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The big search news in March has been all about Google’s planned rollout of the move to mobile-only indexing. But that’s not all that happened this month! We also saw an (as yet unconfirmed) Local search algorithm update, an explanation of Google’s “serving index” from Gary Ilyes, and an announcement that major SEO tool provider SEMRush is going public.

In this roundup you’ll also find us sharing technical tips and tool features to help make your workflow easier, plus our favorite recent insights and research from others in the industry, including an experiment from SearchPilot testing the impact of removing numbers from title tags. And here at Tight Ship HQ we’ve also been discussing Mike King’s prediction that Mobile-Only Indexing will cause “the biggest SEO shake up of 2021”. 

Read on for our monthly news and insights roundup for March:

[Read more…] about March 2021: This Month in Search

Most of the search industry news we saw in February was related to Google updating SERP features and appearance. From the official launch of the “about this result” feature, to autoplaying video previews and a new swipe through functionality for Google Product Search, we continue to see Google testing and rolling out new SERP enhancements as well as updates to GSC functionality (and the occasional bug). 

It’s not just about the Google news, though — we’re also sharing some of our favorite tools and technical tips to help make your workflow easier. We’ve included our favorite recent insights and research from others in the industry, including the launch of Tom Critchlow’s new SEO MBA email newsletter. And here at Tight Ship, we’ve been discussing John Mueller’s comments about using a 503 when temporarily removing site functionality, and diving into the debate swirling in response to AJ Kohn’s recent blog post (controversially titled “The Comforting Mirage of SEO A/B Testing”). 

Here’s our monthly news and insights roundup for February:

[Read more…] about February 2021: This Month in Search

We can’t believe we’re already over a month into the new year, but despite how quickly time flew we’ve got plenty of news and updates to show for it.

Most of the industry news this month was related to various GSC changes and updates, new Google documentation and tweaks in SERP appearance. We also saw the addition of a Core Web Vitals lane in Chrome 88 performance recordings, and the Bing Webmaster Tools Performance Report added crawl and index data.

We’ve also seen a few cool new experiments from SearchPilot, a Google Ads Benchmark Report for 2020, and Gary Ilyes and John Mueller continue to confuse concerning link equity distribution. And here at Tight Ship we’ve also been discussing the best way to measure Core Web Vitals for websites with a lot of long tail.

Here’s our monthly news and insights roundup for January:

[Read more…] about January 2021: This Month in Search

2020 was quite a year for SEO news, from new ranking factors being announced to new technologies disrupting how we think about content, pagespeed and automation. As usual, we saw our share of core algorithm updates, and this year they came with a special surprise mix of indexing bugs. The COVID-19 pandemic also led to some changes in search behavior and trends, with a particular impact for more directly affected industries like travel, weddings, real estate, health, and remote working services.

[Read more…] about 2020 Year in Review