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October 2019 SEO Updates
It’s October but in this SEO update, we will be diving into the changes seen with the release of September Core Update last Tuesday, other Google announcements, and provide you with the usual awesome SEO tips.
So let’s begin!
Algorithm Updates
04/10/2019 – 10 Days After Google Core Quality Update
Google announced a core quality update which started to roll out on September 24, 2019. Here’s the announcement.
Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the September 2019 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this blog for more about that: https://t.co/e5ZQUAlt0G
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) September 24, 2019
Now it’s been 10 days and according to Marie Haynes, this appears to be a fairly significant update, affecting many verticals but in particular eCommerce, health, and legal websites.
Among her clients, the sites which had show improvement were those that made changes related to improving their trustworthiness (T in E-A-T), improving technical aspects on their site, and trimming out thin content.
This seems to be aligned with the blog that Google has linked to, regarding “What Webmasters should know about Google’s core updates”.
But if you are short on time, here are the main points:
- The reason behind Google’s September core update is to “ensure overall that Google is delivering on its mission to present relevant and authoritative content to searchers.”
- Readers are directed to read Google’s Search Quality Guidelines, and especially the part on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness – here’s our take on it)
- For websites that are negatively impacted this September core update, Google advise is to look at Amit Singhal’s 23 Questions to ask re:Panda
Google Announcments
01/10/2019 – John Mueller strongly advice against using M-dot sites
Although Google has always strongly recommended sites to use responsive designed but John Mueller has recently adviced staying away from m-dots websites as a strong recommendation. Here’s the Tweet.
Client is a publisher with approx. 6M+ uniques/month. Most from Google (Search/News/Discover). 50%+ of traffic is to AMP pages. Some discussion about moving to PWA. I'm apprehensive. Any thoughts? Do m. URLs still have a place in 2019 and beyond? @JohnMu any insights?
— Rob P (@MrRobzilla) September 27, 2019
In the tweet, Mueller had only said that this will make things easier, but to further elaborate — mobile-dedicated websites are designed under a separate URL (eg m.site.com) and are completely distinct from the full site, which dispersed your website traffic and SEO, which is what makes responsive websites a better choice.
02/10/2019 – HTML Sitemaps not worthwhile for SEO?
Google’s John Mueller posted on Reddit that he agrees that HTML sitemaps are not worthwhile for SEO purposes.
HTML Sitemaps has always been seen as an important part of SEO, like almost forever since 2009 when Matt Cutts picked HTML Sitemaps over XML Sitemaps.
Then again, ten years have passed and like Mueller said if Google cannot crawl your website through normal navigation, then you might have bigger issues. Still, on a consensus from the team in SEOPressor, we think an HTML sitemap is still something better to have than not.
SERP Updates
02/10/2019 – Google featured Snippet Image Carousel to show more Results
All this while, we have been Google testing different variations of SERP results, and this time Google is showing image carousels in the featured snippet position. We are not sure if it is entirely new, but for us it is and here’s the snap shot.
The image carousel is above the usual featured snippet of “Technical SEO Checklist”
We are not sure if Google is going to roll this out, but if they do — this will shift a great weightage to Image SEO.
That is it for this week’s SEO updates, remember to stay tuned next week as we bring you more weekly SEO news you should keep an eye out for.
