Last Updated on August 20, 2018
Right now the SEO community is all abuzz with the talks about the new Google Medic update.
We covered about this broad core update from Google that was rolled out on August 1, 2018. The after-effects of this update are still experienced with a turnaround in rankings mostly in the health category. Since there is no solid proof available on how to recover if penalized by the new update, some SEOs are turning back to the 2011 Panda recovery guidelines to deal with it.
Are they successful or nor, only time will tell.
Moving on, Google has asked users to provide examples of how the search results after the Medic core update are worse off. Gary Illyes of Google asked users on Twitter to let him know of any such examples and he will forward it to the search him.
His tweet read, “give examples (query, location, bad result with explanation) and I’ll forward it to the team, like i did for other people. Note that OMG my competition is ranking better now” is not a good example.”
If you want to report an example, reply to his tweet:
Give examples (query, location, bad result with explanation) and I'll forward it to the team, like i did for other people. Note that "OMG my competition is ranking better now" is not a good example.
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) August 17, 2018
Next is not an update but a revelation from John Mueller. The Google executive confirmed in a tweet to Barry Schwartz that pages that are important and popular are crawled more often by Google. He explained that this is not a new information but already covered in a Google blog post about crawl budget.
According to the post the two main factors that determine the crawl demand are the popularity of the URL on the internet and staleness.
However, the important takeaway from the post is this:
“An increased crawl rate will not necessarily lead to better positions in Search results. Google uses hundreds of signals to rank the results, and while crawling is necessary for being in the results, it’s not a ranking signal”
Here’s John’s tweet:
"URLs that are more popular on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresher in our index." ?
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) August 17, 2018
Here’s the major update of this week:
Expandable Featured Snippets
Google announced a new form of the featured snippet that offer searchers to dive deeper into a search query, the new expandable snippets.
This featured snippet form is tested in April is not live globally. Here’s how the expandable featured snippet looks like:
In the August 16 post, Google wrote, “we’re introducing a new way to get you to relevant information fast and help you get a glimpse of multiple aspects of a topic with a single search.”
Right now, there’s no official name for the new snippers but soon we can expect one.
