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 November 2021 issue of The Featured Snippet:
Google rolled out a new core update on November 17, the third released in 2021. Core updates occur several times a year and involve significant, broad changes to Google’s search algorithm and systems. The November 2021 Core Update concluded on November 30. The official announcement from Google is below:
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On November 3, Google announced that it was releasing a new spam update to reduce spam from appearing in search results. Alongside the update, Google encouraged sites to follow its best practices to avoid seeing any negative impact. Google completed the update on November 11. The last spam algorithm update was the Link Spam Update in July 2021.
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At I/O 2021, Google previewed plans to bring page experience ranking to desktop. Google will begin incorporating page experience as part of the desktop ranking system in February 2022 and will finish in March 2022. The same page experience signals that currently apply to mobile will also apply to desktop.
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On November 26, Google’s John Muller announced that they will no longer have a deadline for sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing. The original deadline was set for September 2020 but was pushed back to March 2021 and has now been completely removed.
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Google recently announced that they are rolling out a new PageSpeed Insights upgrade, available to everyone as of November 16. Google now offers sections for lab data versus field data in the tool. The update introduces a newly-designed user interface that makes data within PageSpeed Insights easier to understand. Google’s primary goals with the upcoming PageSpeed Insights revamp include (via Search Engine Journal):
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In October, Microsoft Bing announced the development of a new crawling protocol called IndexNow that promises to make crawling and indexing more efficient, and Google now confirmed that it will be testing IndexNow.
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Google published the full list of IP addresses it uses to crawl sites. This can be used as an alternative if you do not want to use reverse DNS or other types of methods for verifying Googlebot. You “can identify Googlebot by IP address by matching the crawler’s IP address to the list of Googlebot IP addresses.” Knowing which bots are real or fake can help you more accurately decide what bots to block from your site.
On November 15th, Microsoft also published its list of addresses that are used by Bingbot, Microsoft’s Bing crawler, when crawling your site. Similar to the benefits of using Google’s list, this is useful if you think someone is crawling your site or pretending to be Bingbot. Use the list to verify if blocking the Bingbot crawler is or isn’t actually Microsoft Bing.
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Google My Business was renamed to Google Business Profile. Google made this change to keep things simple, and the entire Google My Business Google My Business was renamed to Google Business Profile. Google made this change to keep things simple, and the entire Google My Business app will go away sometime in 2022.
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Google is attempting a new method for contacting support when issues are related to Google Search Console. The new tool will allow users to contact Google about domain verification and user management issues with Search Console. The official announcement from Google is below:
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Microsoft Bing’s Page Insights are live in Bing’s search results as of November 21st. You can find this by looking for a lightbulb logo on the right-hand side of the search results. Microsoft explained that Page Insights “provides summarized insights from a page on your search results so you can find what you’re looking for faster.” This feature is only available on desktop because of a screen size requirement.
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