01/18/2021: SEO Rewind

New details in Coverage reports in Google Search Console. Probably the most significant improvement is a more granular classification of crawl errors. There are small improvements in reporting Soft 404s and pages blocked by robots.txt.

At the same time, GSC started showing multiple referring pages in the URL Inspection. It used to reveal only one referring before this change.

Hey, thank you! I'm glad you found the cases helpful. They were super-interesting to work on.

And I think you're right... I saw that today and didn't really think about it. But I don't remember seeing multiple referring urls there before. I'll double check some things now. pic.twitter.com/WDqjFd3dt3
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 15, 2021

New Google News performance reports. Following the recent change that made Google News data available in Google Data Studio, Google released new performance reports dedicated to Google News data.

Google launched new performance reports for Google News publishers - this is awesome news! https://t.co/ayojwS1Jxp pic.twitter.com/pQna9wR83R
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) January 12, 2021

Speaking of Google News, Valentin Pletzer discovered one interesting thing. He observed that Google seems to be classifying some news articles automatically based on their intent.

Looks like Google is classifying articles based on their intent. "kc:/media_common/articles_by_intent:interviews" #google #serp #mobile pic.twitter.com/AW4YhBocvh
— Valentin Pletzer (@VorticonCmdr) January 9, 2021

Tools: Detailed SEO Extension has a new design. This Chrome and Firefox extension lets you quickly check on-page SEO directly within the extension or send it to third-party tools that you have (such as Ahrefs).

A big plus is that they claim they don't track users nor sell data.

In celebration of surpassing 20,000 users, today we launched a new redesign of the Detailed SEO Extension (forever free + zero tracking). I know the numbers aren't huge compared to other extensions, but it's a pretty cool milestone for us. Here's the link: https://t.co/lm0Gheb2df pic.twitter.com/aEfsjhbQnG
— Glen Allsopp (@ViperChill) January 13, 2021

Tools: AlsoAsked (Beta) lets you visualize People Also Ask data. AlsoAsked is currently in open beta. You can subscribe for free to get 1,000 searches/month.

Great tool for getting better insight into user intent and generating content ideas. And that all in a very nice visual form. Highly recommended!

Hi everyone! 👋https://t.co/OHxXDWBoWC has finally entered beta stage! We've gone straight to an open beta and would love to get your feedback for bugs and improvements. This thread will outline new features in AlsoAsked, planned changes and how you can give feedback. ⬇️⬇️ pic.twitter.com/MU94WeJjpb
— AlsoAsked (Beta) (@AlsoAsked) January 12, 2021

YouTube launched new hashtag pages. YouTube now has dedicated result pages when users look for videos by hashtag.

Why is this relevant to SEO, you ask? Google indexes these results pages (for example, https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/localseo) , and hence they can appear in organic search results.