SEO Wash-up Monday 3rd February

Google

Google displays ‘Get more reviews’ for local knowledge panels – They have changed the button for the local knowledge panel from ‘write a review’ to ‘get more reviews’ for businesses managers. So when you click the new button, it will then provide you a way to share reviews for your business, rather than taking you to write a review. Users have said that this is a big improvement over the ‘write a review’ button that used to appear and wrongly prompt business owners to review themselves.

Google snippet shows “list includes” for list based content – There has been chatter and screen shots shared on social media which shows Google adding “list includes” to a snippet. The show the listed items but titling those lists in the snippet with ‘list includes. Although this is not on desktop but currently is on mobile.

Data issues with Google’s search console URL parameter – A spokesman from Google has confirmed that there is an issue with the data being displayed in the URL parameter tool within the old Google Search Console. This means that the tool is showing sometimes zero and often less than it should, URL parameter settings for the sites that have configured them.

There has been chatter on forums as to if something has been changed in GSC’s URL Parameter handling area. As they are seeing little to no parameters where there was over 100 parameters for large e-commerce websites.

Google search console crawl stats report data has been fixed – It seems that Google has fixed the delayed data in the crawl stats report within their search console. There has been an issue since December, but as of now it has been fixed. The report now been updated to show data as recent as a few days ago. A three-day delay is a normal delay for those reports in Google Search Console.

FAQ schema must be on page for Google – A spokesman from Google has stated that you shouldn’t use FAQ schema for PDF documents. It was mentioned on social media that the FAQ should be visible on the page and reflect the primary object on the page. So if you have it displayed on the page as well as a PDF then that should be fine. However, the FAQ schema must reference was is on the HTML page.