The past month in terms of Google search, SEO and webmaster related topics can be summed up into two primary categories. First is the massive number of bugs and the second is about new features and tools. Let’s start with the bugs; we saw pages dropping from the Google index and it took them a few weeks to fully fix when you count in the 16-day Search Console data loss. Google had bugs with picking the correct canonical as well, also an issue with indexing Google News content, cache date issues, problems with both recipe markup and mobile friendly issues and so much more. It is because of all these bugs, it was hard to tell if there were any large algorithm updates – I am thinking there may have been one around August 26th.
Google added some new features and took away others – such as dropping the sort by date but adding before: and after: search operators. Google Search Console added a number of new reports such as new enhancement reports and unparsable markup reports, a new Google Discover report, AMP Stories filters, Android app filters and more. Heck, they even went Star Wars on us this weekend.
Google might be able to better crawl complex JS soon and change how they index robots.txt content. Let’s not forget Google launching support for your URLs with AMP pages. Finally, Eric Schdmit stepped down after 18 years of service.
There is a lot and a lot more – including the typical ongoing chatter in the WebmasterWorld thread. Here is a recap for the past month sorted by importance and category:
Google Algorithm Updates:
Google Search:
Google Search Console:
Google SEO:
Google Links:
Google Maps & My Business:
Google User Interface:
Google Business:
For last month’s recap, see over here.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.