No core update roll out yet so far this week and no more reports of volatility compared to the past weeks. Seems to be a quiet week aside from the usual buzz. Check out this week’s notable SEO news below.
Google announced the addition of Search Console Recommendations, which is a new feature in search console that provides sites with optimization opportunities and suggests actions that can be taken to improve presence on Google Search.
The recommendations are based on a variety of Google Search systems data like indexing, crawling, and serving. The kinds of recommendations provided may include:
The recommendations are optional and do not have to be resolved. They are computed on a regular basis and may expire, the details may also change over time. The recommendations will appear in the Search Console overview page.
As of this time, it is still an experimental feature and not all sites will have the recommendations. The feature will be rolling out slowly over the coming months. It is also mentioned that even when the roll out is completed, they will only provide recommendations when they have a recommendation available for the site.
This week’s episode of The Search Off The Record Podcast is about crawling. The Google Search team talked about misconceptions around crawl frequency and site quality, what’s challenging about crawling the web nowadays, and how search engines could crawl more efficiently.
Here are some notable parts of the episode:
“In one of the presentations that we keep doing, Search Central Live events, that is actually about myth busting. And it has at least one or two questions about crawling. And then it’s like, “Oh, Google is crawling my site a lot, so my site must be very good.” And it’s like, “Nah, not really.” Like it can mean many things, but generally if the content of a site is of high quality and it’s helpful and people like it in general, then Googlebot–well, Google–tends to crawl more from that site, but it can also mean that, I don’t know, the site was hacked. And then there’s a bunch of new URLs that Googlebot gets excited about, and then it goes out and then it’s crawling like crazy…It can mean other things as well than just quality. But then, on the flip side, if we are not crawling much or we are gradually slowing down with crawling, that might be a sign of low-quality content or that we rethought the quality of the site.”
“I think with regards to the amount of crawling and the external perception, there’s also the aspect of like a lot of sites have a lot of different pages, and then it’s not so much that Google crawls one page very often. It’s sometimes just like, well, if you have all of these pages and Google has never crawled them, then Google wouldn’t be able to know what to do with it. So some of that perception of like, well, if only Google could crawl more, then it would see that I actually have some good content. I can kind of understand that.”
“We keep saying Googlebot is following links, like, no, it’s not following links. It’s collecting links, and then it goes back to those links. It’s not like properly following links.”
Check out the episode below: