The big search news in April is that Google is postponing the Page Experience update – this will now be a slow rollout starting in mid-June. But that’s not all that happened this month! We also saw an (as yet unconfirmed) web and local search algorithm update, an explanation that pages need to pass quality checks for indexing, some changes in SERP features and–in other headlines–the Daily Mail is suing Google because they lost organic rankings.
In this roundup you’ll also find us sharing technical tips and tool features to help make your workflow easier, plus a couple Tight Ship hot takes on current industry topics like Rand’s Zero-Click study and the role of Googlebot Desktop in ongoing URL discovery.
Read on for our monthly news and insights roundup for April:
Industry News and Updates
General News
- Google is postponing the Page Experience update – will now be a slow rollout starting mid-June
- Mike: “They’re also killing the AMP indicator, suggesting AMP content will now be bundled up in “Good Page Experience” and get that indicator instead.”
- Google Page Experience Algorithm Update won’t be real time
- Google has changed Cumulative Layout Shift Metric
- Google Web and Local Search Ranking algorithm updates suspected over the weekend of Apr 24-25
- Google: A page needs to pass quality checks for indexing
- The Daily Mail is suing Google claiming they lost organic rankings due to not selling enough ad space through AdSense
- Google says that Cache View is an unmaintained legacy feature
- Google Search tweaks Knowledge Panel and Filter Design
- Google: Break YMYL and non-YMYL content into separate sites if you want it treated differently for EAT purposes
- Ben: “I’ve seen Google seem to have a similar issue around adult content (not porn) causing a client in the publishing space to not rank as well as it should site-wide (my theory anyway). Google made a similar suggestion of isolating this content to a subdirectory or subdomain. Probably not the same things at play here algorithmically – but interesting to suggest separate domains.”
- Jake: “One of the problems here is what counts as YMYL queries. Yes what nurses and doctors do is YMYL — but where is the line drawn? Buying scrubs is not a YMYL query per se. A day in the life of a nurse, maybe. Is content around a nurse practitioner’s job counted as “Your Life”?”
- Related topic: Google Search More Critical Of E-Commerce Sites That Sell Medical Equipment
- Google Discover New Guidelines: Won’t show these types of content
- From the article:
- Google specifically gave these examples of content that it might not show in Google Discover:
- Job applications
- Petitions
- Forms
- Code repositories
- Satirical content without any context
- Google specifically gave these examples of content that it might not show in Google Discover:
- From the article:
GSC and BWT Updates
- “Good Experience” is already a Search Appearance type in GSC:
- New Page Experience report in GSC:
- Improved data filtering and comparison on Performance reports in GSC
- Ben: “GSC now supports new regex filter for queries and pages — but doesn’t seem to allow negative match.”
Insights and Hot Takes
- Tight Ship hot take: “Google still using Googlebot Desktop crawler for discovery” (Ben)
- One of our clients has a different URL structure for Googlebot Desktop vs Googlebot Smartphone. This makes it easy to understand how Google chooses to crawl with the Desktop crawler since mobile-first indexing rolled out to this website in June 2020.
- Analysis of crawl patterns indicates that Google uses Googlebot Desktop crawler for discovery and to “check in” on some URLs ongoing: