This Week in Search: Google Introduces Breadcrumb SERPs & More

Pure SEO’s This Week In Search series takes a look at the top SEO and SEM news stories from the week.

This week we received a warning about Google Crawler, Google announced new features to search results and Assistant, and YouTube announced it would protect the privacy of viewers.

A Google Engineer Issues a Warning About Google Crawler

A Google engineer has issued a ‘public service announcement’ notifying web publishers that Google doesn’t support CSS custom properties. He stated that Google’s crawler is rendering sites using an outdated version of Chrome, Chrome 41, which dates from March 2015.

This means that Google’s crawler won’t be able to render the web page properly. There has also been indication that Google’s algorithm may rank sites lower if it perceives that the web page doesn’t render properly.

To find out more, read the full article here.

Google Search will Feature Snippets for Multi-Intent Queries

Google is updating search results with a new type of featured snippet, designed for queries that have multiple interpretations.

“Sometimes the words we use to ask a question are broad and there could be several different interpretations of the question. With multifaceted featured snippets, we’re able to better understand your query and recognize when there could be multiple interpretations of that query.”

Google will begin by introducing multifaceted featured snippets with ‘multi-intent’ queries, where the intent behind the query could be interpreted in several ways. Eventually, Google plans to expand multifaceted featured snippets to cover more query types.

Google Introduces Breadcrumb SERPs

Google has updated its search results pages by adding breadcrumbs to the top of the page. The breadcrumbs are triggered by informational search queries and are accompanied by images. For publishers, this means that it may be helpful to add relevant images to the topic of the web page. Logos and images of the entity that is the focal point of the web page may be more important too.

To find out more, read the full article here.

YouTube Analytics Demographics Report to Contain Less Data

YouTube says that changes are being made to protect the privacy of viewers, and soon YouTube content creators will notice that their YouTube Analytics demographics report contains less data. However, not all demographics data is being removed. Here is a summary of the upcoming  changes:

• Creators can no longer filter demographics data by YouTube product. Going forward, YouTube, YouTube Kids, and YouTube Gaming will be aggregated.
• Creators will no longer be able to see demographics data for private or unlisted videos. Although if an unlisted video is an advertisement then demographics data will still be available in the AdWords for Video reports.
• Demographics data may be unavailable for some videos and channels if they have received limited traffic during a selected time period.

Google Assistant Announces New Updates

Google has announced plans to update Google Assistant with support for more languages and deeper integrations with third-party devices. Soon, Google Assistant will be available in over 30 languages, and all capabilities will be made available to non-Google Android phones. Google Assistant will also be updated with routines and location-based reminders.