Our Summer of SEO Round-Up: A Look at the SEO News You May Have Missed
Part of being a great SEO is simply staying on top of the seemingly endless mountain of news that comes out of SEO forums and news sites. But unless you really spend an hour every morning going through all the posts, it can be easy to miss out of the some of the important news items that popped up over the summer. So in looking back from June through August, here some news stories that you might have missed this summer.
Starting in June, one of the stories that broke—leading to our piece on the SEO and social advantages of using emojis—was the fact that Google is now allowing users to search using emojis. The month also saw the declaration from Gary Ilyes that having fewer but higher quality pages results in better quality traffic from Google. While “quality” is always a tricky concept within content marketing, the simple takeaway from this is create pages that you would want to visit if it wasn’t your site, and don’t create pages just to create content.
A relatively slow June led to a much more busy July, with Google declaring the importance of RankBrain in search results, which is now used in the large majority of Google search results (which led to our posting an article to help you better understand how to cater your content to RankBrain). The long-gestating discussion about the fate of Google author tags got its (hopefully) last nail in the coffin when Google announced that it was safe for webmasters to remove said tags as Google no longer counts them. And Google beat the AMP drum harder and harder, announcing a new AMP validator so you could test pages on which you install AMP and encouraging all sites to give AMPs a try, with eBay being the most noteworthy adopter.
The unrelenting heat of August saw a month full of unconfirmed algorithm updates along with adjustments to the local search algorithm. Firstly, in case you were worried that Penguin might have somehow launched this summer, newsflash: It did not. Google also cleared up some longstanding confusion over redirects by declaring no lost Page Rank from any 3XX direct. Finally, providing a nice bookend to this story, the search behemoth stated that it would not penalize the use of symbols or emojis in your site’s rich snippets. So take note of the above news items, make those necessary changes, and get ready to win big this fall!
