December’s most discussed SEO story was the Products Reviews Update for English language search results, which followed on from a previous update in April 2021. Google also rolled out a significant Local search update between Nov 30-Dec 8 and released their annual “Top Searches” recap.
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November 2021: This Month in Search
November’s top SEO stories included another core update, announcements about the Page Experience update coming to desktop in early 2022, Google dropping the mobile-first indexing deadline, a list of official Googlebot and Bingbot IP addresses and an outage in Google search for websites hosted on SiteGround.
[Read more…] about November 2021: This Month in SearchOctober 2021: This Month in Search
October’s top SEO stories included Google’s rollout of continuous scrolling on mobile search in the US and changes to Google’s advertising and monetization policies to reduce climate change denial content. There was also an update to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, with changes including an expansion of the YMYL (“Your Money, Your Life”) content categorization, definition of “lowest quality content” and more.
[Read more…] about October 2021: This Month in SearchSeptember 2021: This Month in Search
The big stories in September saw a focus on some items that are still in the works: an upcoming Search redesign integrating the MUM algorithm was announced at Google’s Search On event, and Google is apparently working on deals to allow them to index TikTok and Instagram content. Meanwhile, a new update to Lighthouse 8.4 helps improve reports and offers new audits, and the automotive industry saw some ruffled feathers this month with the addition of new data in car related SERPs.
[Read more…] about September 2021: This Month in SearchUpdate to How Google Generates Page Titles
What did Google change when generating titles for SERP listings?
It’s not news that Google has historically rewritten a page’s meta title in the SERPs when it was missing or vague. However, with recent changes to how these title rewrites are being generated, SEOs have been noticing a difference.
The change that Google has just announced is that they will (caveat: “generally”) stop rewriting title tags based on the specific Query of a given SERP, in favor of generating “titles that work better for documents overall”.
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