Pure SEO’s This Week In Search series takes a look at the top SEO and SEM news stories from the week.
It’s been another busy week for Google, who introduced new features for mobile devices and revealed updates on the beta Search Console and Gboard.
Google has always made it easy to save and bookmark search results, but now they have made it possible to save all results in a single location.
The new feature can be accessed in the hamburger menu, on the left-hand side of the Google homepage on your mobile device. For those who don’t know, the hamburger menu is the three horizontal lines, also known as the navigational drawer.
A Google spokesperson said, “We’ve created a new tool so you can collect and keep track of things that interest you more easily. When you see the bookmark icon appear, you’ll have the ability to save images, itineraries, and places you visit in Google Search on the mobile web. To access your inventory, just tap ‘Saved’ in the navigation drawer on any mobile search results page.”
Google has added small badges on the corner of images in image search results for recipes, videos, products and animated images. They will appear on the image search interface on mobile devices.
Its purpose is to help searchers understand any data behind an image that Google may have. Google said, “These badges will help you uncover images where next steps or more in-depth information is available — everything from bags to buy, to recipes to try.”
To learn more about how to get badges on images taken from your website, read the Google Webmaster blog.
LocalSEOGuide has revealed a new monitoring tool called Locadium. This is a new ‘point solution’ to monitor any changes in Google My Business listings.
At its core, the new tool is similar to other local listings monitoring services. LocalSEOGuide’s founder Andrew Shotland says it will be the only tool to monitor both ‘front end’ (consumer fields) and ‘back end’ (API) of Google My Business.
Locadium will send alerts when there are any changes to a company’s listings, in any of the data fields. It will be marketed to agencies, multi-location brands and SMBs.
Gboard, the Google keyboard for your iPhone, now includes access to Maps and YouTube and includes an ‘ink’ drawing feature. It also now supports Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi languages.
The search-enabled keyboard is making it easier to communicate with your peers. Tap on the YouTube or Maps option to add a location or a link to a video, and tap on the emoji icon and select the pen icon to draw a message instead of typing.
The new features include an Index Coverage report and an Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) fixing flow report.
The Index Coverage report can show you the number of indexed pages, and information about why some pages couldn’t be indexed. It will also show you example pages with problems, along with tips on how to fix these indexing issues.
The AMP fixing flow report can show you what’s impacting the ability of sites to show your AMP content in search. It will also show you samples of affected pages, and solutions.
The new beta Search Console will include a verification button. After fixing any issues, you can click on the button and Google will re-crawl the affected pages and notify you of the progress.
Subscribe to our blog and get awesome digital marketing content sent straight to your inbox.
Your report will display in a new tab once you submit this form.
