All About Google’s Broad Core Update
As we all know, Google launches core updates at least twice a year. These updates keep web developers and SEO specialists busy because we have to monitor the rankings and make the required changes to keep our customers’ websites ranking high in search results.
This core update was further explained on Google Search Central. According to this article, Google makes changes to the ranking process to increase the accuracy of the search results. These improvements are called core updates. The core updates are not specific to certain sites but will generate notable effects. Some sites’ ranking may drop, while others may rank better.
Also, Google said that if any site does experience a drop in its ranking, they don’t have to fix anything. These updates are meant to improve the system, helping under-ranked sites get better traffic.
So, if your ranking suddenly drops, there’s nothing to worry about. You have not violated any webmaster guidelines. You just have to sit back and wait for the next core update. One last thing you can do is observe the sites that have ranked higher and try to figure out the factors that helped them.
Still, have questions or concerns? You can get in touch with our experienced team for assistance.
Google Comes Up With New Guidelines For Virtual And Delivery-Only Food Businesses
Last month Google laid out new, more specific guidelines to help the virtual food brands and delivery-only businesses with their Business Profiles on Google. These guidelines are meant for food businesses that don’t really have a physical location in an area, but they do re-package and deliver the local restaurants’ food.
The guidelines can be found in Google’s Guidelines for representing your business on Google, under the section Guidelines for chains, departments, and individual practitioners.
Here’s a look at what these new guidelines have to say:
If you own a virtual food business, it is in your best interest to take a look at the new guidelines so that you can create a business profile on Google that isn’t suspended.
Google Is Launching Video Indexing Report To Search Console
Recently, Google’s Dikla Cohen gave a presentation on video indexing, which explains that video indexing does not rely on where and how you host your videos. You can host them yourself or choose from the most popular video hosting platforms and services.
With this, he announced Google is soon launching a new set of reports and tools in Search Console to make video indexing easier to track and diagnose.
With this new launch, the Video Page Indexing report will show a summary of all the pages that Google’s systems find with a video while crawling and indexing your website. You can see how many video landing pages were indexed at a glance.
Issues will be grouped with a trend line and counts of the affected videos. For example, which videos are missing a thumbnail URL, with reasons – the largest impact ranked on top.
You can click on one of the rows to get more details, such as affected video page URLs. You can also download the list of examples and double-check them. So, you can narrow down the details and understand what is happening and how to resolve issues.
Once your website is updated and you think you have resolved the issue you were facing, you can go back to the Video Indexing Report, go to that specific issue type, and then use the validate fix button to inform Google.
This way, you can initiate the recrawling of known URLs affected by the issue. And as the pages are being reprocessed, you will be notified if everything is resolved or if there are remaining issues.
But you will have to note that reviewing all the URLs can take some time.
If you wish to check the video indexing status, you can get there by entering the URL of the video landing page at the top of the search console. It will first show you the current status of that URL, as well as the video index status of the page. It will inform you whether Google detects a video on the page. And, if so, did they manage to index it. If a detected video is not indexed, it will list the reasons preventing it from being indexed.
Also, please note that Google indexes only one video per page, even when a page has multiple videos.
To summarize, with the new tools,
- You will be able to see how many video landing pages Google has discovered and how many of them were indexed.
- Examine reasons for unindexed videos on video landing pages.
- You can use the list of affected video page URLs to debug and fix issues.
- You can use the Validate Fix button to initiate recrawling of the known URLs affected by the issue.
- You can check the video indexing status of a specific video using the URL inspection tool.