November was not a quiet month in the world of Search, with Google confirming they had released a core algorithm update mid-month. There was a lot of talk about tackling spam and cleaning out the nasty lower levels of the web – so nothing too out of the ordinary here. However, what was interesting was the timing of this update – a week before the biggest shopping day of the year – Black Friday.
The other Google announcement in November was around page experience ranking and how it is now starting to roll out to desktop – although this shouldn’t change things much. Most desktop sites are already faster than mobile sites due to the hardware used and better access to faster WIFI.
There were also updates to Google My Business in November, which has been rebranded to Google Business Profile and is now properly integrated into Google maps. So instead of having to manage your Google My Business and Google maps profiles separately, they can now all be managed in one place.
Google also announced its biggest news for the last decade, when they confirmed that bolding text on a page can help them to understand what that page is about, and the importance of the text that is bolded – which makes sense. Writers will bold a word or phrase to draw attention and emphasize it. But before we go mad and bold every keyword on your site, it is important to remember that these tools should only be used the way they are meant to be used. So, if you see changes to your site in terms of bolded words, title sizing and even underlining – we will have been tweaking things to help Google understand better what things we think are important to the reader.
SEO News Round-up for November 2021
Digital SEO / Nov 1, 2021
November was not a quiet month in the world of Search, with Google confirming they had released a core algorithm update mid-month. There was a lot of talk about tackling spam and cleaning out the nasty lower levels of the web – so nothing too out of the ordinary here. However, what was interesting was the timing of this update – a week before the biggest shopping day of the year – Black Friday.
The other Google announcement in November was around page experience ranking and how it is now starting to roll out to desktop – although this shouldn’t change things much. Most desktop sites are already faster than mobile sites due to the hardware used and better access to faster WIFI.
There were also updates to Google My Business in November, which has been rebranded to Google Business Profile and is now properly integrated into Google maps. So instead of having to manage your Google My Business and Google maps profiles separately, they can now all be managed in one place.
Google also announced its biggest news for the last decade, when they confirmed that bolding text on a page can help them to understand what that page is about, and the importance of the text that is bolded – which makes sense. Writers will bold a word or phrase to draw attention and emphasize it. But before we go mad and bold every keyword on your site, it is important to remember that these tools should only be used the way they are meant to be used. So, if you see changes to your site in terms of bolded words, title sizing and even underlining – we will have been tweaking things to help Google understand better what things we think are important to the reader.
