In this week’s SEO roundup, we have a few interesting updates from Google. The search giant is known to continuously work on improving user experience by making the design improvement to its search services.

In the recent changes that were introduced this week, we have:

Recently Viewed Section Added To Google Image Search

Google added the feature to display the recently viewed images to the Image Search that shows the images you have previously viewed and are related to the one you are currently looking at.

Here is a screenshot shared by one of the users on Twitter where you can see the recently viewed section in the image preview.

This change can point towards early changes in the Google Image Search.

Google Assistant Search Ads

Moving on, last week a user named Gennaro Cuofano on Twitter shared a Google Assistant showing search ad for his voice query. Here is a screenshot of what he saw:

Honestly, it’s not a surprise that Google is testing ads for its Assistant service. The voice queries are the future of internet search and companies like Google has to come up with ways to monetize voice search results.

In a statement to Seoroundtable’s Barry Schwartz, Google states, “We’re always testing new ways to improve the experience on phones, but we don’t have anything specific to announce right now.”

Google News Search Related Coverage Expandable Snippet Carousel

For mobile users, the Google News search has not made a new form of snippet feature available that allows users to browse the related coverage in the expanded section.

Here’s a GIF of this feature in action:

This is it for this week’s SEO roundup. All these updates are not affecting the SEO principles and practices in any way, but they are important to be taken into account.

This is the first SEO roundup for the first week of February 2019. Can you believe it one month of the New Year has already passed!

Moving on with our weekly SeoEaze’s SEO roundup, Google Search Ranking Algorithm showed signs of an update on February 7th. It is hard to say what websites are mostly affected by this minor update, however, most of the update signs are coming out of the United Kingdom.

If you have witnessed any change in organic rankings or traffic for your websites, most probably it has happened because of this update.

Bing Recommends Publishers To Use The “Submit URL” Tool

Last week, Bing remove URL submission restriction on its Submit URL tool from 10 URLs per day to allow 10,000 URL submissions per day. This is a move as announced by the search engine to do away with the crawling as a strategy to include web pages into their index.

In an interview with Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism at Bing confirmed that this is the direction Bings hopes to move towards. According to her, crawling URLs is both ineffective and resource intensive for both Bing and the publishers. Instead, the new strategy will let the publishers submit their content to the search engine.

Yes point and feedback taken. Crawling isn't going to stop – this is a signal for new and fresh/updated data to be included in the index.

— Christi Olson (@ChristiJOlson) February 7, 2019

To fully utilize the new strategy Olson recommends that publishers should start using this function NOW. This will allow a lot faster crawling and indexing of the content.

This makes way for the biggest update for content creators who use the Yoast SEO tool with WordPress.

Yoast To Add Live Indexing For Google And Bing

At YoastCon, Joost de Valk that the popular Yoast SEO plugin will start offering live indexing with both Bing and Google from the next month.

For Bing, the plugin will most probably be using their newly introduced submit URL API. As far as Google is concerned it is still not clear how this feature will work. On the official Yoast blog, it is pointed out that “For Google, the details on this are not entirely determined yet, but a Google Search Console account will probably be required.” We expect it will have something to do with Search Console.

Explaining further Joost wrote that, “When you connect your site to MyYoast, you’ll authorize it to send messages back and forth. One of the types of messages that will be sent will be when you publish, update or delete anything on your site. We’ll pass that notification on to Bing, and Bing will check the changes within approximately one minute of you hitting the button.”

In this week’s SEO roundup, we will cover some of the important revelations made by Google’s John Mueller during the hangout sessions with SEOs.

First one is the upcoming changes in Google Image Search that will force you to think differently.

Google Image Search Changes Are Coming

During a session with webmasters on 24th January, John Mueller told that there are some really big changes coming to the Google Image Search this year. These changes will force you to think differently about image optimization than you have been doing for the last two decades.

These changes will be based on the introspection that people will be using images at a much larger scope in a more transactional and educational manner rather than to just search images to be included in presentations. It will be hard to say what these new changes will bring in. Here’s a tweet by Barry Schwartz on John’s statement:

Images in general are going to be a bigger topic this year. Think more how people might be searching to find your images. Not just for searching for images for presentations. Says @JohnMu

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) January 24, 2019

Moving on to the next update, Google states that the last 50% of the Mobile-First Indexing migration will be harder.

Till not Google has migrated 50% of the search results towards the mobile-first indexing mechanism that evaluates the value of web results based on their mobile friendliness. But the last 50% is still left to be migrated and it is going to be much harder for Google to migrate over.

According to John Mueller, the problem is between the mobile and desktop versions parity that is causing issues with migration. The challenge is to fix the mobile pages that have a difference in terms of content, structure data, links, etc. as compared to their desktop versions.

Google is planning to communicate with the webmasters via Google Search Console regarding the issues that need to be fixed for successful migration of their websites. Still, John believes there will be a number of websites that will never be mobile-first.

This last one is a tip that can help you improve trust value of your website for Google.

Disavow Bad Links to Make Your Links More Trustworthy for Google

In another webmaster hangout session this week, John Mueller told webmasters that cleaning up or disavowing bad links to your site can help Google algorithmically trust other links to your website. One of the webmasters asked Mueller that after disavowing some links on their site they saw improvement. She asked if bad links can hurt websites algorithmically, to which Mueller replied:

    That can definitely be the case. So it’s something where our algorithms when they look at it and they see oh there’s a bunch of really bad links here, then maybe they’ll be a bit more cautious with regards to links in general from the website. So if you clean that up then the algorithms look at it and say oh there’s kind of it’s okay, it’s not that bad.

I think if you’re in the case where it’s really clear that the webspam team you would give you a manual action, then based on the current situation then that’s what I would disavow.

You can check the complete discussion in the video above.