The Featured Snippet is the official SEO newsletter of Performics and is dedicated to keeping you up to date with the latest SEO industry news, trends, and events—all in an easy-to-read, summed-up format.
In the October 2021 issue of The Featured Snippet:
On October 14, Google introduced continuous scrolling on mobile devices. Now, when you reach the bottom of a search results page on your phone, the next set of results will automatically load with relevant information. Continuous scrolling effectively eliminates “page 1” which could have an impact on URLs ranking lower in search results for certain keywords. Below is the official announcement from Google and a demonstration on how continuous scroll works:
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IndexNow is a new protocol created by Microsoft Bing and Yandex to help search engines more easily find your website’s content. When set up with IndexNow, websites are instantly notified when content is created, updated, or deleted. Follow these steps to implement IndexNow on your website.
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On October 19, Google announced that it had updated the Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines. This document is used by human raters to help determine the quality of a website. While these standards do not have a direct impact on rankings, they do help provide key insights into what Google deems a high-authority website by E-A-T standards (expertise, authority, trustworthiness).
Top changes in the 2021 update included:
Below is the official announcement from Google:
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Google added new capabilities to the Google Search Console Analytics API. The API now supports data for the following: Google Discover, Google News, and RegEx commands. All three features were already in the web interface. Google News performance reports were added in January 2021, Google Discover performance reports gained full data in February 2021, and Regex support was added in April 2021, but Google has now brought support to the API. Having access to these features streamlines and automates reporting. Below is the official announcement from Google:
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This week, Google announced the rollout of Google Analytics 360, which builds on the foundation of Google Analytics 4 properties to address the measurement needs of large advertisers and agencies with more customizations, increased scale, and enterprise-level support. Analytics 360 has higher limits for up to 125 custom dimensions, 400 audiences and 50 conversion types to support larger enterprise-level information.
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In October, Google began rolling out knowledge panels for podcasts within the SERP. These new panels are located on the right side of the search results and contain information such as a description, images, host info, genre, and number of episodes. Google has yet to provide official documentation on where this data is pulled from, but many SEOs believe it is pulled from podcast RSS feeds.
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As of Monday, October 11, the following fields will be available both on public testing and URL Inspection tools: page availability, HTTP headers, page screenshot, and paired AMP inspection. The URL Inspection Tool is a Search Console tool that currently powers AMP, Mobile Friendly, and Rich Results. Below is the official announcement from Google:
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Google shared that some sites can now see additional details on errors in the Search Console Rich Results status report. Rich results status report will only appear in Search Console if Google has data on the markup and if there are issues or warnings with the markup. The new errors introduced in this update include: invalid attribute string length, invalid attribute enum value, invalid object, type of conversion failed, and out of numeric range. Below is the official announcement from Google:
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The Facebook outage didn’t affect Google too much since it was only out for about 6 hours. According to Google, it takes a couple of days for an outage to result in Google dropping pages from its index due to the pages not being accessible. For longer outages when Google can’t reach a site for network/DNS reasons, it is seen like a 5xx HTTP server error, which means a reduction in crawling. Then the site ranks as it used to, and it’s a temporary state. If the error lasts more than 1-2 days), then they will start dropping those URLs from indexing. Below is a thread from Google regarding how Google handled the outage:
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