Every fortnight the Croud SEO team collate the latest news from relevant sources around the web so you don’t have to. Read through the top SEO news stories for this week below and follow us on Twitter or sign up to our newsletter.
Google My Business offers more flexibility with business hours
04/06/2020
Google My Business is offering more flexibility in how businesses can display their operating hours, as many now start to reopen with social distancing rules. This includes options for setting up special times for elderly, pick up etc.
How to adapt SEO strategies for the zero-click search landscape
08/06/2020
SEW looks at how to cope with the increasing prevalence of zero click searches, which now make up 55% of all searches on Google. This includes how to approach keyword research, targeting featured snippet positions, optimising content on Google’s property, incorporating structured data and using relevant images.
Google launches featured snippet to web page content highlight feature
03/06/2020
Google has launched a feature that enables searchers to see the text used in featured snippets; highlighting it within the webpage after it has been clicked on. This could increase the number of users skipping CTAs on those sites and moving straight to the highlighted content.
Google confirmed indexing issues causing some stale results
02/06/2020
Google has confirmed that there were some indexing issues within Google Search that may have caused SERPs to lack fresh content – an issue that appears to be a recurring problem for Google recently. It has since been corrected, but may have impacted sites that released new content or breaking news.
Common JavaScript errors that can harm your SEO [Video]
02/06/2020
Martin Splitt, search developer advocate at Google, released a video highlighting common JS errors that can impact a sites search performance. This includes issues such as blocking search engines from viewing JS scripts in the robots.txt and relying on JS for functionality that does not require it.
Bing Webmaster Tools now gives you competitive link data
02/06/2020
Bing has announced on Twitter that they are opening up access to link data again, not only for your own site, but for competitor sites also. This could prove a useful tool in competitor backlink analysis and spotting opportunities.
How we fought Search spam on Google – Webspam Report 2019
09/06/2020
Google has released its annual webspam report, highlighting that it had managed to shut down more than 90% of link spam, that user generated spam saw little growth in 2019 (after the 2018 crackdown) and that the impact of spammy sites has been reduced by 60%.
Google Search Console performance report gets recipe filters
09/06/2020
Google has added a recipe filter to the performance reports in Search Console, this includes Recipe Gallery and Recipe rich results. This should provide greater flexibility when refining reports and details on how well recipe structured data is performing.
Data roundup: Resources to help you market more effectively during COVID-19
09/06/2020
SEL has put together a list of resources that can provide insights to improve your search campaigns during the pandemic. This includes tools to help understand consumer trends and audiences insights, and should prove useful for search campaign planning.
