
Seolab opens a new rubric – the most important Seo news from Google, Seo community and from the biggest Seo tools that happened within the previous 30 days. From now on, you don’t need to read the bunch of all Google updates and announcements. No need to worry if you missed something – Seolab collected all updates instead of you. Save your time for some other important things and check SeoLab at the end of each month.
Google Introduced Three New Tools
Just in February Google launched two new tools – Impact Calculator, Speed Scorecard and updated their tool Lighthouse.
-
Speed Scorecard
Last February 26, 2018, Google introduced the tool known as Speed Scorecard at the Mobile World Congress. It is very easy to use and allows the user to compare your site mobile speed to your competitors’ ones. As you see in our example, we compared a few large sites from Seo community. If you would be a Backlinko, you would definitely understand where you lose against your competitors. What you need to do is just to place four domains for comparison, and the tool will do everything for you. You can also choose the target country.
The Speed Scorecard displays the rapidity of thousands of websites from 12 nations across the world. This tool is powered by one of the biggest database – Chrome User Experience Report.
-
Impact Calculator
Along with the introduction of Speed Scorecard is the Impact Calculator tool that evaluates the income impact that results in improving your mobile website’s speed. Google created this tool because they have found that a slow mobile website does not only upset customers, but it minimizes your business income. Check it out on your own if it really does.
-
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an automated and open-source tool that improves a web page’s quality. This Google tool works with any web pages, public ones or even with those that require an authentication. The extension audits your page and then generates a report with data, that helps you to improve your technical and basic SEO. Unfortunately, after Google’s update in February, their Chrome extension currently not working properly (which is, of course, temporary) and still shows some bugs. But you can use the tool online or from Chrome DevTools.
Google Chrome Will Clean Up Messy URL’s
The newest version of Google Chrome 64 deals with the issue of messy URLs, i.e. that are not easy to read from a human perspective. It cleans them before they are shared and makes them look presentable and cleaner. When distributing URLs from Google Chrome’s inbuilt menu “Share” all needless parameters will be cut off. For example, referral strings that are used for data collection by sites, will be shortened.
If you still need to see the whole URL, you can select the text of the URL manually, and get it full with all the junk at the end.
Google Expands Multifaceted Featured Snippets
In the past couple of years, Google has been developing several new search features that are related to featured snippets, knowledge graph and images. But today, the biggest engine expanded another feature known as the “multifaceted featured snippets.”
These types of featured snippets are helpful for search queries that lead to more than one understanding of what was being submitted.
As Google explained “The query “tooth pain after a filling,” for example, could be interpreted as “why does my tooth still hurt after a filling?” or “how long should a tooth hurt after a filling?”
The multifaceted featured snippet will be first rolled out in mobile phones and it will become accessible to desktops within this year.
Google made changes to Google Images
Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites. This will include removing the View Image button. The Visit button remains, so users can see images in the context of the webpages they're on. pic.twitter.com/n76KUj4ioD
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) February 15, 2018
Last February 15, 2018, Google officially announced two major changes on the image functions:
-
elimination of the “View Image” button
-
removal of the button “Search by Image”.
The main reason why Google made these changes are due to their settlement with Getty Images and to balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns.
Google has announced the deadline for HTTP
Google strongly advocates all sites to adopt HTTPS encryption. Therefore, it has announced a deadline of July 2018 for all HTTP site. In Chrome 68, the omnibox will display “Not secure” for all HTTP pages.
Google’s New Search Console is Now Available
Google officially announced about GSC beta version and gave access to a limited amount of users. The new Console will be rolled out slowly.
This latest console has been fully reconstructed and designed to focus on supporting website owners to fix and identify pending issues.
-
Moz
Rand Fishkin Formally Leaves Moz
Last February 28, 2018, Rand Fishkin who was the CEO of Moz for 7 years, left the company. He also confirmed this breaking news on his Twitter account. The reason why Fishkin left the company is to focus on his new software company, SparkToro and also because of some internal disputes. He estimated his departure on around 4 on a scale of 0-10, where 0 is “fired and escorted out of the building by security” and 10 is “left entirely of his own accord on wonderful terms,”.
SparkToro is a data service and software product that helps public relations, marketers, entrepreneurial teams, and even professionals to learn more about the needs and wants of their target customers and Fishkin will be the one lead.
Tickets for Mozcon 2018 Are Now Available
The long wait is over as the registration and tickets for the Mozcon 2018 is now already available. This conference offers a harassment-free experience for everybody. So if you’re interested in this conference that will hold on July 9 to 11, 2018 at Washington State Convention Center, you can register at https://moz.com/mozcon/register. Visit Mozcon’s website for more details.
-
Ahrefs
Ahrefs Introduced a New Domain Rating Metrics
On February 2, 2018, Ahrefs rolled out a new calculation of their well-known metrics “Domain Rating”. So, as a result, the majority of websites that had Domain Rating of 30 to 50 dropped down to 0 – 30. Because of this issue, a lot of Ahrefs customers started a panic. Ahrefs took into consideration the clients feedback and launched patch 2.0 of these new metrics. So everything ended quite fairly – Sites with “weak” backlinks still stayed below 10, but sites with strong backlink profile gained the DR even higher than they had before the first roll out. In the opinion of Seolab, now DR Ahrefs metric is very close to MOZ DA.
Some examples:
Before the new metrics rollout, the site just didn’t have the DR lower 30, which was unnatural. Ahref redistributed all existing site on the scale 0 -100.
-
SEO Conferences
This 2018, there are so many conferences regarding SEO, and one of them was in February – the Public Austin 2018. The Public Austin was held at the AT&T Conference Center, the University of Texas Campus on February 21, 2018.
The speakers in this conference were discussing latest approaches to social media, digital marketing, SEO, and content. This conference featured some prominent marketing experts as well as best speakers from around the world as Gary Illyes and Purna Virji . Check the next Seo conference at Seolab events.