Google May Core Update, LinkedIn’s Google Mistake & News Changes By rustybrick

Hello everybody, my name is Barry Schwartz, and this is the search buzz. Video recap today is friday, May 8th, and this is the search news we covered over at the search engine round table nscroundtable. com over the past week. So first up, I want to go ahead and tell you about the Google webmaster report. I post this monthly, it's a good way of catching up on what happened over the past month or so I posted about it on May 7th. So if you want to catch up on everything that happened in the past month, definitely take a look at that.

I'm not going to go through it now, because it's a lot um big news this week was that google announced on Monday that the Google another core algorithm update is released a broad core algorithm update. This is called the May 2020 google core update and this started to roll out Monday, around 3:50 p. m, or so eastern, and it's big um, there's lots of chatter around it. This is a global update. Like all core updates and google said it would probably take start it.

You know Monday afternoon, and it will probably take up to one to two weeks to fully roll out. It seems like this is big and so forth. So definitely take a look at that. If you're interested the tools themselves are pretty, pretty significant, we did a post with a bunch of posts on it, one about the launch and the second one about the chatter around it and there's definitely a lot of chatter in the community. Lots of people saying they were hit up to 90 percent of their traffic is gone.

Some are saying you know, 60 some are saying forty percent. Some are saying they did well like any update. Um people do, you know, go out people sites go up, sites go down uh, but this was definitely big um. In fact, I wrote a post on search engine land yesterday, um, where I got data from all the data providers like a bunch of them, and they all pretty much said this was you know I think rank rangers said this was a monster of an update. I believe um, every single data provider company basically said that this was one of the most significant updates they had in a while.

Maybe since the medic update one of the that was also a core update, but we definitely have lots and lots of people who are hit by this and lots and lots of chatter. So I hope you guys did well from this update. If not, hopefully, Google will make tweaks to it and you guys will recover shortly, not that you can make any changes, as Google has said over the years for core updates, but it is what it is just a reminder that these core updates do influence the Discover. Google discover area and google discover extended tremendous amount of traffic to publishers, um, and if you were up to hit by this, your google discover traffic may have sawed a significant decline. Uh just keep that in mind.

That's nothing new as we knew that for a while uh. But that's just a reminder. Google also said that any lag in search console reporting any delays in the reporting. It would be completely unrelated to two core updates. So there are some theories out there that when you see google core update, the search console reports also seem to kind of lag and delay and john Mueller said they're completely unrelated core updates and search console reporting.

Any delays in reporting on search console would be completely unrelated to any core update. Um. Also, there's lots of chatter. Over the past couple weeks, around Google doing a local update, a local search update. Now this started back, I think, on April 23rd, but even yesterday was significant.

Um uh signs that there was a big local update for the past couple weeks, and it keeps you know some days. It's slow some days so something's going on Danny Sullivan from Google said he would look into it. He hasn't responded back about this, but there's definitely a lot of chatter and a lot of signs from the various ranking tools that track this information that there were numerous updates over the past couple weeks around the local side, the local pack side, Google Maps site other big news this week was that LinkedIn was removed or has removed their website. It looked like, or the WWW version of their website from Google for about a 10-hour period on May 6th. This happened, um, you did a site command for www.

linkedin. com. You look for your LinkedIn profiles, us profiles in google search. None of that will come up even the uh profile. Tabs people have knowledge panels, uh personal knowledge panels in google.

The LinkedIn button was not there, it would show Instagram, it would show Facebook, it would show Twitter, but LinkedIn was not there and then after 10 hours or so google seemed to have fixed it. What I believe happened was that google went into I'm sorry LinkedIn when it went into their search console panel or, and they requested a removal by accident. They requested a removal of their WWW, or maybe the HTTP there are signs that they did this. Of course, nobody from LinkedIn has responded to me yet about this. They got my press request.

Google would not respond about this either because they don't like to talk about any mistakes that companies do, but it seems that what happened is they went into the Google Search Console console, and they asked for removal. They removed the whole website within a matter of time, but technically it didn't remove it from their index. When you use that tool in the Google Search Console it flags the site to not be shown in the search results. So it's to hide these pages, hide these index pages and then, when they reversed that all they did was remove the flag so very quickly after they reversed that um did google start to just show the sites, the pages again that were in index. So it was very quick because they used that tool.

