SEO News You Can Use: Google’s Algorithm Update Includes New Snippet Settings

The dominating news in the world of SEO last week was Google’s algorithm update for September.

As part of recent updates, Google released new snippet settings to allow website owners to control how Google search displays listings.

Google uses content previews to help searchers decide if a result is relevant to their query. This includes using text snippets and other media. Several factors dictate the previews shown, including what kind of device he/she is using to view it.

Before, you could only use a textual snippet or just not allow one. The new Google update allows you to do more, finally giving webmasters more control over what Google shows for their listings in the search results. This update is something that — if done right — could really help you increase your click-through rates.

Google introduced two new types of settings: a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute. These will give you more flexibility to control what you do and don’t want to show up in your search result snippet on Google.

Google webmasters said this change will have no effect on search rankings. The settings for robots meta tags are expected to become effective in mid- or late October 2019.

More SEO News You Can Use

A Google Blog Explains Why the Snippets Change: It turns out, new copyright rules in France played a big part in Google released new snippet settings to allow website owners to control how Google search displays listings. Here’s a Google blog that gets into it more.

Yoast SEO Responds to Google’s Snippet Updates: WordPress plugin Yoast SEO responded to Google’s new snippet settings. Yoast SEO users will be opted into all of its snippet features by default now. This will be included in a version 12.2 update that will be released this week. If you don’t want to use all of Yoast SEO’s snippet features you shouldn’t update to the new version.

More on Google’s Algorithm Update: Google says there isn’t anything to fix with this September Google algorithm update, but you know there will be changes that affect your website. Search Engine Land gave some early analysis on Google’s latest update.

Google Review Stars Dropping: A Moz.com report updates the decline in Google stars since Google announced it would be restricting review stars in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to specific schemas. Moz is seeing continual drops, showing that Google has already implemented the changes.

Google Affirms Internal Nofollows Not A Directive: Google webmaster John Mueller says that Google will use nofollows on internal links but not as a directive. Before Google’s change, the nofollow attribute was a directive.

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