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.
Understanding searches better than ever before
25/10/2019
Google announced it was introducing a large change to search which it says will affect the results for 1 in 10 queries, naming the change BERT. The update aims to to help computers understand search queries in a similar way to humans do i.e. the nuances and context of language and how they can be related to more relevant results.
Goodbye, Flash
28/10/2019
Google announced it will stop supporting Flash in the web browsers. This is an old form of content that likely won’t affect the vast majority of the web, though on the off chance something is still using Flash, it should be updated to use HTML5 or newer forms of JS.
Why you may not have noticed the Google BERT update
28/10/2019
With the introduction of BERT by Google, SEL rounds up what the ranking tools have reported. TL;DR nothing appears to have changed. Though this may have been due to the nature of the queries the update focused on i.e. conversational, longer queries, whereas the tools track shorter-tail terms.
What does Google Maps ‘incognito mode’ mean for businesses?
28/10/2019
Google recently announced it was allowing Android users to do incognito searches within Google Maps, meaning activity will not be saved on their Google accounts. SEL discusses how this may impact businesses, as the change has the potential to gain around 35% pick up from users (current percentage of users using other incognito modes in web browsers).
Five factors that determine the overall page quality
25/10/2019
SEW analyses the factors that determine the overall page quality based on the Search Quality Raters; humans that Google hires to rate page quality. This includes looking at the purpose of the page, E.A.T., content quality, clear information and website reputation.
Creating SEO-friendly how-to content
24/10/2019
SEW runs through how to create SEO friendly how-to content, this covers the research, using “how-to” structured data, optimising the page elements, visualising the content and tracking it’s performance.
Google: internal PageRank sculpting is a waste of time
29/10/2019
Google’s John Mueller has stated that using the nofollow link attribute for internal PageRank sculpting is a waste of time.
Google: links with diminishing traffic are not any less valuable
29/10/2019
Google Webmasters twitter account has said that diminishing traffic from a link doesn’t impact the value of that link in terms of search performance.
