SEO Wash-up Monday 17th December

Google Updates

Google URLs in search results snippets now clickable – Google have been testing for a while with the URLs in the search results, and now they are clickable. You may have noticed last week the change. Although this change may not matter to most users, but it is a change to the Google search results. So now when you hover your mouse cursor over the green URL in the Google search results snippets, you can click on that as well as the title of the snippet.

Google search console AMP errors gets more general rather than specific – Google mentioned on their data anomalies page that the search console AMP error reporting will become more generic in nature. They say that the AMP enhancement report will now combine some over-specific issue types into fewer generalized issue types. So when the migration is complete, you will see an increase in generic issue types with a corresponding decrease in the specific issue types that were combined into the general type.

Google My Business renamed communications manager to site manager – In Google My Business, they have renamed the communication manager to site manager. So a site manager can create posts to promote events, share news, update business phone number, business hours, address and manage information about amenities.

They are enforcing this change based on user feedback to enhance the role of communications managers on Google My Business, communications manager will be renamed to site managers. They will make the changes over the next few weeks, the newly minted site managers will be upgraded with new permissions.

Google expedites closing Google+ after another security bug – Google+ was coming to an end but now the search giants have said that they are now expediting this process. This is due to a new security bug that was discovered with the Google+ API. 52million users in connection with a Google+ API potentially had their name, email address, occupation, age and other information taken.

Google is moving up the closure of the consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019 and closing down all the Google+ APIs in the next 90 days. Developers can expect to hear more about the closing by checking the Google+ developer page.

Bing Updates

Bing machine learning leads to more human like ranking in search – Bing has mentioned that machine learning helps with scaling generalizing, which is how humans would manually rank search results.

However, Bing’s ranking teams goal is to build an algorithm that would rank documents in the same order as humans would as they are following the guidelines. You can only do that by generalizing your ranking algorithm as much as possible.