Google Updates in January 2020

Want to know what Google got up to in January and how it might affect you?

I've listed all the important stuff here.

It’s been a pretty intense start to 2020, with the confirmed and super big January 2020 core update, the favicon and black ad label release on desktop and then a step back on that, and Google deduplicating featured snippets.

But there was a lot more than just those three big items, here are all the details:

January 2020 core update

This Google algorithm update seemed substantial. However, Google just echoed its previous advice around core updates: “there is no fix”. The previous core update in September 2019 was much slower to roll out and wasn't a shockingly upsetting one. By contrast, the January 2020 core update does seem a lot bigger and all categories saw major changes and so we can assume that this update wasn’t aimed at any particular topics.

Unconfirmed updates

We’ve also had many tremors and other unconfirmed updates since then and there were also a lot of request indexing complaints.

Favicon and black ad label 

Google launched favicon and black ad label on desktop, it caused a huge stir, despite being live on mobile for several months. So Google reverted that change and is testing new things!

Featured snippets

Google began deduplicating featured snippets and is no longer showing a featured snippet and at the same time the same URL in the main web search results.

A new removals tool

Google Search Console launched a new removals tool. https://search.google.com/search-console/removals

This tool lets you temporarily block search results from your site, it shows reported via other Google public removal tools (i.e. Outdated content) and you can manage SafeSearch filtering in this tool.

Temporary removals

Here is where you can request temporary removals of specific URLs on sites you have verified. Google said there are two types of removal requests available. (1) Temporary remove URL will hide the URL from Google Search results for about six months and clear the cached copy of the page. (2) Clear cache URL clears the cached page and wipes out the page description snippet in Search results until the page is crawled again.

Outdated content

The Outdated content section provides information on removal requests made through the public Remove Outdated Content tool, which can be used by anyone (not just site owners) to update search results showing information that is no longer present on a page.

SafeSearch filtering

Often SafeSearch is hard for SEOs and Webmasters to debug. Is my content being blocked because it was tagged as being adult? This tool should help you see that quickly. Google said "The SafeSearch filtering section in Search Console shows a history of pages on your site that were reported by Google users as adult content using the SafeSearch Suggestion tool. URLs submitted using this tool are reviewed, and if Google feels that this content should be filtered from SafeSearch results, these URLs are tagged as adult content."

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1. Google has updated some of the colours used in the Google Search Console reports, such as the performance report. The colours are now a blue, purple, green and orange. The old colours were a blue, light blue, green and purple.

2. Google dropped support for data-vocabulary.org schema.

3. There has been a spike in Google My Business suspensions.

Did you notice any changes this month with your Google rankings and organic search traffic? Let me know in the comments below.

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