SEO Wash-up Monday 6th August

Google Updates

Google link operator is no longer supported – Some are still asking about the Google link operator, but there was an official announcement that the Google link operator is no longer working. This was confirmed back in January last year that Google no longer supports this search operator.

‘Recently viewed’ in Google Local search panel – There is a personalized feature in Google search that shows a carousel feature in search, which shows “you recently viewed” these places in Google search and “only you can see this.”

Google search algorithm update – There seems to be chatter about a big update that may be starting in the Google search results. Although it’s still early to say but within the SEO community, they are mentioning that this one might be a very big one, and most of the tracking tools aren’t even picking it up yet. Based on the number of posts and what they are saying within the SEO community in a short time period, it can be a glitch or it can be a new algorithm update that is causing a shift in the core rankings in Google.

Datasets Schema Now Live – Google has released information that they are rolling out datasets schema in the search results. You may have seen this coming as Google did launch something similar in 2016 called science datasets. In comparison to that, it is the same help document with some added content. Google mentions that they have identified an opportunity to improve how tabular data appears in Google Search and in doing so make it easier for users to find the data they’re looking for.

How it works is basically news organizations that publish data in the form of tables can add additional structured data to make the dataset parts of the page easier to identify for use in relevant Search features. Then the news organizations add the structured data to their existing html of a page, this means that they can still control how their tables are presented to readers.

Google Posts Insights – Google has announced in their help section there is a thread that mentions they will launch new insights, analytics report, within the Google My Business. This will show how well your Google Posts are doing in Google search and maps.

This will help you to see your Google Posts Insights data from within Google My Business and clicking on Google Posts. At the moment you can only see the insights on an individual Google Post. However, the have said you will be able to see these insights not just for an individual post but also for all posts from the last week and all posts from the last month.

Bing Updates

Bing Webmaster Tools API Fixed – Although it has been almost a month already that the Bing Webmaster Tools API has stopped working, they said that it has been addressed and finally been fixed. Bing mentions that upon investigation, they discovered a technical glitch which led to API call failure that has now been resolved. They have been actively listening to their user and said that they value their users’ feedback and it’s important to how they continually improve Bing and to help notify them of potential issues.