The big story in August was all about page titles, as SEOs started to see a high volume of SERPs with rewritten titles (often based on H1s on the page). We’re also seeing some more clarification and detail around the Page Experience update (including Core Web Vitals) and how it integrates with the core algorithm updates.
In other Google news, the July link spam update took a month to fully roll out, and Google is still working on moving all websites to mobile-first indexing. John Mueller offered some thoughts on handling website downtime and Google News sitemaps, and the Google Trends team published a list of 15 tips for getting the most out of Google Trends. On the SERP features front, SEOClarity did an analysis that showed the People Also Ask and Local pack features were the most commonly shown in SERPs, and Google is now showing an “Affordable Picks” carousel in mobile search. We’re also seeing a “Did You Know” box in Bing search results.
And for those who want to test their SEO knowledge, Google has updated the format of their documentation to be more interactive, with a new “Google Crawling Exam”.
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