I am really delayed this month with the monthly Google Webmaster Report, but here it is for January. The big items were the December 15th Google update, which many many webmasters saw. Google starting rolling out the interstitial penalty two days ago, the mobile-first index isn't live yet and it seems like the link operator is dead - maybe.
Also, Google doesn't throttle traffic to sites, SEO is a primary reason for hacking and Google supports HTTP/2.
Google also said they are working on a year of search analytics data and made several Search Console updates this past month. The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is pretty normal and stable right now.
Here is the recap from December.
Here is the outline of the more important Google stories for webmasters:
Google Updates & Algorithms:
- December 15th Google Search Algorithm Update Signals
- Official: Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Now Rolling Out
- Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Only To Impact Search Result To Page
- Google: We Will Treat Religious Interstitials As Legal Or Policy Interstitials
- Google Algorithm Update During Holiday Break? Doubt It.
- Google: Don't Use Our Link Operator In Web Search
- Google Reiterates There Is No Penalty For Not Linking Out
- Google Calls Out Sites With Taboola Or Outbrain Links
- Google Featured Snippets Now Displayed On More Queries
- Google Showing Rich Cards In Over 10% Of Search Results
- Do Google AMP Rich Cards Have Drastically Lower CTR?
- AMP Comes To Google Image Search
- Search Google By Tweeting Emojis To @google
- Google Replaces "In The News" With "Top Stories"
- Google: Mobile First Index Is Not Yet Live
- The Google Mobile First Index Won't Measure Page Speed
- Google: Slow Pages Might Be Labeled As Not Mobile Friendly
- Google Misinforming Webmasters That Their Page Is Not Mobile Friendly
- Google 2017 SEO Advice: Make Sure You Optimize For Mobile Like You Do For Desktop
- Google Home & Assistant Now Allow Developers To Build Voice Commands
- Google: We Have No Web Site Page Quota & Do Not Throttle Traffic
- Google: SEO Is One Of The Primary Reasons Websites Are Targeted For Hacking
- Google Gives HTTP/2 GoogleBot Clearance
- Google: Most 404s Are Not Webmasters Fault
- Google: CDNs Are Safe & Shouldn't Hurt Your Rankings
- Google: Wix Web Sites Work Fine For Search
- Google: Keep The Default CMS Robots.txt Setting
- Google: Site Removal Tool Won't Speed Up Site Migrations
- Google: Similar New URLs Won't Pick Up Old URLs Signals
- Google: There Is No One Recipe For Search Rankings Success
- Google: Wikipedia Is Ranked By Google Like Any Other Web Site
- Google: Nofollow Attribute May Help With Crawl Budgets For Large Sites
- Google Image Search Now To Use Product Schema Markup
- Google: There Is No Google Sandbox
- Google: Sitemaps Should Contain URLs Of Pages You Want Indexed, Not Variations
- Google On Measuring Speed: Page Speed Insights & Plain Old Response Time
- Google Presentation On Internationalization & Search
- Google: Crawl Budget Works Differently Than You Think
- Google Adds New Books Schema Markup With Buy E-Book Links
- Google Actively Working On Adding A Year Of Search Analytics Data To Search Console
- Google Search Console AMP Reports Differentiate Between Critical & Non-Critical Issues
- Google Changes Search Console Report "Update" Line To "Note"
- Google Search Console AMP & Rich Card Reports May Have Updated
- Google Search Console Property Sets Now With More Reports
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
