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.
Voice SEO: Different tactics required for Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa
01/09/2020
Whilst voice devices such as Alexa and Google Home have failed thus far to become market-changers in search or SEO, there has been steady growth in the use of voice assistants on smartphones. Search Engine Land (SEL) looks at how to improve performance across the different voice search assistants, which each tend to use different factors.
Google officially launches ‘licensable’ image label and filter in Image search
31/08/2020
Google has officially launched the ‘licensable’ label and filter within Image search, intended to help improve revenue generation of the image owners. The badge is implemented via structured data and should help improve click-through rate from those searchers looking to purchase image usage.
See how visits to retail, grocery, workplaces are trending by area with Google Mobility Reports
27/08/2020
Google’s Mobility Reports allow users to monitor the changes in visits and lengths of stay in various location categories since the pandemic. This is published on an on-going basis to emphasise movements over time, with the latest report showing changes in retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, workplaces and residential categories. This may be useful for local businesses to better understand how customers are reacting in the local area during the pandemic.
28/08/2020
Google has said it is reporting warnings for any dataset structured data spikes that are missing the “creator” property. This is important to bear in mind for any reporting purposes, as this may lead to a dramatic increase in warnings in Search Console.
27/08/2020
Google is now providing support for home activities structured data, which aims to provide rich results for videos or online classes being offered. It offers options to provide a description and information on how to watch or register. This could include content types such as video livestream, recorded video or an online event, and should help improve visibility of those operating in this area.
Google tests reporting security issue false positives in Search Console
26/08/2020
Google is testing a method to report false positives related to security issues in Search Console, in an effort to speed up the recovery time for those who have been accidentally removed from Google search. These types of removals could have been due to malware or hacking, but this new method could provide webmasters a way to inform Google as quickly as possible to prevent lasting traffic impacts.
26/08/2020
SEL continues to review Bing’s new webmaster guidelines, focusing on page quality and how it relates to indexation. According to Bing, they do not index all content on the web, including pages that are empty or pages that hold junk content, broken experiences, JavaScript errors, spammy pages and malicious content. They also share a list of things to avoid: cloaking, link schemes, social media schema, duplicate content, scraped content, keyword stuffing, auto-generated content, affiliate programs, malicious behavior and misleading structured data.
Bing uses user engagement metrics for ranking websites in search
20/08/2020
Bing has documented that it uses engagement metrics as a ranking factor (click-through, pogo-sticking, clicking on other results, searching a different keyword, etc.). However, whilst user engagement is a direct ranking factor, machine learning and intent changes how much impact it has.
