SEO UPdate #7 | 24/01/2022

Welcome to yet another seventh SEO update. We go through quite a few points in a nutshell in this update, enjoy reading!

Quick updates

A lot has happened in the land of the SEO specialist, let’s dive right in.

• When there is a spike in crawl requests (can be found in the GSC), it does not mean a Google Update is coming.
• Google has said they want to make crawling (requests) easier. But they don’t do that for now with IndexNow (as Bing does, for example).
• Google now shows the Desktop Page Experience report in the GSC.
• Google is getting better at understanding languages and places without the hreflang tags in the code.
• Google still does not understand when a piece of content is exactly the same as another piece of content in another language.
• Google may be renaming the Google webmaster guidelines (something more modern perhaps?).
• Google Maps is testing displaying review snippets in the map interface.

See if the user agents on your server are Googlebot

This way, you can see whether a user-agent that wants to come to your website is from Google or another party(see this source). Both automated (for larger scale) and manual (for one-off actions) ways have been explained. I briefly discuss the way for one-time actions below; this is also the most commonly used way.

1. Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address from your log file (you can find this in your server).
2. See if this is from googlebot . com or google . com comes.
3. Run a forward DNS lookup on the domain name from step 1.

Are you getting the same IP address again? Then it’s Googlebot. See the example below:

Closing

A pro-tip for the Screaming Frog users among us. Try setting the user-agent to Chrome when you get a 403 (everyone suffers from this from time to time in my opinion).

Good luck!