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In our first monthly recap for 2019 we covered a couple smaller unconfirmed Google updates. It was a slower month with the holidays and New Years but Google launched some new features.
Google made AMP featured snippets do fancy moves, They also launched support for livestreams in search with new markup and also audio news for Google Assistant. Google Search Console moved some reports off the old version and to the new version.
Google's mobile first index hit a big milestone this past month, hitting over half of their search results. There was a lot of chatter around links and what is allowed and not allowed. Sundar Pichai said Google has thousands working on core search and Paul Haahr said searchers can tell the difference between organic listings and paid listings in search.
In the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread, there is some limited chatter around traffic fluctuations earlier this week. It might be an update but more likely related to New Years traffic slumps. I'll keep an eye on it.
Here is a summary of stories that I wanted to highlight over the past 30 days:
Google Algorithm Updates:
- Limited Chatter: Google Search Algorithm Update This Week
- A Google Search Algorithm Update Over December 15th Weekend
- Google's John Mueller On The Medic Update: Improve The Whole Site
- Sundar Pichai: Google Has Over A Thousand People Working On Core Search
- Google: Searchers Can Tell The Difference Between Search Ads & Organic Listings
- Google News Publishers Continue To Have Indexing/Ranking Issues
- Google AMP Featured Snippets Anchor & Highlight Content
- Google Zero Results For Record A Video Result
- Google Tests Black URL/Breadcrumbs At Top Of Search Result Snippets
- Google Tests More Movie & TV Streaming Options In Search
- Google Search Pronounce Feature
- Google Tests Expandable More People Carousel
- Google Rolls Out Image Thumbnails In Related Searches
- Google URLs In Search Results Snippets Now Clickable
- Google Assistant Testing Audio News
- Google Moved Some Of The Old Google Search Console Reports
- Google: We Fixed The Date Bug Between Performance Reports & Search Analytics Reports
- Google Search Console AMP Errors Gets More General, Less Specific
- Google To Shut Down Many Old Search Console Reports December 13th
- Google Mobile-First Indexing Now Used For Over Half Of Google's Search Results
- Google Mobile First Indexing Notices Are Delayed Within Search Console
- New Google Livestream Support In Search With Structured Data & Indexing API
- Google Recognizes Web Mentions But Says They Are Not Links
- Google Link Schemes Now Includes Contractually Requiring Follow Links
- Google: We Can Detect Automated Link Dropping
- Google: More On When To Ignore Bad Links
- Google: We Don't Need To Notify You Of Bad Links Because We Just Ignore Them
- Google: If A Random Tool Can Find Bad Links Then Google Probably Ignores Those Links Already
- Google: Hard To Understand URL Structures Can Lead To Indexing Issues
- Google: Links From Non-English Languages Are Not Unnatural Links
- Google: We Don't Skip Indexing Content That Is Over-Saturated On The Web
- Google: Don't Wait For Us To Change For Technical SEO
- Google Getting Your Canonical URLs Wrong?
- Google: We Use The Most Restrictive Crawling Command On The Page
- Google Images Best Practices Guide Updated, But What Changed?
- Google My Business Products Beta Gets Update Design
- Google Moving Google Posts Back Up?
- Local SEOs Say Google Posts Traffic Significantly Declining
- Google Tests Larger Messaging Buttons In Local Panels
- Unicode Works Within Google Local Listings
For last month's recap, click here.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
