Each week 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.
Find and book vacation rentals, with help from Google
26/03/2019
Google has added vacation rentals to its Hotel Search in the mobile UI, in some cases users can book directly through Google and pay via Google Pay. This means that rentals can compete directly with hotels within the same interface.
This year in Search Spam – Webspam report 2018
21/03/2019
Google released its Webspam Report 2019, highlighting trends across 2018. This included a reduction in the number of hacked sites compared to 2017, reduction in user-generated spam, 4 million manual action messages being sent out and poor linking methods were made less effective.
Google hasn’t supported rel=next/prev for a while (thanks for telling us)
21/03/2019
Google has let webmasters know that it had stopped supporting the rel-next/prev markups…several years ago, but didn’t tell anyone. The recommendation from Google is to put all content onto a single page rather than split, however multi-part is fine as long as it’s what’s best for users. The mark-up can still be used by other search engines so it is still worth using and not removing altogether.
The Top Retailers Lost Over $60M This Past Holiday Season
22/03/2019
Applause released a report revealing its finding from testing more than 50 of the top retail sites in the US, UK and Germany and comparing the customer satisfaction in each region. The report identified more than 3,000 bugs and UX issues that could impact revenue and found the UK to be the weakest across the board with the highest bug count (45%), followed by the US (32%) and Germany (23%). The US led the way in having the best user experience and functionality followed by Germany and lastly the UK.
Google: Accents In URLs Work Fine For Google
26/03/2019
Google has reiterated that accents in URLs will work fine in Google Search, but warned that sometimes tools may have issues tracking them.
Revealing The Google March 2019 Core Update Survey Results
26/03/2019
SEO Round Table has revealed the results of its March Core Update survey which appears to indicate that more sites were impacted negatively than positively with some sites seeing recoveries, but not all, from a previous core update. It appears that the category of site that was impacted most skewed largely towards ‘health’.
Optimizing for Searcher Intent Explained in 7 Visuals
23/03/2019
Moz released a guide to understanding searcher intent using a number of graphics and how these can be actioned to help map keywords to user intent.
