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—all in an easy-to-read, summed-up format. See below for the latest version of The Featured Snippet:
In the June 2020 issue of The Featured Snippet:Â
After several years of testing, Google officially rolled out a featured snippet-to-webpage-highlight feature. This new feature sends users who click on the featured snippet result to the highlighted portion of the text the user saw within the featured snippet. Here’s the official announcement from Google:Â
Here’s an example of this feature in action:Â
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Google announced earlier this year that its Shopping search results will now be unpaid organic listings, which was covered in the April 2020 issue of The Featured Snippet. Now, Google announced that it has expanded this initiative by placing free Google product listings into knowledge panels in Search results.
Here’s a look at what these free product listings look like:Â
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Bing updated its webmaster guidelines in June 2020—the first time since its original 2012 version. Here is the official announcement from Bing and its Head of Evangelism, Christi Olson:Â
The updated guidelines are separated into four sections: How Bing Finds and Indexes your Site, Help Bing Understand your Pages, How Bing Ranks your Content, and Abuse and Examples of Things to Avoid.
One of the main takeaways that Bing released within these updated webmaster guidelines is how it ranks web pages and content. Bing describes these areas that it uses for ranking: relevance, quality & credibility, user engagement, freshness, location, and page load time.
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Site Scan
Bing released a useful technical SEO auditing tool called Site Scan. Site Scan works by crawling your site and checking for common technical SEO issues. The report will give you the number of pages scanned, number of errors, number of warnings, and a list of issues found with their severity and number of pages affected.Â
Competitive Link Analysis Data
Bing also added a backlink analysis tool called “similar sites” that allows you to compare one site’s backlinks to another. To use the tool, you can visit the backlinks section of Bing Webmaster Tools and then navigate to the “similar sites” tab.Â
Here’s the official announcement of the tool from Bing:
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Testing Google Analytics Data in GSC
Google is testing a new feature in Google Search Search Console that integrates Google Analytics Data. Called Google Search Console Insights, this new feature allows for more website performance data including page views, average time on page, referring sites information, and much more.Â
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Screaming Frog, a popular site-crawling tool, updated its tool to version 13.0, which has brought a variety of new features. Here are some of the highlights of the new Screaming Frog version:
Near Duplicate Content
Screaming Frog added a new feature to help you find duplicate content on your site. They introduced a new “Content” tab that shows both near duplicate and exact duplicate pages. Here’s a look at what the new “Content” tab looks like:Â
Spelling & Grammar
Screaming Frog also added a spelling and grammar functionality—a little outside of the SEO scope but a very helpful tool for reviewing spelling and grammar errors on sites. Within the new “Content” tab, you can now perform a spelling and grammar check during a crawl. Here’s a look at what the new “Content” tab looks like:Â
Among these bigger updates, Screaming Frog also added improved link data (with link position, path type, & target), security checks, and improved UX features.
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