SEO Wash-up Monday 6th January

Google

BERT does not affect indexing – It was rolled out as a way for the search giant to understand queries better, this can impact how a site is ranked within Google search as Google might match the queries to the content slightly differently now. But, it does not impact how Google indexes the pages on your web site. So therefor, if you see some of your pages from your website dropping out of the Google index, it has nothing to do with BERT.

News publisher center request inclusion feature may be broken – There has been chatter that there is a bug with the feature to submit a site for inclusion into the Google News index. After you request inclusion, it says successful but then goes back to its original state. It should say ‘Submitted’ and now say ‘Request Inclusion into News Index.’

Keyword planner lets you share keyword plans – You can now create and share keyword plans in the Google Keyword Planner tool. They mention that you can now create, save, and share plans from directly within Keyword Planner.

For example, if you are a clothing retailer planning to launch three new product lines: jeans, shirts and shoes. In order to share your keyword plans in the past, you would need to create, download, and email them individually. Well now you can create separate plans for each product line and share them directly with others for feedback, all without leaving Keyword Planner.

Google images dropped custom date range filter – On Google Image Search, they have dropped the custom date range filter when you try to filter by time. Although this may have been removed a few months ago, users have started to realise now. You can only filter images by the past 24 hours, past week, past month and past year.

Google search console updates messaging interface – Google has said that there is a new method for viewing messages in Google Search Console. It seems that you can now access messages in the bell icon at the top right, it will have a red indicator when there are new messages for you to view. You can even view the messages by category.

They also mention that the main difference from the old interface is that now you will have access to your messages throughout the product, so you do not need to leave your reports. You can also mark all or some as read, so if you get a boat load of messages and want to mark them all as read, you can quickly do that.

Google my business reviews can now select tags – The search giant now let’s local guides and other users to select a tag to describe why you like the business you are reviewing. So not only can you leave a star rating and a review and photos but also select a descriptive tag that Google can use in a more structured fashion.