SEO
Google rich results guidelines now prohibits weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco & vaping products and gambling-related products
This better aligns Google Search guidelines with merchant guidelines.
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.
SEO
Google documents how to inject canonical tags using JavaScript
Google still recommends you avoid using JavaScript for canonical tags but if you must, Google provided these recommendations.
Local
Google Maps adds new store location feature, Locator Plus, Reserve with Google integration, new analytics and more
The familiarity of these features might be welcomed by your website users but it might also make you more reliant on Google services.
SEO
Yoast SEO Premium now offers IndexNow
Finally, those who use Yoast SEO premium can easily toggle on IndexNow for their WordPress sites.
SEO
Googlebot will crawl and index the first 15MB of content per page
Make sure the content you want Googlebot to crawl, index and ultimately rank is within the first 15MB of that page.
Local
Google adds LGBTQ+ owned attribute to business profiles
These labels can help some businesses with visibility and potentially increase conversions.
Content
Revamped Google News design goes live with top stories, local news and personalized articles
Google also has re-launched Google News in Spain.
SEO
Google cuts back on SEO office hours format, frequency
This is a substantial change to the original format that has been so helpful to SEOs over the past decade.
SEO
Google updated guidelines for product variants pages and rich results
If you have pages with product variant switches, it may reduce your chances to show rich results in Google Search.
SEO
Google testing new featured snippet layouts
If Google begins to show two or more featured snippets, that can impact your CTR and conversions from Google Search.
SEO
Google Search Console compare feature in performance reports
This feature can be very useful in debugging Google Search issues with rankings, indexing and potentially crawling.
SEO
DuckDuckGo drops below 100 million searches per day
After having over 100 million searches per day since January 2021, the privacy focused search engine has been under that figure for the past few months.
SEO
Google Search Console item classifications updated to show valid or invalid
This is just a reporting change, no changes have been made to crawling, indexing or rankings with this announcement.
SEO
Google to sunset old Search Console message panel
Google will officially remove the legacy message panel on August 1, 2022.
SEO
Twitter removes nofollow attribute from links in tweets
It is unclear if Twitter intentionally removed the attribute or not and even so, if Google would count links in Twitter posts.
SEO
Google May 2022 core update is finished rolling out
This update took 15 days to roll out and is now done, you should now dig in and see how your site was impacted and what actions to take next.
SEO
Google updates its title algorithm for multi-language or transliterated/scripted titles
Make sure your titles match the language and/or script of your page or Google may change it for you.
SEO
Google help document adds author markup best practices
Make sure to verify that you are following these new best practices to ensure your rich results show properly in Google Search.
SEO
Google adds learning video rich results
These rich results show in English in all regions for academic learning content on desktop and mobile.
SEO
Google drops support for job training structured data
Google said they didn't find this structured data and rich results useful after its tests.