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 eventsāall in an easy-to-read, summed-up format. See below for the latest version of The Featured Snippet:
In the June 2022 issue of The Featured Snippet:
Apple Rumored to Announce New Search Engine
Although unconfirmed, Apple is rumored to be releasing a new search engine. Apple was also rumored in August 2020 that they would be launching a new search engine when they updated documentation about Applebot. However, if the search engine releases, it will not be until 2023.
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Ahrefs Launches its Search Engine, Yep.com
Ahrefs unveiled its new search engine, named āYepā, which will be available in most countries and languages shortly. Ahrefs has been rumored as early as March 2019 that they will be creating a search engine to compete with Google. According to Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko, āIt doesnāt have any specific meaning but is a nice, short, and easy-to-remember name. You wonāt forget āYepā, right?ā The new search engine will notably not collect private information and will instead rely on aggregated data.
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Updates to Schema Search Console Reports
On June 15, Google announced that it updated GSC reports to identify errors as āvalidā or āinvalidā to help users understand if the error is an issue for indexing and ranking. The update will help users determine if an error is causing issues in Google Search. The official announcement from Google is below:
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Author Markup Best Practices Update
On June 1, Google added a new section to the article structured data documentation for author markup best practices. The new section is designed āto help Google best understand and represent the author of the content, we recommend following these best practices when specifying authors in markup.ā Users who want their article structured data to be effective will want to follow the new best practices outlined here.
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On June 3rd, Google introduced an update to the algorithm that can identify title elements of pages that are written in a different language than what is on the pageāexpanding upon its title link update in August 2021 and refinements in September 2021. It can then generate a title that matches the language of that original page. With pages that have multi-language titles, Google will try to use alternative titles that match whatever the predominant language is on the page.
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Google is testing new formats and layouts for featured snippets. Typically, there is one site displaying as a featured snippet, but tests are now showing up to four different featured snippets. This test is important because if Google permanently shows more than two snippets, it could impact site performance including organic traffic and click-through-rates. See examples of these tests below (via Search Engine Land):
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On June 28th, Google confirmed that its web crawler, Googlebot, will only read the first 15 megabytes (MB) of an HTML file and will ignore anything after 15 MB. Google says that HTML files that are over 15 MB are rare, and most websites will not be affected by it. The announcement from Google is below:Ā
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