26/05/2020 – Is There Actually an SEO Friendly Font?

This week, we have two interesting questions from a Twitter user, @johnmullerfan.

The first question:

John Mueller was asked if fonts affect a website’s speed. Well, the answer from Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst was that anything on the page affects their speed. 

Well, that’s true because they require bandwidth and increases the number of requests necessary to load your site. But how they affect may vary so test out what’s best for your site. 

The next question:

John Mueller was then asked if there are any fonts that he prefers. John Mueller said to use one that works for your site and also said that font doesn’t matter for SEO. 

But as mentioned above, fonts do affect speed. Site speed is definitely a ranking signal. Other than that, fonts also determine whether your visitor stays on your site or not. 

So, I guess fonts actually matter for SEO? What do you think? Let me know in the comment section below.

27/05/2020 – Google testing How To Schema Results 

For the past two days, from 25th May to 27th May 2020, several SEOs spotted “how to” schema appearing on Google Search for Desktop.

I’m unable to replicate this one yet, so here are the tweets:

I believe this will help users decide quicker which snippet to click. 

28/05/2020 – GSC: Speed Report Replaced by Core Web Vitals

Just yesterday, 28th May 2020, Google Webmasters announced on Twitter that there’s an update to Search Console. 

The Speed report is now replaced with Core Web Vitals. 

This report shows you how your pages perform based on real world usage data (sometimes known as field data).

Core Web Vitals report:

• shows URL performance grouped by status, metric type, and URL Group (groups of similar web pages)
• based on 3 metrics; Largest Content Paint, First Input  Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

Navigating the report

1. Toggle the Poor, Needs improvement, or Good tabs on the overview page chart to see how URLs on your site perform, based on historical user data.
2. Click Open Report to see the mobile or desktop summary page, showing page performance numbers for each platform.
3. Click a row in the table to see details about URL groups affected by the selected issue, including a set of example URLs.
4. Click a URL in the Examples table of the issue details page to see more information about that URL and similar URLs.

Here’s the full report:- Core Web Vitals report

Oh, on top of that, Chrome UX Report has also introduced a new dashboard to easily monitor how real users experience your site. Here’s the tweet which states what’s new. Also, there’s a setup guide here.

22/05/2020 – Flaws in Google May 2020 Update

Since the update, there have been a lot of Pinterest results on the SERPs. Which may be one of the reasons you’re seeing a drop in traffic.

Take a look at Bruno Dangelo’s tweet here: 

Besides these snippets, most of the images shown for some results were from Pinterest, and they were duplicated as well. Check it out here: 

Not just these, Matt Smith shared that sites that rely heavily on UGC/ Forums were affected by the latest update. Stackexchange has seen a -41% drop in search visibility. 

Cyrus Shepard from Moz also said that their Q&A page saw a significant drop. Lily Ray later shared some changes in visibility among the top UGC sites. 

The results showed that multiple Pinterest pages from different country domains saw an increase while sites like Twitter and Reddit saw a drop. Check out the full list in Lily Ray’s tweet here:

I didn’t have a look at the SERP myself when this happened but I believe things are back to normal now? Do share with me if that’s not the case. 

And that’s it for this week’s update. Let’s hope we get some answers on these by next week! Take care for now. 

Updated: 22 November 2024