A happy new year to all our readers.
We are here with the first weekly SEO roundup for 2019.
The first week of January had no updates for the SEO community, primarily because of the holidays. However, on January 9th there were signs of a Google search algorithm update.
Since January 9 there have been pretty much unstable rankings in the Google search results and it is picked by the automated tracking tools. The update is continuing on and you can experience changes in your website’s search results over the following weeks.
There has not been any official confirmation from Google on these updates but the ranking fluctuations are evident.
Moving on to the next update, in a recent webmaster hangout session with SEOs, Google’s John Mueller hinted towards discontinuation of some old Search Console features. Earlier in February last year, Mueller has said that all the features of old Search Console will be ported to the new one, but now it is said that some of the old features will be discontinued for sure.
John listed the crawl errors sections as an example feature that will be removed as it is not useful.
John listed one example, the crawl errors section will be going away because it is not useful. Google also might do away with reports that third-party tools have and are redundant to what Google offers. It is not 100% clear.
John Mueller said:
On the Search Console side there lots of changes happening there of course. They’ve been working on the new version.
I imagine some of the features in the old versions will be closed down as well over time. And some of those might be migrating to the new Search Console.
I’m sure there’ll be some sections of Search Console also that will just be closed down without an immediate replacement. Primarily because we’ve seen there’s a lot of things that we have in there that aren’t really that necessary for websites. Where there are other good options out there or where maybe we’ve been showing you too much information that doesn’t really help your website.
So an example of that could be the the crawl errors section where we list all of them and millions of crawl errors we found on your website. When actually it makes more sense to focus on the issues that are really affecting your website rather than just all of the random URLs that we found on these things.
And in the last update this week, Google will remove the comments feature from the Webmaster Blog.
Google Webmaster Blog will no longer have the ability to post or view comments as announced by Gary Illyes on the blog. He reported that most of the comments were off topic, even some being outright spammy.
This is a step to save time spent on moderating the comments. Google is not redirecting users who want to comment to the help forums or their Twitter accounts.
