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 February 2019 issue of The Featured Snippet:
Google announced a big change to how page metrics are collected in Google Search Console. Previously, the Performance Report credited metrics to the page URL that a user is referred by. Staring on April 10, Google will unify all page metrics by (Google-selected) canonical URL. The new and old version of the report will be available until April 10, 2019.
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Moz announced that they will update how they calculate their internal metric called “domain authority,” which is a score created to estimate the value of a given website and how well it will rank in SERPs. Moz explains that the new score will deliver a “better, more trustworthy metric than ever before.” The new “domain authority” metrics will be available on March 5, 2019.
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Google announced in February that they have rebuilt their Test My Site tool. With updates to the tool, Google explains that businesses can now see:
Here’s a quick look at the new features:
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Bing announced at SMX West that they are now allowing webmasters to submit up to 10,000 URLs per day through Bing Webmaster Tools. Previously, Bing Webmaster tools only allowed webmasters to submit up to 10 URLs per day. Below is a Tweet from Bing announcing the change:
Bing will continue to crawl pages but explained that the hope in the future is to not rely on crawling the web to find new content but to rely on webmasters to submit content to the search engine for indexation.
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Google published a lengthy white paper on its blog about how it fights disinformation. One of the main topics that gained a lot of traction/chatter in the industry was the section about E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness). Below is the section found in the white paper that explains how Google’s algorithm assesses E-A-T:
Long story short: Google explains that they are putting more emphasis in their algorithm to help understand E-A-T. However, Google does not go into specifics on how E-A-T is exactly measured/calculated by its algorithm.
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Google announced a new feature in Google Search Console called “domain properties.” Domain properties shows data for all URLs under the domain name including all protocols, subdomains, and paths. This feature will provide webmasters a more complete view of websites across Google Search Console. Below shows a graphic provided by Google about how domain properties work:
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Google Search Console added a new report to help webmasters assess their product schema markup and how well it is performing ing Google search results. Below shows a screenshot of what the new report looks like and where to find it:
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All algorithm updates were speculation and industry. All speculated algorithm updates were unconfirmed by Google. Here are February’s unconfirmed updates: