This month was pretty packed with a ton of SEO tips but the big items included many penalties, mostly manual actions. We had product review penalties, rich snippet penalties, clickjacking penalties and more warnings after warnings. Did you know Google sent about 500 manual actions per hour last year?
Google told us the next Penguin update may be the last one we get. Google really and fully turned off the PageRank feed we get from the toolbar. Google also updated the quality raters guidelines and update the local rankings document. Google brought back in-depth articles after it going away and extended featured snippets.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is relatively calm right now, so not much to report there. Here is the report from last month and here are quick links to catch you all up:
Google Penalties:
- Google Slaps Mass Manual Actions For Outbound Links Over Free Product Reviews
- Google Penalizes Flight Industry Web Sites By Removing Their Rich Snippets
- Google Takes Action Against Publishers Who Do Clickjacking
- Google Warns Again: We Will Penalize You For Sneaky Mobile Redirects
- Google Now Sending Webmasters Deceptive Site / Social Engineering Detected Warnings
- Google Webspam Report: Google Manually Penalized 500 Sites Per Hour In 2015
- Google: Recover From A Manual Action? You Still May Have To Recover From An Algorithmic Penalty
- Should Google Penalize Google Play Podcasts For Link Schemes?
- Former Googler On Why Do Some Google Manual Actions Seem Automated
- Google: The Next Penguin Update May Be The Last
- Google: When Penguin Begins Rolling Out, We Will Post An Announcement
- Google Fully Turns Off Feed To Toolbar PageRank
- Google Updated Quality Raters Guidelines Last Week
- Google Expands Local Ranking Help Document
- Android GoogleBot Smartphone User-Agent Did Go Live This Week
- Google On Using Sitemaps For Expediting Redirects: Keep Sitemap Live For 6 Months
- Is Google Testing The Penguin 4.0 Algorithm?
- Google: Keep Redirects Indefinitely But One Can Remove Them After Google Indexes
- Google: Community Through Comments Help A Lot With Ranking
- Google: Don't Worry Too Much About Page Speed
- Google Displaying A Featured Snippet From User Generated Comments
- Google: Pages Move Around In Shards Very Slowly
- Google's John Mueller Addresses Zombie Traffic Phenomenon
- Webmaster See Spike In Google Zombie Traffic
- Google: You Can Be Negatively Impacted By One Algorithm & Positively Impacted By Another
- Google: Footer Content Is Not Penalized But Not Seen As Primary Content
- Google Does Index & Rank Images Title Attribute Tags
- Google's John Mueller On Redirecting vs 404ing Products That No Longer Exist
- Even When Former Googlers Reports Spam, It Takes A Long Time To Be Removed
- Google: Mixing Mobile Friendly Types (i.e. Responsive, Dynamic Serving & Seperate URLs) On One Site Is Fine
- Google's John Mueller On How They Handle 301, 302, 307 & Other Redirects
- Google Showing Site Owner; Your Page Is Not Mobile-Friendly In Search Results
- Google Sending Recommended PageSpeed Update Available Notifications
- Google: Alt Tags Should Be In The Language Of The Content Of The Page (Localized Alt Tags)
- Google's Paul Haahr On Patents For Learning SEO
- Google: Quality Raters Primarily Use Mobile Devices
- Google Search Console Improves AMP Error Report
- Google Search Console API Gets Some Enhancements
- Confirmed: Google Is Testing A New Mobile Friendly Test
- Sites Registered In Google Search Console Are Much More Likely To Fix Compromised Sites
- Unsubscribe From Some Google Search Console Messages
- Google Extended Featured Snippets
- Google In-Depth Articles Now Coming Back
- RankRanger: Google Featured Snippets Expand To More European Search Results
- Google Testing Trending In Search Auto-Complete
- New: Google Review Snippets In Local Pack
- Google Testing Larger Margins & Spaces Between Search Snippets
- Google Testing Very Light Blue Links In Search Results
- Google Partner Logo Showing On Profile URLs In Search Results?
- Google TV Search Adds Search By Show To Find Channels Or App
- Google Prompts Users To Set Home & Work Address On Some Searches
- Google News Now AMP Ready
- Google: We Tests By Redirecting A Small Percentage Of Traffic, Not Setting Up Test Sites
- Google Movie Listings Direct You To Fandango
