SEO Wash-up Monday 4th December

SEO Wash-up Monday 4th December

Google can penalize publishers and webmasters if they have misleading event mark-ups

If you are a publisher or webmaster and use event markup in a misleading way, then Google has a warning up where they can remove the ability for your website to show the rich snippets in search results.

A recent update from Google has clarified the guidelines around the use of event markup, this is due to it getting a lot of feedback from users stating that publishers and webmasters are misusing the markup rich snippets.

Google has said that using the Event markup to describe something that is not an event will create a bad user experience, by triggering a rich result for something that will happen at a particular time, despite no actual event being present.

If you do misuse the markup then Google will take manual action in these cases. This is where someone who works at Google will flag or mark your website for not following the Google guidelines. In some cases, it can result in structed data markup for the whole site not being used for search results rather than the usual that is ranking demotion.

For instance you do get a manual action against your website, then you will find a notification on your search console account, and if you think it is wrong or think that you have done nothing wrong then you can take the corrective action and submit a reconsideration request through the notification.

An increase in the length of snippets in Google search results

Google has officially rolled out a change to the way it displays snippets on their search results. Snippets are the description of a business page that is shown below the URL in an organic search result, snippets usually help show how it relates to the users search enquiry.

Google has said that they have recently made changes to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, this helps people to understand how pages are relevant to their searches and queries. IN doing so, this has resulted the snippets in becoming slightly longer on average.

You may have realised over the week that the snippets were longer than what is usually typically shown. However, when it comes to updating your meta descriptions, you do not need to. Google has not recommend doing so as of yet. Snippets are generated based on the users question or query and the content can be found both in your meta description and available content on the actual page.

 

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