Are you interested in following the latest SEO news? You may want to tune-in to the new Google Search News series on Youtube. The first edition has Google’s John Mueller as anchorman, and he’s made a real attempt to keep things simple while explaining the latest changes and announcements by Google.
Watch Google Search News
Respecting the TV news format and even (spoiler alert) ending with the weather forecast, the news items featuring for September are:
- Recent updates to the new Google Search Console (0:39)
- Making review rich results more helpful (3:09) which covers Google’s decision to stop showing review-stars in the search results for a lot of sites
- New meta tags for snippets / previews (3:49) announcing new ways that sites can help Google create more useful previews of sites in the search engine results.
We’ll assume that it’s only going to get better
The video is pitched at webmasters, publishers and SEOs. As well as the news mentioned above, there are also news items about Google’s webmaster events.
The result is perhaps too many stories and too little information on each one.
John tells us too often to go read the technical docs “in the links in the description below.”
But it’s good that they are making the effort to tell us more about how Google works and we’ll assume that it will only get better.
Google do publish a lot of new information every month and this is an attempt to get us more interested in reading it.
Documentation mentioned in this episode of Google Search News:
- Google Search Console
- Goodbye old Search Console
- YouTube community page
- Webmaster event calendar
- Qualifying outbound links
- Evolving nofollow
- Making review rich results more helpful
- Robots meta tags & data-nosnippet developer documentation
- Webmaster FAQ on new controls
- List of upcoming events
Is it important to follow Google’s news?
Google are never going to tell you how to beat Google, but because 88,37 % of searches in the US are now performed in Google.com (and not in Bing or Yahoo) it’s important to make sure that you are up to date on their rules and new features.
Being the first to implement a new feature can give you a real advantage over the competition.
For example, early adopters of schema markup can get richer snippets in Google search results (for example a photo for a recipe page) and earn more traffic simply because richer snippets attract higher click-thru rates.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
More SEO news for your blog from SEOPress
Because it’s difficult to know whether the latest SEO news is important for your WordPress blog, SEOPress will be covering more SEO news in the coming months!
Some of the changes to Google mentioned by John Mueller in this video have already led to new features in the SEOPress plugin for WordPress. WordPress have also added the UGC attribute in comments.
Other changes are in the pipeline for SEOPress because we want to make sure that SEOPress gives you all the tools you need to increase your traffic from Google and other search engines. So keep tuned to Google’s Search News and to the SEOPress blog too!
See the changelog to follow the latest news on our new features.
