Google Search Announcements: BERT, Passages & Subtopic Indexing & More
Google made a boat load of announcements last night around Google Search. Now, while some of the announcements were things already launched, many were new. Google covered changes to BERT, how it understands passages and subtopics on a page, to hummin…
Search Buzz Video Recap: Big Changes Coming To Google Search, Indexing Issues Grow, New Quality Raters Guidelines & Bing Site Explorer
It was a super busy week in the SEM world this week, a ton of things to talk about this week. Yesterday, Google announced a slew up updates, I broke down what is important for SEOs to know about including BERT updates, passage indexing…
Google: Mobile-First Indexing Should Be Mobile-Only Indexing
So yesterday during John Mueller’s keynote talk at PubCon, he summed up what has been announced over the year around SEO changes at Google. One was on the mobile-indexing changes and the deadline. That caused some confusion amongst the SEO industry t…
Google Suspends Request Indexing Feature While It Has Indexing Issues
Google announced it has suspended, temporarily, the request indexing feature, within the URL inspection tool in Search Console. It didn’t say why, outside of making infrastructure changes. But it comes at a bad time as tons of sites are complaining ab…
Google Updates Search Quality Raters Guidelines On October 14th
Google has just updated the Search Quality Raters Guidelines PDF. The last time it was updated was on December 5, 2020, which was 10 weeks and 10 days ago. The new date on this document is October 14, 2020. It has been expanded from 168 pages to 175 p…
Google Search Console Data Anomalies With Web Stories
Google had added two notations around specific data anomalies within Google Search Console with Web Stories. Both are related to Google Discover and Web Stories, one was related to the launch of Web Stories on Google Discover.
Google News Backed Up Accepting New Sites?
Google’s John Mueller said in a video he recorded on October 2, 2020 but just uploaded to the Google YouTube channel this morning that the Google News team is backed up in accepting new sites into Google News.
Coming Soon: Style Your Highlighted Answers From Google Search
Thomas Steiner, a web developer advocate at Google, said that soon you will be able to style a text fragment URL highlight on pages with the target-text pseudo class. So instead of the highlighted text being yellow, it can be blue, green, purple or wha…
Google Podcasts Manager Unlocks Podcast Search Performance
Google launched Google Podcasts Manager, which is basically the search performance reports and analytics for how well or poorly your podcasts perform in Google Search. You can set it up for your podcast at podcastsmanager.google.com/about
Google Tests Related Searches At The Top
Google seems to be testing placing the related searches feature at the top of the search results page, as opposed to the bottom of the search results page. I received two notifications from, I believe, SEOs based in India, of this yesterday.
Google Search Asking Searchers To Leave Online Purchase Reviews
It is not uncommon for Google to ask searchers to leave reviews or rate the search results here and there. But here might be a new one. Google thinks a searcher purchased at a specific retailer and when that searcher does a search for the brand, Googl…
Is There A Google Search Ranking Update Or More Indexing Issues & Fixes?
As we have been covering, the Google Search results have been pretty unstable recently. Yesterday and this morning are no different. I am getting complaints both about indexing issues and ranking changes over the past 24-hours or so and honestly, I h…
Google Key Moment In This Video With Transcriptions In Google Search
Google launched key moments where it shows “in this video” segments directly in the search results. This lets the searcher skip directly to the section of the video that aims to answer their query. Now Google seems to be testing transcriptions in the …
Google Search Tests Virtual Keyboard Again
Google seems to be testing a virtual keyboard icon in the search box on the Google home page and in the search bar after you do a search. This is a feature Google tried out in 2010 but then discontinued shortly after.
Google: Most Of The Time A Wrong Date In The Search Results Is Your Fault
A couple of years ago, we reported that Google said that with dates and times in the search results snippets, sometimes they admit they just get it wrong. But why does Google get it wrong? Gary Illyes from Google said you can almost always blame the we…
Google: Reconsideration Requests Can Take A Week To A Few Months
A question that comes up often in the SEO world is how long does it take after one submits a reconsideration request in Google Search Console to get a response. It can vary and earlier this year we seemed to have some backlogs there but John Mueller o…
Google Duplex Live For Some Haircut Appointment Bookings
VentureBeat reports that Google made the Duplex technology live for some haircut appointments, for barbershops, salons, etc. This way Google can help businesses that are shorthanded, at least with making appointments.
Google Sports Scores Stop Working In The US Yesterday
Yesterday, Google had another bug – this one was not with indexing or ranking but live sports scores. I assume there was some sort of disconnect between the data provider for some of the sports scores and Google search.
Bing Webmaster Tools Now Supports Arabic & Hebrew Languages
Bing Webmaster Tools now supports languages that go from right-to-left, like Arabic and Hebrew. Fabrice Cabal from Microsoft Bing wrote on Twitter “If you didn’t notice yet, Bing Webmaster Tools is now also available in Right-To-Left languages as Arab…
Another Google Webmaster Virtual Conference Coming February 2021
The next Google Webmaster virtual conference is already being worked on by Martin Splitt and Google friends. Martin said it is expected to happen in about four months from now, in February 2021.