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.
Google Search Console adds Android app filters to performance report
08/04/2019
Google announced it is introducing an Android app filter to the performance report in Search Console, allowing webmasters to analyse traffic coming through from Android apps.
New types of answers from your Google Assistant on Android
05/04/2019
Google is introducing new range of imagery and types of content to Google Assistant which appear to harmonise the results with the mobile search results. This includes more images, save buttons, graphical charts and other enhanced content to make browsing more useful and engaging.
What killing rel=prev/next means for SEO
04/04/2019
SEL runs through what it means for webmasters now that Google has confirmed it no longer supports the rel=next/prev. This includes a brief history and recommending the markups don’t need to be removed; according to Google’s Web Performance Engineer Ilya Grogorik, Googlebot is smart enough to find the next/previous pages, but bear in mind other search engines may still use them. It is recommended most content is located on the first page in a category and as many items included as possible without hurting speed.
Search Console reporting for your site’s Discover performance data
10/04/2019
Google announced it is adding Discover performance data to Search Console, allowing webmasters to view traffic through from the Discover feed.
Google de-indexing issue now fully resolved
10/04/2019
On 4th April Google inadvertently dropped pages from its search index, but has since resolved the issue. This may have resulted in a loss of organic traffic/revenue between the 4th and 11th April 2019.
How Bad Was Google’s De-indexing Bug?
11/04/2019
Moz released a more detailed analysis into the Google de-indexing bug which concluded that around 4% of sites could have been affected, but long term it’s likely the effects will be minimal.
Links as a Google Ranking Factor: A 2019 Study
10/04/2019
Moz conducted its fourth study into the correlation between links and rankings; TL;DR links still correlate with rankings, but there is an indication that the nature and quality of those links matter too.
A survival kit for SEO-friendly JavaScript websites
09/04/2019
SEW released a guide to JavaScript and SEO. This covers challenges JS can create for SEO, client- and server-side rendering, how Google handles site crawling, detecting client-side rendered content and the solutions to ensuring these challenges don’t become an SEO issue.
