It is that time of the month, here is our monthly Google webmaster report, where I summarize the most important webmaster/SEO related topics over the past month. If you missed the August report, make sure to scan through that to catch up.
This month, we had some big events including signs of a big Google update over this past weekend. We also had signs of a local quality update in the local pack. Google announced they are introducing a new interstitial mobile penalty in January 2017 and also removed the mobile friendly labels this week from the mobile search results.
Google quietly announced the real time index which is their search live coverage carousel. They did more with AMP notifications in the Search Console and added schema 3.1 support.
Google redesigned the local pack and hurt search marketers by restricting the keyword planner data.
Here are the key links for this past month:
Google Algorithm:
- Early Signs Of A Google Core Search Algorithm Update
- No Confirmation From Google On The Friday Google Update
- Google Local Pack Results Algorithm & Ranking Update
- Google: Panda Roll Outs Continue But Not All Take 10 Months To Cycle
- The Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Coming January 10, 2017
- Poll: Should Google Build A Pass/Fail Mobile Interstitials Testing Tool?
- Google: No Plans To Build A Mobile Interstitials Testing Tool
- Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Is At The Page Level Only
- Should Google's Interstitial Mobile Penalty Hit AdSense's Vignette Ads
- Google Confirms It Will Penalize BlogDash For Link Schemes
- Google Search Live Coverage Carousel Pilot; Is This The Real Time Index?
- Google To Drop Mobile Friendly Label But Not The Ranking Factor
- The Google Mobile Friendly Label Is Now Officially Gone
- Google Testing AMP For Web Pages In Live Results
- Google Android Now Allows For Apps Search For Personal Content
- Once Again; Google Testing Image Thumbnails In Mobile Search Results
- Why Did Google Add Solitaire & Tic-Tac-Toe To Search Results?
- Google Tests People Also Ask Carousel On Desktop
- Google Search Console: Preview AMP Presence Message
- Google Sending Search Console Notifications To Create AMP Pages
- Google Updates Reviews Markup Guidelines Disallowing Marking Up 3rd Party Reviews
- Google Adds JSON-LD Breadcrumbs Support
- Google Structured Data Tool Supports Schema v3.1
- Google Showing AMP Errors In Desktop Search Results To Site Owner
- Google: You'll Almost Never Restore Your Rankings To Previous State After Penalty
- Google Titles In Snippets Gone Awry
- Google: 410 Response Codes Don't Generally Cause Indexing Issues
- Google's John Mueller: Requiring A Followed Link For API Access Is A Paid Link
- Google Doesn't Follow Links In SVGs
- Google Support Rel Canonical For PDFs
- Google: Rel Canonical Not Supported For Images
- Google: No Problem Having Downloadable PDFs That Match Your Web Content
- Google: Sitemaps Don't Help With Rich Snippets
- Google: 30x Redirect Passes PageRank But 301s Help With Canonicalization
- Google Search Analytics Data Bug Extended: July 29th - August 5th
- Google: We Don't Have Different GoogleBot User Agents For Crawling JavaScript
- Google Keyword Planner Removes Valuable Data For Potential Advertisers
- Google Local Pack Results Algorithm & Ranking Update
- New Google Local Pack Design Now Live
- Google My Business Insights: Search vs Maps & Direct vs Discovery Analytics
- Old Google My Business Business Hour Format No Longer Supported
- Google My Business Updates User Interface For Editing Business Details
- Google My Business Insights Statistics Broken?
- Google My Business Adds Ability To Add/Remove Owners & Managers
- New Google My Business New Access Map View
Finally, there has been ongoing Google zombie discussions throughout all of August.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.