5 Latest Google Update Reviews of 2018
by First Launch on Wednesday Dec 26
A successful SEO is not about tricking Google but is about partnering with it. Google has always tried to provide the best search results and better user experience, and as an SEO company, it’s pretty obvious to understand the needs of Google and ensure that your website belongs to Google’s best search results.
Over the year, Google has been coming up with several updates and here are the major 5 updates of 2018-
1. Google Algorithm Update
This year, Google rolled out one of the major algorithm updates which affected the search results in a significant way, specifically impacting medical, health, fitness, and healthy lifestyle space, and thus has been widely known as Medic update. Google, with this update, tried to show better results based on the intent of the search. The update has resulted in showing ‘job type’ results for large brands search.
2. Mobile-First Indexing
We are not new to the fact that mobile usage has increased over the years, and most of the search queries come from a mobile device. To enhance the user experience, Google rolled out mobile-first indexing early this year, which means, Google will base what it places in the index based on the mobile version of your site instead of the desktop version. This doesn’t mean that Google will stop indexing desktop sites, but it simply means that indexing a website which is not mobile-friendly is going to be difficult. If your website has a responsive design, there is less to worry about the consequences; ensure that the website provides a great mobile user experience.
3. Structured Data
Google, this year, has given more importance to structured data. Google has launched a bunch of search features that are based on structured data like badges on image search, job search, recipes, movies, local restaurants, courses and a bunch of other things that rely solely on structured data and schema.org annotations. Structured Data helps Google to understand your website better and in indexing.
4. Google Search Console
Google has been adding new features to the search console, such as a URL Inspection tool to retrieve crawling, indexing, and serving information for any URL directly from the Google index, index coverage report to get an accurate view of your website content, performance report to review your search analytics data and links report to see information on links pointing to your site and within your site.
Here’s a comparison between Google Console before and after the Google update-
Before-
After-
5. Mobile Search and Voice Assistants
Mobile use and voice search, which are correlated, has been on the rise, and Google has given more importance to the quality of the voice search results this year. Since most of the voice searches are in the form of queries, content which can redress a query in the form of ‘How to’s have a higher chance of ranking in Google.