SEO Wash-up Monday 25th October 21

Google Update

Google link spam update has taken longer than expected to roll out – They have rolled out the link spam update that started back in July 26 earlier this year, but now it has been fully rolled out. They initially said ‘This algorithm update, which will roll out across the next two weeks, is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages.’

Google adds shipping & return annotations to shopping as well as search results – Google have mentioned that they have added new shipping and return annotations in Google Search and Shopping results. This works across both the free and paid listings. Furthermore, they then go on to mention that shoppers can now see when their orders will arrive, with shipping annotations like “Free delivery by Fri, Dec 20,” or “Get it by Dec 20” for products that ship for free in five business days or less. To give shoppers more confidence in their purchases, you can now indicate extended holiday return windows with return annotations like “Free 90 day returns” or “Free returns until Jan 31.”

Google has added documentation on Chrome follow beta feature – They have added a new section to the Google Discover help documents around markup you can use to define your RSS feed for Chrome to use for the “follow” feature. Back in May, Chrome mentioned that an RSS reader like feature for Chrome named Follow.

Within the new section in the help docs Google describes the feature and tells us how to optimize the site for it, the guidelines and how to handle multiple feeds.

The Chrome Follow feature allows people to follow a website and get the latest updates from that website in the Following tab within Discover in Chrome. This is called the new Google Reader, although it is far from Google Reader. At the moment the Follow button is an experimental feature that’s available to some users in English in the US that are using Chrome Android Beta.

So by default, the Follow feature uses RSS or Atom feeds on your website and if you don’t have an RSS or Atom feed on your website, then Google automatically generates a feed for your entire domain based on our view of your site. If you have one or more feeds on your website, you can optimize your Follow experience by explicitly telling Google which feed you want people to follow for a given page on your site.

Below are the Follow feature RSS guidelines:

• Don’t block your feed with your robots.txt file.
• Make sure that your feed is up-to-date, like you would for sitemap files.
• You can host your feed somewhere other than your domain; Google supports this.
• If you redirect your feed, use a 3xx (redirects) HTTP status code so that Google can follow it.