SEO Update #22 | 07/06/2022 | Up Digest
Ralf van Veen
Senior SEO-specialist
This is already the 22nd SEO update from me, Ralf van Veen (SEO specialist). It has been down for a while, but as a result, we also have more to discuss (good news, that is). Let’s start right away.
Table of contents
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Fast news from SEO land
We start with the fast news from SEO land. Quick, but no less important.
- There was a confirmed core update from Google in May that took about 2 weeks to fully roll out.
- Google has added new Google rich results to show enriched results for video (see image #1).
- Google has proposed new semantics around the Structured Data Author.
- Google has added new structured data for Q&A (education). With Quiz structured data, this can be added in the form of flashcards.
- Google has displayed some common errors in page titles on their website. See here.
- Google also reviewed the validity of <meta> tags in the <head> displayed on the website. See here for this page.
- Moz’s home page had been removed from search results for a while.
Tags in sitemaps become invalid (as of 06/08/2022)
A number of tags are no longer validated by Google. This has no impact on results in Google.
- Caption
- Geo_location
- Title & license tags/attributes within image sitemaps and category
- Player_loc[@allow_embed], player_loc[@autoplay], gallery_loc, price[@all] & tvshow[@all] within video sitemaps
Google Webspam report (SpamBrain – 2021)
Google has published its 2021 SpamBrain report. SpamBrain is the name for the AI spam detector deployed by Google. The link to the full report can be found here. A summary of the results I have listed below:
- In 2021, SpamBrain found 6x more spam than in 2020.
- More than 99% of searches within Google are spam-free.
- The issues Google has made the most progress on are link spam, scams and online harassment of people.
- The number of scams has dropped 40% through various efforts.
Google’s goal is clear. Google wants to serve high-quality content, without manipulation of it, to the user.
