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. See below for the latest version of The Featured Snippet:
In the August 2022 issue of The Featured Snippet:
On August 25, Google started rolling out its “helpful content update.” The update will specifically target websites that do not provide users with helpful content and instead focus on ranking in search results. According to Google, the update is “part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.” The update is expected to take up to 2 weeks to finish rolling out.
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Google will be rolling out its fifth product reviews update, known as the August 2022 product reviews Update, in the coming weeks. Google will post on its updates page when it initially launches and also when it finishes rolling out. The product reviews update is an algorithm update that attempts to rank product reviews that will be most helpful to searchers. Most recently, Google launched the July 2022 product reviews update, which finished rolling out on August 2, 2022.
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Featured Snippet Updates
Google Featured Snippet Callouts are the words that appear above the featured snippet in search results in enlarged font. Using MUM (or Multitask Unified Model), Google Featured Snippet Callouts can now compare against other sources to identify if there is a consensus on a given piece of information.
“About This Result” Updates
About This Result first rolled out in February 2021. Now, Google is expanding it to eight additional languages: Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Indonesian. Google is also adding information to About This Result, including reviews, whether a company has a parent company, or if there is a lack of information on a given source.
Expanding Content Advisories
Google is expanding content advisories to searches where its systems don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results available for the search. Search results may still provide helpful information to users.
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On August 9, 2022, Google experienced an outage where users could not access the search engine. The issue affected indexing and missing pages, and it created search ranking problems. The issue was resolved as of August 10, 2022.
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International Targeting Report to be Deprecated
Google announced that the International Targeting Report has been deprecated, and this report will no longer be available as of September 22, 2022. Google will still provide recommendations for international and multilingual sites in place of the International Targeting Report.
Video Indexing Report Fully Rolled Out
The video indexing report in Google Search Console has fully rolled out. This report allows you to view the performance of your videos and the data behind it. Areas of improvement will also be available in the report, and once you make a fix, you are able to verify and track the fixed video in Google’s index.
Core Web Vitals Report Update
The Core Web Vitals Report has been updated to include a feature where it gives you URL level data when clicking on a group of URLs. Within clicking in this group, it also identifies which URLs that don’t have a score of “good” to help you identify areas of improvement. This feature and more were included in the Core Web Vitals Update, displayed in the tweet below:
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Google has added a feature where it may highlight the Pros & Cons of a product, in the product review snippet in search results, as shown in the screenshot below. You can add the pros and cons by adding structured data on editorial review pages. If pros and cons aren’t provided, then Google will try to automatically identify the pros and cons.
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The new Google Quote Searching update includes a feature where the snippets that are displayed will be targeted around the quoted search. On desktop, the quoted search will be bolded in the snippet to help searchers more easily find the quoted word or phrase within the page. However, with using the quoted search, it may bring back content that isn’t visible on the page. For instance, search uses meta descriptions for matches when using quoted search, so it may bring a page as a result because of the quoted word or phrase being in the meta description even though it isn’t visible.
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On August 17th, Screaming Frog announced their most recent update to the platform, version 17.0, following the version 16.0 Screaming Frog update in September 2021 and version 15.0 Screaming Frog update in April 2021.This update includes enhancements to six main features of the tool, which include the Issues Tab, Links Tab, New Limits, “Multiple Properties” Config For URL Inspection API, Apple Silicon Version & RPM for Fedora, and Detachable Tabs. Outside of these main updates, there were also a number of smaller bug updates within the platform. Quickly following this version update, Screaming Frog released version 17.1 on August 23rd, which was primarily aimed at bug fixes. The new enhancements should help provide users with all levels of Screaming Frog experience with the helpful hints and support they need to better understand the data.
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