SEO Wash-up Monday 27th April

SEO Wash-up Monday 27th April

Google Updates

Google Maps has removed fake businesses & local reviews – The search giant has said that in order to combat Google Maps spam and violations, they have removed around 4 million fake business profiles from their Google My Business programme last year. They have also removed around 75 million policy-violating reviews from local profiles.

Below are some of the highlights in bullet format:

  • Business profiles removed: 4 million
  • Reviews removed: 75 million
  • Business profiles that has been removed due to contributor reports: 258,000
  • Reviews that has been removed due to contributor reports: 580,000
  • Photos removed: 10 million
  • Videos removed: 3 million
  • User accounts that was disabled and removed: 475,000

Google image search adds new image license metadata – They have announced that users can now use markup and metadata in order to tell Google about the image licensing rights and details. So when you add this metadata and Google decides to show the results within image search, they may show a new Licensable badge for the image. Although this is a BETA release, it may never launch fully or look completely different when it goes live.

Below are the two ways to add this metadata to your images:

  • Structured data: The structured data is an association between the image and the page where it appears with the mark up. You will need to add structured data for every instance an image is used, regardless of it being the same image.
  • IPTC photo metadata: The IPTC photo metadata is embedded into the image itself and the image as well as the metadata can move from page to page while still staying intact. You only need to embed IPTC photo metadata once per image.

Google search console improves data exports – Google have said that they have made some big improvements to the data exports within Google Search Console. They mention that users will now be able to download the complete information they see in almost all search console reports.

The exported data gives you tabs of information both in Google Sheets and Excel. However, the CSV file will give you two files as you can’t do tabs in CSV files. Within these tabs and files, it breaks down the data as you would see in in Search Console.

Google My Business products adds ‘suggested categories’ – You may have spotted a new feature within the Google My Business dashboard. If you see under the products tab it shows ‘suggested categories’ for you to add based on how Google understands your business.

Related posts

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.