Oliver takes us through all of the latest SEO news, from new Robots Tags to an ongoing issue with Search Console. Find out more.
This week we look at the exciting new announcements and features released by Google and much more. Starting off with the improved new Robots tags "Indexifembedded" giving you more control over indexing and the new mobile search feature being launched by Google called "People Search Next".
It has been announced this week that Google is releasing a new robots tag that will give users much more control over their content and what gets indexed in search results.
Google would like to introduce indexifembedded, the newest Robot’s tag. What sets this new robot tag apart from the traditional tag is that this allows you to tell Google to only index content on a page if it’s embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags. The indexifembedded tag overrides the noindex tag.
This changes the way we can index a page and the content within that page. For example, a huge benefit of the indexifembedded tag is that you can use noindex to keep a whole URL out of search results and apply the indexifembedded tag to make a specific piece of content indexable when it’s embedded on another webpage.
There was a reported issue on the 24th of January from Google that stated there was a logging issue with google search data for images. Google has warned that this logging issue may result in a drop of image search performance data which, in effect, will result in the number of clicks and impressions declining in your Google Search Console reports.
However, it is not all bad news. Although there is an issue with the image search performance data. this will only be recognised in reporting, and will not impact rankings or traffic for your website. Google continue to look at the issue and at this current moment in time Google have stated “they are still working on resolving this issue”.
Do you ever open your phone, go onto Google and look for a shop or product followed by ‘near me’? If so, Google have launched a brand-new feature for this exact action in its mobile search results and it is called “People Search Next”.
People Search Next is the newest feature from Google with the purpose of helping people easily view popular "next" searches that are relevant to what they are searching. This is not a replacement for any other feature but is seen as an addition to the Google search features that are currently active, such as People Also Ask and Related Searches.
That wraps up the SEO Round-up from this week! If you would like Oliver and the SEO team to assist you, then get in touch!