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.
Keywords in generic top-level domains won’t help you rank better
15/09/2020
Google’s John Mueller has stated that top-level domains with keywords, such as ‘.jobs’, do not get any bonuses to search rankings; they are treated in the same way as a ‘.com’ would be treated. The exception is the country code Top-Level Domain (TLD), such as ‘.uk’, which is used as a strong indicator that the site is intended for a certain country.
How to earn your place in Google’s index in 2020
14/09/2020
Search Engine Land (SEL) looks at the most common indexing problems and how to identify them. This includes Uniform Resource Locator (URL) indexing, mobile-first related partial-indexing, JavaScript related partial-indexing and layout based partial indexing.
More Google Search bugs: top stories indexing snag, coverage report delays
14/09/2020
SEL rounds up the latest issues with Google Search, including an indexing issue on 11th September and an ongoing Coverage report issue that is delaying data by about two weeks. It is important to bear these issues in mind as they may have an impact on reporting.
Local businesses can highlight COVID-19 ‘health & safety’ measures with Google My Business
10/09/2020
Google has introduced its own ‘health & safety’ attributes relating to COVID-19 for Google My Business (GMB), Search and Maps. This allows businesses to reassure customers that they have safety measures in place.
How Google delivers reliable information in Search
10/09/2020
Google has summarised changes made over the past year to Google Search, Google News, and language processing, as well as autocomplete and fact checking through Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). Their aims have been to return results that are as relevant and reliable as possible, with a particular focus on ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL) searches, with health being a major concern especially amid the US elections and the ongoing pandemic.
How content consolidation can help boost your rankings
10/09/2020
SEL looks at how consolidating content can help improve search rankings. This covers a situation where newer content is overlapping with older content on a site, which effectively could lead to multiple pages competing with the same terms.
Google says you can recover from core updates without a new core update
09/09/2020
Google’s John Mueller has stated that if a site has been negatively impacted by a core algorithm update, there is still a path to recovery before the next update. The data and signals between core updates are in fact refurbished regularly. Thus, assuming improvements have been made, it is therefore possible to improve performance before the next major core update.
Bing Webmaster Tools makes it easy to edit and verify your robots.txt
04/09/2020
Bing has released a new robots.txt tester with makes it easier to check for crawling issues that may arise for search engine crawlers.
