Hello everyone! We’re back again with another week of SEO News. Here’s a quick list of what we’re talking about today:

-Google Confirms Bolding Words Helps with SEO
-Google Desktop Search Results Are Getting More Visuals
-Google is Promoting More Local News in Search Results
-Google is Rolling Out November’s Core Update

16/11/2021- Google Confirms Bolding Words Helps with SEO

Google’s John Mueller confirmed again that bolding words and “important points on a paragraph” does help with SEO and rankings. However, take care not to bold everything on the page because obviously, that wouldn’t help. 

He explained that it’s essentially semantic HTML that makes it easier to recognize for both bots and users. They don’t necessarily make the site rocket up in rankings but they can certainly help with understanding pages better.

16/11/2021- Google Desktop Search Results Are Getting More Visuals

Users have reported seeing more and more product images being shown in the desktop search result snippets in Google Search. Personally, I found this really cool because I like being able to see visual representations of a product before I buy it. 

17/11/2021- Google is Promoting More Local News in Search Results

Google said it is now promoting more local news in its search results and news results, including top stories. Google said they would be doing this earlier this year and in 2020 started doing this specifically for COVID news.

Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search at Google said it is improving local news in Google Search in three primary ways:

(1) More local news not just for COVID news, Danny wrote Google will “soon see a carousel of local news stories when Google finds local news coverage relevant to their query.”

(2) Google will show more local publications even for national stories. Danny wrote, “also been working on improving our systems so authoritative local news sources appear more often alongside national publications, when relevant, in our general news features such as Top Stories.”

(3) Google said it is getting better at local news, saying it has “improved the local news experience by refining our ability to understand topics beyond just broad areas, like sports, to narrower subtopics, such as football and high school football.”

18/11/2021- Google Is Rolling Out November’s Core Update

Google has announced that they’re beginning their Core Update in November and it’s got people worrying. It’ll take roughly two weeks to fully roll out but we might start to see rankings dropping which is bad news since the holiday season is beginning. 

Danny Sullivan has been reassuring people that it won’t affect them much or negatively but sentiments have been rather skeptical. 

That’s it, folks! Weekly SEO news for this week is over so enjoy your weekend!

Updated: 1 May 2024