SEO Wash-up Monday 15th October

Google Updates

Google tests like and dislike buttons on hotel search result photos – The search giants have been testing like and dislike buttons in their hotel search results, specifically on photos. You can either like or dislike a photo within a specific hotel search result.

Google’s image algorithm uses page authority and image placement – Google have announced that they have updated their image search algorithm to use the authority of a web page. They also mention that they are looking at prioritizing images that are fresher from new content and the placement of the image on the page.

So therefore, an image that is more to the central of the page and higher up is valued more to Google. Although they do not update their image search results and algorithms that often, they mention that they did a lot of work around image search recently.

Google related activity and collections in search – Google has been testing the ‘relevant history’ that started earlier this month, which is now renamed to related activity cards. Google has announced that a new card will show past searches related to your current search.

The new activity card will help you pick up from where you left off in Search and when you revisit a query related to a task you’ve started in the past, it will show you a card with relevant pages you’ve already visited and previous queries you’ve done on this topic.

Google Search Console adds event markup report and sends notices – Google has rolled out the Google Search Console event markup report and they have recently started sending out notices to those with issues with their event markup to check out the report.

As there have been issues around the new event markup reporting tool, people are saying they are getting notifications via Search Console about event markup issues for the first time. So now in the rich results report Google added support for event markup.

Google Posts Now Allows 1,500 Character Posts – Google posts previously had a 100 to 300 word limit within the Google Posts. However, Google posts now has a 1,500 character limit. Although it is a more specific number, there is a notification that lets you know exactly when Google will cut you off.

Google image search desktop redesign – As Google have been testing out various designs for the image search, they now have officially rolled out the new design for the image search results on desktop. The new image search desktop design adds titles, captions, URL to the image thumbnails, and images to the top filter options. The new desktop design brings it more in line with the mobile version of the image search results.