As with the rest of 2021, August was another busy month in the world of Google and SEO.
Google started the month by telling us that safe browsing was no longer a Google ranking signal, which is a change to what they originally told us when releasing the Core Web Vitals page experience update earlier in the year.
They then went on to make not one but two ranking algorithm updates – one on the weekend of August 6th, and one on the weekend of August 15th. Google hasn’t actually confirmed these updates, but we suspect they were part of the link spam update which started rolling out in July and seems to be still ongoing.
The main chatter in August, however, was around the header vs title tag tweak that Google dropped mid-month. They suddenly started to use H1 or H2 title tags in search results snippets rather than meta title tags, and only confirmed it when bombarded with questions from the SEO community on Twitter. The interesting thing about this is:
- Google has now said it will generally not be using what the searcher entered into the search box to produce the title for the search result i.e. titles won’t be dynamic based on the query
- They went on to say that 80% of the titles they do use in search results will still be meta titles as optimised by us. The other 20% may be from header tags or other areas of visible content on the page
- This means headers within pages (H1s and H2s) are now more important than ever as Google is putting more emphasis on them
As with most SEO news, this doesn’t really impact Zool’s clients as we look after everything SEO related for you, ensuring everything we do adheres to Google’s best practices
SEO News Round-up for August 2021
Digital SEO / Aug 2, 2021
As with the rest of 2021, August was another busy month in the world of Google and SEO.
Google started the month by telling us that safe browsing was no longer a Google ranking signal, which is a change to what they originally told us when releasing the Core Web Vitals page experience update earlier in the year.
They then went on to make not one but two ranking algorithm updates – one on the weekend of August 6th, and one on the weekend of August 15th. Google hasn’t actually confirmed these updates, but we suspect they were part of the link spam update which started rolling out in July and seems to be still ongoing.
The main chatter in August, however, was around the header vs title tag tweak that Google dropped mid-month. They suddenly started to use H1 or H2 title tags in search results snippets rather than meta title tags, and only confirmed it when bombarded with questions from the SEO community on Twitter. The interesting thing about this is:
- Google has now said it will generally not be using what the searcher entered into the search box to produce the title for the search result i.e. titles won’t be dynamic based on the query
- They went on to say that 80% of the titles they do use in search results will still be meta titles as optimised by us. The other 20% may be from header tags or other areas of visible content on the page
- This means headers within pages (H1s and H2s) are now more important than ever as Google is putting more emphasis on them
As with most SEO news, this doesn’t really impact Zool’s clients as we look after everything SEO related for you, ensuring everything we do adheres to Google’s best practices
