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.
Claim your Knowledge Graph: Here’s how
30/07/2019
Google is allowing entities to claim their Knowledge Graph panel enabling them to edit the results within it. The reason being is that Google doesn’t always get the information right and sometimes incorrect information is displayed in the graph – especially in the era of fake news – so allowing them to be claimed and edited should help improve this.
Do local citations matter anymore? Five local SEOs sound off
30/07/2019
Five SEOs weigh in on the importance of local citations and their impact on Search. TL;DR: there are currently no large scale studies that indicate the impact citations have on search, in some cases some local search agencies don’t even focus on it and consider it a low impact tactic. That being said, for a consistent user experience having the same address across the web can help.
Google swaps ‘voice search’ on Android for Google Assistant
29/07/2019
Google has changed its ‘voice search’ to Google Assistant on Android – a shift from basic voice search to an AI-driven approach and the ability to display ad in the more visual Assistant results.
Google notifying webmasters to remove noindex from robots.txt files
29/07/2019
Google is sending webmaster messages within Search Console reminding users to stop depending on the noindex in robots.txt file, which it is fully removing support for. It is important to review how sites prevent search engines indexing URLs and whether or not a noindex tag is being solely used in the robots.txt; noindex in the meta tags, 404/410 response codes, password protection, disallow in robots and Search Console Remove URL tool are alternate ways to preventing search engines indexing URLs.
Low mobile page speed scores may be killing your traffic
26/07/2019
SEL takes a look at how low mobile page speed scores may be negatively affecting search traffic and provides some tips on accessing pages found to be slow in Page Speed Insights tools: benchmark against competitors in the same tools, run competitors through traffic estimators and keep a log of top-level SEO metrics to see if your pages are being affected. To improve speed some easy fixes include removing sliders, using next-gen image formats and remove unused tracking codes.
Google short names bug persists despite Google insisting it’s fixed
26/07/2019
The Google short names bug appears to still affect Google My Business reviews, causing them to disappear when short names are added to accounts. Google stated it has fixed the problem, however, there are reports that the problem is continuing. It’s worth bearing in mind if similar issues have been experienced with GMB, as this could negatively impact search performance.
Helping publishers and users get more out of visual searches on Google Images with AMP
25/07/2019
Google has launched ‘Swipe to Visit’ for AMP-enabled sites, which allows previews of the page where an image is located within the image search results. This allows brands with high quality and optimised images to attract users to their websites and drive more traffic via the new site feature as there is no load time from image to webpage content.
Fashion Retailers Growth Report
26/07/2019
A report by Pi Datametrics has revealed the most searched fashion brand in the UK is Next, out of an analysis of 972 online retailers. However, most brands appear to have taken a hit in branded traffic compared to 2015 – New Look, in particular, has lost 33%. This correlates with the overall online retail economy in the UK seeing slower growth (and in some verticals negative growth) compared to last year.
