Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Passage Ranking Live, Search & Image Algo Updates, News/Discover Manual Actions & Dark Theme

Feb 12, 2021 - 8:21 am 0 by

This was one heck of a busy week, so sit back, get a drink and enjoy the show (okay, it won’t be that exciting of a show but you should still subscribe and smash that like button). Google launched passage ranking on Wednesday night, this is where Google can rank specific passages from a document, well, it went live in the US English results, not globally, as they said but it still should be a big deal. Google may have released an unconfirmed update around February 8th, this is unrelated to passage indexing rolling out. Google announced that back in November 2020 it released an image update aimed at reducing duplicate images and improving image refinements. Google launched a whole new set of manual actions, or penalties, aimed at Google News and Google Discover. Google is still rolling out dark themes, with a big push this week, but the ads on dark mode are so hard to notice. Google said it can recognize if a site has a good reputation in a specific topic area. Google on the other end said there is no such thing as levels of site quality demotions. Google said when it comes to the core web vitals metrics it may take into account pages not in its index. Google may be coming out with a search appearance filter for the page experience update label in the performance report within Google Search Console. John Mueller of Google released a great video on image SEO. Google said it likely ignores spammy blog pingback links. Google gave SEO advice on what to do if you remove site functionality to show a sign of support for social action. Google is rolling out scroll-to-text on the free organic product results. Microsoft Bing launched Speller100 to help with understanding spelling mistakes in search, which is in about 15% of all searches. Bing is testing recommended queries and sites based on search activity and what’s currently popular. Finally, Google Ads updated the lead form extension to trigger off the click of a headline. Oh and if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week's video recap is sponsored by Semrush, the beloved SEO toolset provider.

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