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 may be having issues showing new content again
16/10/2019
Google may be having problems displaying fresh content again which seems to be a recurring bug for the search engine, affecting both large and small publications and impacting overall traffic through Google Search and News.
There is hope after a site gets hit by a Google core update
16/10/2019
SEL discusses how sites that are negatively impacted by broad core Google updates can bounce back in the age of “no fix” advice from Google. The consensus is that recovery is possible, but it should be seen as a long term goal; the quality of the whole site would have to be improved, and be in place for longer than a few weeks, before the algorithm starts to improve the performance of the sites in the SERPs.
Google readies new markup rules for European news publishers
16/10/2019
Google is set to introduce a new markup for European publishers to avoid paying licensing fees for using content in their search results. Publishers need to opt into the display of snippets or will have a “bare links” snippet displayed instead, with no text or images.
Google’s voice AI resonates in the new Pixel Recorder app
15/10/2019
Google has released a new sound recording app, Recorder, on the Pixel 4 smartphone. The app uses AI to produce a written transcript of speech, allowing users to search for words and phrases, as well as other sounds such as applause and music. The app can be used to record lectures, meeting and interviews for easy review at a later date.
Crawl data analysis of 2 billion links from 90 million domains offer a glimpse into today’s web
15/10/2019
SEL released an analysis of 2 billion links from 90 million domains and found that the majority of domains on the web have low PageRank, a low number of incoming and outgoing links and a low number of host subdomains.
Which service-area business types perform best in local search?
10/10/2019
SEL reviews and analyses the Google My Business Insights Study back from July, to breakdown the key findings from the data. This provides some invaluable insights into what GMB is being used for, such as in terms of service-area searches: the overwhelming majority of businesses were found using a “discovery” search i.e. a user search for a category, product or service and the business listing appears (rather than directly searching for the business). Well worth a read if you’re heaving involved in local search.
Google showing mobile ‘search by photos’ option in selected local verticals
10/10/2019
Google appears to be showing a new mobile element “search by photos” for certain verticals; this allows users to search exclusively by the associated images for the local results.
Bing launches content submission pilot
10/10/2019
Bing is set to launch as content submission pilot which enables publishers to not only submit a URL but also content and images, allowing the search engine to see the content before crawling it.
Google: Stick to structured data guidelines if you want the rich result
10/10/2019
Google’s John Mueller has stated that in order to be eligible to be shown as a rich result you need to make sure that the pages use the correct structured data and complies with the appropriate Google policies. Even doing so, it is still not guaranteed, however, though it is always advantageous to mark up content where appropriate.
New SEO experiments: A/B split testing Google’s UGC attribute
15/10/2019
Moz conducted an experiment A/B testing Google’s UGC attributes to see if there was any impact on rankings. The test resulted in a null result i.e. not significant boost of the drop in rankings which was expected.