It was very it's just a learning experience. Even large websites, like LinkedIn uh, one of the most popular websites, one of the most popular social networks at all time do make mistakes. Google is now displaying more local news in the top carousel they're doing this because of all the coveted stuff. So over the past month, or so, google announced on Twitter that you will now see more local news in the top carousel for specific queries. So that's something that's going on.

There's no change! You need to make. According to google, it's just happened over the past month or so with that um, specifically for coveted, related news cover.19 related news. Google said that um you no longer need amp. Your pages no longer have to be amped enabled to show in the top carousel. If it's code related, I guess because a lot of smaller publishers maybe didn't make their sites amp friendly or equivalent or make it amp alternative is the actual right word to use because of that um google's, like you know what for covert related stories, we're not going to require uh it to be had an amp, URL or amp page um, and thus will show that uh content in the top carousel, even if it's not amp related again for COVID-19 related content, Gary from Google said something fun.

He basically said there's more to our search, ranking algorithm just than that, then than just quality um. So that's just interesting to him to say and of course that started a little of a hustle. But again basically, google uses hundreds and hundreds of singles quality signals are one of them and there's definitely possible for sites that are not quality. It's ranked because there are other hundreds of singles. It's just funny for him for me to hear him say that uh Google Search Console added reporting and tools for the special announcement structure data that they got us.

Google, on special announcement structure, data uh about a month or so ago, around this COVID-19 stuff, and with that it took them about a month to add this reporting and tools in search consoles. So now, under the performance report, you could actually use a search, appearance filter for special announcements. You could also use the enhancement report if you have special announcements, structured data, to see what improvements you can make to your website, and also you can use the rich results. Testing tool to test your pages to see if the special announcement structured data works well, um google's local panel now could show um COVID-19 testing center details, so it could show if this facility, maybe a Walmart pharmacy, a right, a pharmacy CVS. Pharmacy there's a testing center and if it is, do you need appointments referrals required? Is it testing for all patients or other types of patients, and is there a drive-through? So definitely take a look at that.

If you are a medical facility, google, my business now allows hotels to add information if they are had any special treatment for coven 19 responders um. This is for hotels. So, finally, you can actually add information around cover, 19 responder policies. So, if you want to say you have special discounts or special accommodations for heroes, first responders and so forth, around cover 19. You could definitely go ahead and do that as well.

We posted more screenshots around the Google hub question hub around the Google question hub. So specifically, we've been talking about this for a while, where google expanded these question boxes, we get to submit a question, and now people are sharing screenshots of what this question hub looks like. Where, basically will google will give you all the questions that are related to your to you, and you can then go ahead and submit answers to those questions by posting, a web page on your website and then submitting that URL of that web page that answers that question to google and that will basically and then those they also give you performance data like how well how many, how well you're answering those questions and so forth, and how many impressions and clicks those questions are getting. It's pretty cool, definitely take a look at that, and you will see more information about it on our site. Google Ads said they block on average over 5 000 ads per minute.

It's a lot of ads to be blocked. Google said they announced that they blocked and removed over 2.7 billion ads in the past year. They suspended nearly 1 million advertisers accounts terminated over 1.2 million publisher, google, AdSense publisher accounts and removed ads from over 21 million publisher web pages, so google's doing a lot of work on the ad side in terms of preventing some bad things. This was interesting. Um google, chord SEMrush showed a screenshot of google testing shopping ads product listing ads with organic listing mixed into it.

I'm not sure if it's really organic or ads, but it looks weird so here's a screenshot of that. So you could take a look at that and then google announced this week that Google Adsense um is retiring. The Google Adsense ad balance tool, which lets you balance your ads based on different types of spend and so forth, and you know higher price ads, lower price ads and that's going away on May 20th. That was a tool they launched back in January 2017. I believe, and a few years later google said you know what people aren't using it we're getting rid of it any event that pretty much recaps the search news for this past week.

My name again is Barry. Schwartz today is Friday. May 8th hope, everybody's doing well and feeling healthy again. This is the search buzz video recap: everyone has a great weekend I'll see you guys next goodbye.

Source : rustybrick