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The Expert's SEO Agency

November 2021: This Month in Search

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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.

In other Google news, the November spam update rollout completed in the first week of the month, Google announced that they may use the IndexNow protocol for instant indexing and Bing launched a new Page Insights feature. In addition, Google has been busy rolling out a number of new features and testing others, including a “Found in video” carousel, enhanced results for “Deals” queries, and promoting more local news in Google News results with a “Local news” feature. John Mueller shared some insights and clarifications around a variety of topics including republished reviews and some Google team members shared their predictions about the Future of SEO. 

November’s Top Stories

Google drops mobile-first indexing deadline: after postponing the original Sept 2020 deadline to Mar 2021, Google has now officially dropped its mobile-first indexing deadline in favor of a more open-ended approach. 

November core update: on November 17th, another core update began to roll out and started to show impact quickly, with a burst of volatility in the first 24 hours, some of which appeared to be reversals or adjustments to impact from the June/July updates. The November update appears more significant than the July 2021 update. Around 2 weeks later (on Thanksgiving) we saw reports of more volatility again which could be the tail-end of the update completing its rollout (although this is unconfirmed by Google). This update brings us to a total of three officially confirmed broad core updates in 2021 (the others were June and July’s core updates).

Google publishes a list of official Googlebot IP addresses: Google (and Bing!) have both published lists of official crawler IP addresses to assist webmasters in verifying whether a site is being crawled by the real thing or a fake Googlebot that they might want to block. This will also make it easier for tools to verify crawls from Googlebot and Bingbot. 

Google crawling issues: between November 11-17, a now-resolved bug kept Google from crawling for the AMP cache. A DNS issue also prevented Google from crawling sites hosted on SiteGround between November 8-13. SiteGround rolled out fixes on the 12th and 13th but it can take a little time after an outage like this for Google crawlers to get those sites reindexed. SiteGround provided a little more context in a statement and some tweets. 

Page Experience update coming to Desktop in Feb 2022: Google said at this year’s I/O that the page experience update would be rolling out to desktop, and now we have a timeline: Feb-Mar 2022. This includes all the same factors as the mobile update (Core Web Vitals factors as well as requiring the absence of intrusive interstitials) with the obvious exception of mobile friendliness. Legally required interstitials are not considered “intrusive” for the purposes of this update and so far John Mueller feels confident that no special guidance for these is necessary.

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Read on for our roundup of what else is new in search this month:

Industry News and Updates

General News 

GSC and BWT Updates