The New Year clock has started ticking with December marking the end of 2018. From SEO’s perspective, this year had a lot to offer in terms of smarter search engines, changing the scene of digital marketing and evolving social media channels.
Now, this is time for yet another weekly SEO roundup to catch up with all new that has happened in the past week.
Google Posts Large AMP Indexing FAQs
For a better understanding of the AMP, a Googler, Dong-Hwi Lee has posted a rather large FAQ list in the Google Webmaster Forum addressing the questions related to search engine indexing and AMP.
We recommend everyone interested in SEO to go through the questionnaire and understand how AMP can be an important integration to your overall website improvement. The post answers all the major FAQs like:
In general, how long does it take for AMP pages to be indexed and served from Search?
Is indexing different by page type – i.e. home page vs. product detail page?
What is the impact of AMP on ranking?
Why do two results appear (AMP and non-AMP) when I search?
Should I tag my AMP pages any differently in this scenario? Desktop site (www), mobile site (m.) and AMP pages (on m.) when AMP points to m. and m. to AMP.
Is AMP crawling coming off my crawl budget?
You can get answers to a lot of your AMP related questions directly or indirectly going through this FAQ post.
Bing Search Spam Fighter
Next update comes from Microsoft-backed search engine giant Bing. Frédéric Dubut, a Bing spam fighter who also works on search quality and safety at Bing tweeted, “I always find it fascinating to hear the “reality check” from SEO folks.”
He was actually referring to the, “particularly the small things where the systems and algorithms that we implemented don’t necessarily behave exactly as we think they do.”
A couple of the "reality checks" (related to the other search engine) that I learned from the experimentation panel:
– Implicit local (triggering local intent without "near me") fails 50% of the time
– Robots.txt parsing is not 100% consistent across all the tools#TechSEOBoost— Frédéric Dubut (@CoperniX) November 29, 2018
He backed his statement with two examples:
(1) implicit local (triggering local intent without “near me”) fails 50% of the time
(2) robots.txt parsing is not 100% consistent across all the tools.
Google Tests Dropping The Knowledge Panel
The almighty knowledge panel that we see on the right side of search results is seen disappearing for some searchers. In a recent Google Web Search Help forum, the search giant confirmed testing SERPs without a knowledge panel.
Andy B. from Google wrote “want to confirm that what you are seeing is an experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve the Search experience for users, and one of the ways we achieve this is by experimenting with different methods.” He also asked users to leave feedback if they don’t like this test. He said, “please leave in-product feedback at the bottom of your Search results page to share your thoughts.”
