9/14/2020: SEO Rewind

Google added new COVID-19 related attributes to Google My Business listings. Now you can add new Health and Safety attributes such as:

• Appointment required
• Mask required
• Staff get temperature checks
• Staff wear masks
• Temperature check required

Earlier this year, Google added the possibility to link to COVID-19 information from GMB listings and offer Virtual Care.

Google My Business Adds Health & Safety Attributes

Now you can label if your business requires appointments, masks for both employees and customers and if your staff and customers get temperature checks. In Google My Business, if you go to your info

Search Engine RoundtableBarry Schwartz

The Coverage report in Google Search Console is delayed again. The report shows coverage issues (such as 404s, noindex, redirect and duplicate content issues) currently lag two weeks. For me, it mostly shows: “Last updated: 01/09/2020”.

According to Google, this will be fixed soon.

Microsoft officially announced their take on an URL Inspection Tool. Similarly to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools offer an URL Inspection Tool that lets you check an URL for crawling and indexation issues. This feature has already been available for some time, but the blogpost introducing this feature was published last week:

Introducing the Bing Webmaster Tools URL Inspection Tool

Bing Webmaster Tools URL Inspection is a powerful new tool allowing webmasters to check and take necessary actions on their URLs for crawling, indexing, SEO and markup details and other errors. Let’s investigate if your URLs are indexed and follow recommended actions to be crawled and indexed or ran…

Blogs

I’d still consider it as a beta since, for me, it shows some strange errors that support later confirmed as false positives and “outdated information”.

Chrome 85 was released on August 25. The new stable version of Chrome brings some small improvements. The most significant change is the new default referrer policy, as reported before.

A new default Referrer-Policy for Chrome: strict-origin-when-cross-origin

A new default Referrer-Policy for Chrome: strict-origin-when-cross-origin

Google DevelopersMaud Nalpas

An interesting change is that Google introduced a couple of new feature flags that let you hide the full path from the Omnibox (so you’ll only see the domain). I guess that this will soon become a new default, further lessening the importance of how your URLs look like. More on these new feature flags in the article linked below:

What’s New in Chrome 85, Available Now

Chrome 85 arrived on the stable channel Aug. 25, 2020. The latest version of Chrome promises to speed up page loads on your computer and take advantage of more RAM on Android phones.

How-To GeekJoe Fedewa

Google summarized the changes they made in the last year. Google recaps its improvements with a focus on the quality of search results and information reliability.

How Google delivers reliable information in Search

An overview of our approach to delivering high quality, reliable information in Search.

GoogleDanny Sullivan

Our latest investments in information quality in Search and News

For important topics like health and civics, access to high quality information is critical. Read about our latest updates in Search and News to provide information people can trust.

GooglePandu Nayak

See you on Monday with the next Rewind!