SEO News June 2018
Google My Business Agency Dashboard
Early in June, Google launched a new Agency Dashboard for their Google My Business platform. The current dashboard only enables you to manage up to 100 listings on an account, the new dashboard enables you to manage thousands of listings.
Google says that it will be easier to manage the listings making it easier to send and receive invitations between you and clients.
Google also says it will be easier to manage business listings with multiple locations through the new location grouping and easier to manage users to separate locations.
About a week after launch there were numerous complaints about the new dashboard from agencies. There were a lot of complaints saying it was buggy and there were numerous issues trying to bring clients’ accounts into the agency dashboard as well as listing ownership issues.
Hopefully with time this service will improve.
Google My Business Platform Expanding
The Posts function in Google My Business has expanded to include Products and Offer posts. This is in addition to the existing ‘What’s New’ and ‘Event’ posts that were introduced earlier this year.
The posts enable you to add a brief paragraph and you can include a picture, pricing information and a call to action button.
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Google Clarifies Mobile First Index Points (h2)
To make sure everyone is on the same page with the mobile first indexing Google’s Webmaster twitter account put out a series of tweets about the new indexing system.
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URLs in search: With Mobile-first indexing, we index the mobile version. When we recognize separate mobile URLs, we'll show the mobile URL to mobile users, and the desktop URL to desktop users - the indexed content will be the mobile version in both cases.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 14, 2018
Crawled counts: The total number of crawled URLs/day generally won't change, but the balance will shift from mostly-desktop to mostly-mobile crawls. During a switch-over to mobile-first indexing we may temporarily crawl more as we reindex everything.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 14, 2018
Cached page: Unfortunately, it looks like we're currently still not showing a cached page for many mobile-first indexed sites. This is a bug, not by design, and should get resolved over time. It's just the UI, it doesn't affect crawling, indexing, or ranking.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 14, 2018
Speed and mobile-first indexing: The mobile speed update in July is independent of mobile-first indexing. Fast sites are awesome for users, especially on mobile, since devices & connections there tend to be slower than with desktops.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 14, 2018
Mobile website UIs: Using "hamburger-menus" and "accordions" on mobile websites is fine.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 14, 2018
On requirements: Neither mobile-friendliness nor a mobile-responsive layout are requirements for mobile-first indexing. Pages without mobile versions still work on mobile, and are usable for indexing. That said, it's about time to move from desktop-only and embrace mobile 🙂
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 14, 2018
On ranking: The mobile-first index doesn't change anything for ranking other than that the mobile content is used. While mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor on mobile, being in the mobile-first index is not.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 14, 2018
AdWords Rebranding to Google Ads (h2)
Google has announced that it is rebranding Google AdWords to Google Ads. AdWords first launched back in 2000 and has been a massive success and how the internet giant made so much of it’s money and enabled it to grow into what Google is today.
The transition will happen in July.
Written by Dave Stansfield - 10 July 2018