The Featured Snippet is the official SEO newsletter of Performics and is dedicated to keeping you update-to-date with the latest SEO industry news, trends, and events ā all in an easy-to-read, summed up format. See below for the latest version of The Featured Snippet.
In the April 2019 issue of The Featured Snippet:
A bug caused several issues within Googleās index, Google Search Console, and Google News throughout the month of April. Hereās a quick timeline of what was affected by the bugs:
Thursday, April 4, 2019: Complaints surfaced among the SEO community about Google removing a large chunk of URLs within its index.
Saturday, April 7, 2019: Google and John Mueller confirm a ātechnical issue,” and efforts are being made to resolve it. Below shows confirmations from Google and John Mueller on Twitter:
Wednesday, April 10, 2019: Google announces on Twitter that the indexation issue has been completely resolved – 6 days after initial indexation complaints. Below shows the official announcement from the Google SearchLiason account:
Thursday, April 11, 2019: Mozās Dr. Pete Myers estimated the Google de-indexation bug erased 4% of URLs within Googleās index. Below shows confirmation from Mozās Dr. Pete Myers:
Resource: https://moz.com/blog/how-bad-was-googles-deindexing-bug
Monday, April 15, 2019: Google indexation bug spreads to Google Search Console, which affected coverage, enhancements, and URL inspection tool. Below shows Googleās confirmation of the spread bug to GSC from Twitter:
Resource: https://www.seroundtable.com/googles-indexing-bug-now-impacting-search-console-27410.html
Google announced that it has added a Discover Report to help webmasters gain visibility into traffic they are receiving from Google Discover. Google Discover is a feature within Google Search that allows users to stay up-to-date on their favorite topics without entering a query. This feature has recently been coined as āposition negative one.ā Hereās a quick look at the Google Discover feature:
The Performance Report has now been split into ā Search Resultsā and āDiscover.ā Hereās a look what the report looks like in GSC:
Resources:
The yearly AMP conference was held in Tokyo from April 17 and 18, which brought new announcements and features. Here are some of the biggest announcements from the Tokyo AMP conference:
Resources:
Google announced a new set of tools called “before: and after:” commands to help show SERP results for certain time periods. Hereās how it works: Simply provide a search query along with before: <date>, after: <date>, and you can see SERP results for your provided time. Below shows an example provided by Google:
Resources:
Google has made it clear they want SEOs to focus more on image search in 2019, and seoClarity provided data in April that supported SERPs showing more image boxes. Image boxes in SERPs look just like this:
SeoClarity provided data from three different SERP tracking features that show images are on the rise in web results starting around April 13. Here is the data:
seoClarity:
Rank Ranger:
MozCast:
Resources:
Two important updates happened for Google My Business this month. One update that caused a lot of chatter in the industry is that Google may decide to charge for GMB listings. This inference was made after Google sent out a survey to local businesses that asked how much they would pay for some Google My Business features that are currently free. The other update is Google rolled out āshort namesā for Google My Business URLs, which allows businesses to create a custom, short URL for their business profile listing.
Resources:
Microsoft announced a re-brand to Bing Ads, now called Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft is using the rebrand āto signal offerings that extend beyond search inventory and search data.ā The re-brand puts an emphasis on the use of personalization and AI. In his blog post, Microsoft Advertising’s Corporate Vice President, Rik van der Kooi, explains that the company will be introducing more advertising products with built-in AI and referenced two ways Microsoft Advertising is delivering on this potential: the Microsoft Audience Network and Sponsored Products. Stay tuned for more from Microsoft Advertising.
Resources: