During October, Google has been revolutionising the online landscape, leaving SEO agencies wondering about what would come next. 

New ads on reports, continuous scrolling on mobile search results, and even a small ranking update have been the protagonists for the spookiest month of the year. Check our compilation of Google Updates for October. 

1^st of October: Google search gets larger images, enhances ‘About this result’, gets more ‘shoppable’ and more

Google has rolled out a new more “visually attractive” interface for search result pages. You can check them out for some searches that contain a keyword plus the word “idea” after it. “It is easier to visually browse to find what you are looking for”, Google said. Furthermore, this enhancement also shows web results about the site or page, such as what other users are saying about the result and related results about the topic from other sites.

The new feature makes easier when browsing for garments and looking for this kind of queries, making even more accessible online shopping.

5^th October: What happened in Google Search during the Facebook outage?

John Mueller stated on his Twitter account what happened in Google Search during the recent Facebook outage that the American company experienced at the beginning of the month. “It is generally a two part reaction: when we can’t reach a site for network/DNS reasons, we see it like a 5xx HTTP server error”, the search guru stated on his tweet.

Google Search Central releases a video to explain how to improve Largest Contentful Paint

Through the video that GSC shared, you can easily learn what a good Largest Contentful Paint score is, how to make the most and optimise servers, networks, and how to measure your website page’s LCP.

7^th October: Google Search Console rich results reports gets more actionable errors

Now more details are available on the Search Console rich results status report errors. Daniel Waisberg disclosed the new five errors:

• invalid attribute string length
• invalid attribute enum value
• invalid object
• type conversion failed
• out of numeric range

Below is the tweet that Daniel Waisberg shared on the social channel:

11^th October: The Google Index report admitted it was slow

Some URLs in the Index Coverage report have been marked as “Crawled – currently not indexed” but listed as “submitted and indexed” when inspected with the URL inspection tool. Google announced that the Index Coverage report data is refreshed in a slower way than the URL inspection one.

12^th October: Absolute or relative URLs, which is better? #AskGooglebot

In this episode of AskGooglebot, John Mueller explains the differences between absolute and relative URLs and if there is a preference in how a search engine crawl and indexes them.

14^th October: Continuous scrolling comes to search on mobile

Google has launched a new modern experience that makes easier to navigate and scan on mobile devices by introducing continuous scrolling. Thanks to this new feature, when you go to the bottom of a search results page on your mobile phone, the next set of results will automatically load with relevant information.

From now on, you can keep browsing for additional information without having to click on the “see more” button.

19^th October: An overview of our rater guidelines for Search

This time, Danny Sullivan reveals how Google improve Search through the help of search quality raters. Furthermore, more than 10,000 people from different locations around the world evaluate thousands of websites following a common set of quality rater guidelines, which are publicly available. In this new article, Google shares with the public how these guidelines work, and how they get better over time.

At the same time, Google has updated its Quality Rater Guidelines , adding 5 revisions. Moreover, they expanded the definition of YMYL subcategory ‘Groups of people’, and refreshed the ‘Lowest Page Quality’ section.

21^st October: BigCommerce merchants can now reach new customers across Google

With this new integration, BigCommerce merchants can now list their products more easily on Google, and all free of charge. They are able now to create ad campaigns and review performance/ From now on, they can integrate with Google’s shopping features via Search, Shopping and YouTube.

Let’s talk Core Web Vitals

Google advocates Martin Splitt and John Mueller discuss about Core Web Vitals with guest starts Annie Sullivan and Vivek Sekhar on their new Search Off the Record podcast serie.

22^nd October: Google My Business crowd attributes for LGBTQ+ Friendly & Transgender Safespace 

Google My Business adds a new business attribute called “crowd”, where you can mark your company as being LGBTQ+ friendly and a transgender safespace.

This is what you see when under the info section after you edit your attributes:

And here is how it looked in 2020:

25^th October: Search Analytics API now supports Discover, Google News and Regex

From now on, you will be able to find 2 new parameters on the Search Analytics API section of the Google Search Console Performance report: Discover (for Google Discover) and googlenews (for Google News). Apart from that, the Search Console team has added Regex support to the query and page dimensions.

Google offers a broader definition of Quality Content

John Mueller offered an extensive definition of what content quality really means for Google. This definition is in line with E-A-T principles and goes beyond that. Moreover, Mueller explained that “when it comes to the quality of the content, we don’t mean like just the text of your articles. It’s really the quality of your overall website. And that includes everything from the layout to the design. Like, how you have things presented on your pages, how you integrate images, how you work with speed, all of those factors they kind of come into play there”.

26^th October: Google Search ranking algorithm update

Following Barry Schwartz’s latest article, there has been a small Google Search Ranking algorithm update on the 26^th of October. Several tools are showing early signs of volatility after a very quiet weekend. SEMrush, RankRanger and Accuranker are some of the tools that felt the changes:

Source: SEORoundtable