Google’s Danny Sullivan later confirmed that it was an experiment they were running for “calculator, unit conversion and local time” search queries. Following the confirmation of the experiment there was a huge backlash against it in the search community.

A lot of high profile SEO’s saw the experiment as perhaps the beginning of the end for organic search results and was setting a dangerous precedent.

 

After a week of testing the experiment was halted by Google as they reported they had collected enough data and feedback and were going to review if and how it returned in the future. I couldn’t replicate the results here in Australia.

Google Confirms Core Algorithm Update

Starting around the 8^th and 9^th of March there was a lot of webmaster chat suspecting that a search algorithm update had happened. There were lots of reports of search rankings dropping significantly. Our own DNA website was affected on some search terms.

On the 13^th of March Danny Sullivan confirmed on Twitter that a broad algorithm update had been rolled out around those dates. He didn’t give any specifics about the update.

 

Some SEO’s have reported that their rankings have gone up but the majority have reported a down turn in rankings. Other SEO’s were also reporting that there appeared to be an increase in more spammy results showing up higher in the search results.

Some of our affected search terms and slowly recovering but others are still struggling. We are currently experimenting and testing some changes to see if we can work out how to recover our rankings.

Google starts Rolling out the Mobile First Indexing

Firstly, a clarification from Google;

Don’t call it the mobile first index, call it mobile first indexing.

In short Google currently crawls and indexes webpages like a desktop browser would view the page, when they start crawling for mobile first indexing they will crawl and index the same page but view it like a mobile browser would show the page.

 

 

Once Google start indexing your website with the mobile first indexing crawler you will get a notification on your Search Console.

We haven’t seen any of our properties move to the new indexing yet.

Schema Markup

Google has been actively telling people to use it and now Bing has confirmed, after it was leaked to an SEO by one of their developers, that they too are now supporting JSON-LD for Schema Markup. JSON-LD is the preferred Markup method for SEO’s.

It just confirms to us that Schema Markup is becoming very important to have implemented on your website.

Bing is working on adding a Markup tool to their webmaster toolset.

Multifaceted Featured Snippets on Google Search Results

Google has begun rolling out what they are calling “Multifaceted Featured Snippets”. What this means is they are showing 2 featured snippets where there is 2 potential intents of the query being asked.

I haven’t been able to replicate this here in Australia but below is an example from Google