SEO Wash-up Monday 8th April

SEO Wash-up Monday 8th April

Google Updates

Links not showing in search console are irrelevant – A spokesman from the search giant was answering a few questions around an old topic of showing only a sample of links in the link report, in Google Search Console. They mention that generally if the links are not shown in the tool then they are irrelevant overall.

Google also mentions the exception that they show a bunch of paid links that you have added, and the webspam team takes a look at the situation, then they may encourage you to clean up all of the obvious paid links, including those not explicitly listed in Search Console.

Google webmaster team ends the Google+ community – As you may have seen, Google+ has closed down as of April 2nd. Google+ team says that they thank you for following them and it has been their pleasure to build a community with everyone. One of the more active communities on Google+ for SEOs was the Google Webmasters community.

Google’s ranking algorithm allows SEOs to be unique – A spokesman from Google responded to a social media thread that a webmaster didn’t understand why a competitor was outranking their website when the competitor had a page speed score that was low. The spokesman responded by saying the nice part about using so many factors for crawling, indexing, and ranking is that you don’t have to do everything exactly the same way as all of the other sites are doing.

Although your website isn’t doing well with one specific area, this does not mean that your website cannot rank well in Google. For that person on social media, speed is one of hundreds of factors Google uses and speed is not even a really huge factor compared to other factors in the mix. Though you would still want to make sure your website loads fast because the user can simply click back and go to the next search result listing in Google.

Google tests icons in search for images, maps, top stories & videos – There has been reports that the search giant was testing a new top bar with icons next to the search filters for images, videos, maps & top stories. You may see additional reports of Google testing the icons not just in the search bar but also in the search results page.

Google expands AMP stories to Google arts & culture – A spokesman from Google posted on social media that their search team has launched a new feature with the Google Arts and Culture, bringing their content to the AMP Stories format in search. AMP stories launched just over a year ago that provides a more interactive experience in search around certain knowledge panels.

Google search console enhancement reports data change – The search giant has posted on their data anomalies page for the search console tool that for most enhancement reports, the data is now being collected from more pages than previously reported. So you may see an increase in issues and affected items/pages on these reports.

The reports are currently showing data from the 1st April so naturally you would see it in a couple days later. You also may see more activity and issues being reported within these search enhancement reports. This is because the enhancement reports include reports such as the AMP report, mobile usability, jobs products and more.

However, they did not say specifically which of those enhancement reports will be impacted but they did say most.

Related posts

Leave a Reply

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