A Smattering Of SEO News - It's All About Speed

Wow y’all, even with two weeks I still had to scrape the barrel a bit for this one. There’s some good stuff though, like the page speed stuff, but overall it’s been a slow couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Google Page Speed News

• Speed To Become Ranking Factor For Mobile Sites – As of July of this year, page speed will become a ranking factor for mobile sites. Called the “Speed Update,” it will primarily affect slow pages, but if a slow page still has great content, it can still rank highly. Google says the update will only affect a small number of queries.
• Speed Update Could Ignore AMP If Deemed Too Slow – An interesting tidbit came out of a Twitter conversation with John Mueller of Google. He admitted that “if a page built with AMP provides a slow experience to users, it may also rank lower in the results.” We also learned that the “Speed Update” is independent of the mobile-first index.

Google Regular News

• Google Adds Research Feature To SERPs – Google has apparently, in the US at least, added some new functionality to the search engine results pages that includes relevant articles designed to help searchers who are in the midst of researching a specific topic. In the example given, using the term “bbq grills,” three articles talking about the best grills or grill buying guides were shown. It’s unknown if this is something Google is testing because it didn’t show up for other results, but we’ll keep an eye on it.

• Mueller Leans Toward Recommending GPS Coordinate Schema For Local Results – In a recent Google Hangout, John Mueller was asked whether using GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude) were essential in a local page’s schema. His response? “As far as I know we don’t use GPS coordinates in that regard so if you have addresses on a page then that’s something I would mark up. But as far as I know, we don’t use GPS coordinates.” So he says they don’t use them, but it’s something he would mark up if a page has an address. We’ll keep an eye on this to see if this develops into something more standard.

Other News

• Use Of Voice Search Is On The Rise … Except At Home – According to a recent survey by Stone Temple, they discovered that use of voice search is significantly on the rise from 2017 to this year, except in the home, where use of voice search has dropped. Usage at home dropped from 66% to 59% year over year, while the usage of voice search on public transportation and at the gym, for example, rose significantly.
• Facebook To Focus On News from “Trusted” Publishers – Facebook has announced that it’s going to work to identify and prioritize news sources it deems more trustworthy than others, while decreasing the importance of news in your feed. Apparently, the amount of news will not change much, according to Facebook, only the quality will be updated, they hope.