Industry News

Google is rolling out a new feature for the about this result overlay that actually tells searchers (and SEOs) why Google is ranking that page for that given query. Yes, Google is telling you which high level ranking factors are the reason this page is ranking.

Gary Illyes of Google posted on Twitter that you should keep a redirect live for a year for Google Search purposes. The signals from original page A to destination page B will all be transferred and stick with page B even after the redirect is removed, if that redirect is live for a year.

Google's John Mueller was asked if a core update can have the people also ask (PAA) results show up more or less often. John said yes, it can, just like it can with rich results and featured snippets.

Danny Sullivan of Google published a blog post on Friday named answers to some common questions about appearing in Google News. Sadly, I honestly don't think this will lead to less questions and frustration from new publishers and their questions around sites appearing in Google News or not.

Google announced a bit after 1pm ET on July 12th that the July 2021 core update is "effectively complete." That means, in Google lingo, that it is done rolling out 12-days after it first started rolling out on July 1, 2021.

On Friday, July 9th, it looks like the Google July 2021 core update spiked again. Glenn Gabe asked Danny Sullivan of Google if the update was done and Danny said on Friday "not quite done." I suspect we saw the end wave of this update around July 9th.

In the second part of the Search Off The Record podcast released this morning Gary Illyes from Google explained how Google does ranking. In short, he said Google first cuts down the pages that can rank for a specific query to a short list of let's say about 1,000 pages. Then the magic happens where Google will apply ranking signals or as he calls it "magic signals" to that cut down list.

The past month in Google SEO and webmaster land was a bit insane...

Google announced that on July 1, 2021 it began to roll out the July 2021 core update. We knew we would soon see another core update, and Google delivered this one a month after the June 2021 core update. This one seems to have started out pretty strong and many are seeing big changes with this update.

Yesterday, June 30th, there may have been an unconfirmed update, just two days after Google ran the spam update - which ran on the 28th and would have then been seen more on June 29th than the 30th. But who knows, maybe it ran into the 29th and what we are seeing are fluctuations due to part two of the spam update?