January 2019 Google Webmaster Report

Jan 3, 2019 - 8:46 am 4 by

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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:

Google News: Google User Interface: Google Search Console: Google Mobile First Indexing: Google SEO: Google My Business & Local: 

For last month's recap, click here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

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