages from different types of guests. It is also possible to filter the reviews to show only those from third-party sites like Expedia.com and Hotels.com.

Hotels have had some special functionality for a while in the ability to book and see pricing directly from the listings on Google.

Bing Introduces Business Chatbots

Microsoft is beginning to roll out automatic chatbots to local businesses. These are available to restaurants only initially and when activated they can be accessed through search Bing search results.

The chatbots use information available through Bing Places to answer the questions, otherwise referring to the business’ phone number. They will work with both Facebook Messenger and Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant.

Highlights in Local Google Listings

Some locations on Google are beginning to show highlights in their listings on mobile. These are specific perks for visiting consumers.

Examples of highlights shown include “quiet”, “good for kids”, “casual”, “good for groups”, “bar games”, “great cocktails” and “on critics’ lists”.

The data to display these highlights likely comes from responses to questions answered through the Local Guides programme.

Google is Now an Art Expert

Google has updated their Maps and Search functionality to provide more information about works of art and where they are housed.

Search results now display specific details about the artwork and the artist(s) and when the art was created.

In Maps, you can now take a virtual tour of art museums. Google have used visual recognition software to scan the walls, so each artwork is labeled with useful annotations.

SEO Market Updates: April 2017

Google Fact Check Now in Search Results

Google’s fact check schema markup, introduced during the 2016 US elections, is now out in core search and News results.

Google said: “When you conduct a search on Google that returns an authoritative result containing fact checks for one or more public claims, you will see that information clearly on the search results page.”

Any publisher can include the relevant markup on the page but Google will only display it for what it deems to be “authoritative” sources.

Google Test “Suggested Clip” for Video

A new Google feature was seen this month involving the video featured snippets.

For how-to queries, Google may suggest a portion of a video, recognising which section of the video contains the answer to the question. Clicking on the link takes you to the appropriate timestamp.

This feature cannot be replicated consistently, suggesting it is just a test.

Style Ideas and Similar Items in Image Search

Google image search results on mobile and in the Android app now display “similar items” for relevant searches.

Similar items will be displayed for a few types of products that contain Product schema markup on site. This currently only applies handbags, sunglasses and shoes, but the list will be expanding soon.

There is also an upcoming Style Ideas panel which will show similar products for certain clothing searches.

Google Owl Promotes Authoritative Content

A new Google update named Project Owl is designed to promote content with more authority.

This will be specifically beneficial around queries that could show offensive or misleading pages.

This also goes hand in hand with new feedback forms implemented for autocomplete and featured snippets.

“Best” Filter in Maps Pack

Google is beginning to filter the map results for local queries containing the words “best”, “outstanding”, “great”, etc.

When one of these searches is conducted, the 3 map locations are filtered to show only those with a 4-star rating.

This now makes reviews an even more important part of physical business’ local strategy.

15% of Google searches are unique

According to an announcement from Google, 15% of searches conducted by users daily are new and have never been searched before.

Google says that collectively it handles over 2 trillion searches per year in statistics released by them.

This reaffirmation comes after their announcement to provide more legitimate sources with Project Owl.

Google maps reminds you where you parked

Google Maps on Android and iOS can now remind you where you park your car when you set it manually upon arrival at a destination.

On adding the reminder, it is also possible to include a note and a reminder when your meter is close to running out.

Maps on iOS is already capable of automatically setting a parking location when disconnecting from USB audio or bluetooth in a new location.

SEO Market Updates: March 2017

Google’s “Fred” update disrupts SEO

An unconfirmed Google update on March 8 saw a number of sites fluctuate dramatically in rankings.

The name was coined after Google’s Gary Illyes jokingly suggested that this and all future updates should be called Fred.

Further analysis by data-collection company Sistrix identified that this update may be penalising sites with ad-heavy, low-quality content.

Google gives recommendations on SEO hiring

Google has created a new video on hiring a search engine optimisation service.

The video features Google employee Maile Ohye offering realistic advice on what to look for in an SEO service and how to sort the reliable companies from those that offer the impossible.

New podcast structured data type

Google has recently added the ability to display rich results for podcasts and their episodes in search results.

By including the appropriate markup on the podcast’s website, episode information and an embedded player can be shown directly in the SERPs.

This currently only applies to searches conducted on the Google Search app v6.5 and higher and Google Home, though support will be extending in the near future.

Google Posts program opens in US and Brazil

Google Posts is a new way for companies to pass information directly to Google. These posts then show up for relevant search queries.

The program was originally only available to a small handful of users, including the Clinton and Trump presidential campaigns. It is now being opened up to more organisations, including museums, cinemas, musicians and sports groups.

Hacked sites increased 32% in 2016

In Google’s recently published State of Website Security 2016 report, they outlined that the number of hacked sites increased 32% in 2016 compared to 2015.

This is an incentive for more webmasters to verify their sites in Google Search Console, as the platform is able to provide email notifications if the site has been compromised.

Google also documented 3 common types of hacks and how to recover from these.

SEO Market Updates: February 2017

Google Phantom algorithm update on February 7

Data collected from a number of sites shows significant ranking movements both up and down which could have been caused by an algorithm update.

Google, however, have not confirmed or denied any algorithm change. There is speculation that Google is experimenting with improvements in evaluating large pages.

Based on the data that has been analysed, there is a high chance that this change is related to content quality.

Web directory DMOZ closing down

The DMOZ web directory has announce that it will be shutting down as of 14 March 2017.

Web directories existed as a way of manually categorising pages on the web before search engines became commonplace. DMOZ launched in 1998.

In the past, Google would occasionally use meta descriptions from DMOZ when the page’s description was not appropriate.

Google Assistant coming to more phones

Google Assistant, the artificial-intelligence powered successor to Google’s voice search facility, will soon be coming to smartphones running Android 6.0 and 7.0.

While many voice search users will not see a huge difference in the new service, Google Assistant aspires to be more conversational than simple query input.

In a recent survey, 60% of voice search users wanted more direct answers instead of links to third parties.

45% of top search results are HTTPS

Mozcast is now showing that 45% of top 10 Google search results are using HTTPS.

Dr. Pete from Moz projected that 50% of the results will be HTTPS by June 2017.

With HTTPS taking over, it is more important than ever that sites which remain on the unsecure HTTP protocol make the switch in order to compete in organic search.