Scott Services: Daily Search Forum Recap: December 19, 2019

Thursday, 4 March 2021

Daily Search Forum Recap: December 19, 2019

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google News Stopped Supporting Stock Tickers & Genre?
Joost de Valk noticed that the Google help document for Google News sitemaps has removed any mention of support for stock tickers and genre. We know Google dropped support for the Google News specific meta keywords tag and in the XML sitemap in February 2018 but stock tickers and genre?
Google Tests Featured Snippets With “See What Others Say”
Emily Perry shared a screen shot with me on Twitter of a new Google featured snippet test. In this interface, Google shows the main featured snippet but below it has a section with “see what others say” and then lets you click on an accordion interface to expand those other sources.
Google May Treat Some 404s As 301s & Canonicalize To A New URL
Google’s John Mueller was asked by Mihai Aperghis in a webmaster hangout at the 58 minute mark about a page Mihai 404ed but Google is showing as a 301 to a new URL, like Google canonicalized the 404 URL to the new URL.
85% Of SEOs Do Not Report Bing & Yahoo Rankings To Clients
Russ Jones from Moz did a Twitter poll asking if you report rankings related to Bing and Yahoo to your clients and stakeholders. With almost 900 responses, 86% said they do not, while only 14% said they do.
Google Search Console Speed Report Changes
As you know, Google launched a speed report in experimental mode in Google Search Console. Since it launched I’ve seen numerous complaints that Google is all of a sudden reporting the site as slow when it was moderate or OK. Well, now I am seeing the reverse.
Google Search Console’s Coverage Report Shows More Indexed Pages
Google posted in the data anomalies page and on Twitter that it has updated the coverage report within Google Search Console and as a result, you may see more indexed pages being reported as of December 15, 2019. In short, some pages that were “Crawled – currently not indexed” are now known to be indexed.
Googlers Can Kayak Between Seattle Offices
Here is a photo from Google showing two Googlers using a kayak to go between the different offices in the Seattle office. Google wrote “Googlers in the Bay Area ride bikes to travel around campus, bu