Every fortnight the Croud SEO team collate the latest news from relevant sources around the web so you don’t have to. Read through the top SEO news stories for this week below and follow us on Twitter or sign up to our newsletter.
Google offering ‘upgraded’ GMB profile with Google Guaranteed badge for $50 per month
22/07/2020
Google has started offering a paid for version of the Google My Business (GMB) profile. This comes with a Google Guaranteed badge, following a background and licensing check, which may impact overall click-through rate (CTR) of the listing compared to a free version.
22/07/2020
Search Engine Land (SEL) looks at what type of content survives the Google algorithm updates and what marketers can learn; this includes avoiding poorly written content, anticipating what the user wants, and understanding your audience by becoming invested in communities and writing specifically for those audiences to ensure the content answers a query satisfactorily.
Prepare for mobile-first indexing (with a little extra time)
21/07/2020
Google has announced it is delaying its mobile-first indexing deadline to March 2021. This is to give webmasters, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts and developers more time to prepare for the switchover which was previously set to take place in September 2020.
21/07/2020
SEL released a guide to Core Web Vitals in the wake of Google announcing its new Page Experience ranking factor. This specifically looks at Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and how to analyse and improve these metrics.
21/07/2020
A bug within the Google site command was causing it to fail to show some or any indexed pages – this may have caused some pages to show as not indexed when in fact they were. This has since been fixed but webmasters and SEOs should be aware that using this command to analyse any indexing issues could have shown a problem when none exists.
Get your WordPress content indexed immediately using Bing Webmaster Tools plugin
21/07/2020
Bing has announced the release of a WordPress plugin that allows webmasters to submit Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for immediate indexing. This will come in very handy when releasing new content to ensure it is indexed in time to be as fresh as possible.
16/07/2020
Google has updated its Google Discover help document, designed to help publishers get their content appearing in Google Discover. The guidelines now mention expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) and provide other elements to focus on, including advice on avoiding using clickbait page titles, adding exaggerated details in preview snippets, withholding crucial information, and catering to morbid curiosity, titillation or outrage. Instead, it encourages publishers to have content that’s timely for current interests, provide clear dates, bylines, author, publisher info etc. and include high quality images, particularly larger images.
Lessons from lockdown: four content types that users really engage with
20/07/2020
Search Engine Watch (SEW) looks at what content performed well during the lockdown in terms of engagement; this includes community content, educational content, uplifting and entertaining content, and content that spanned multiple channels.
