Good morning search marketers, let's look back on changes in SEO.
As we head into a new year, we are taking stock of the changes and trends of 2019 that will help shape marketing in 2020. Today, we focus on the big SEO changes of the year with a selection of influential stories and a Pro Tip from the community.
Enjoy,
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
1. Google to stop supporting noindex directive in robots.txt by Barry Schwartz
Changes are coming to how Google understands some of the unsupported directives in your robots.txt file.
2. Google rolling out mobile search redesign with black "Ad" label, favicons for organic results by Ginny Marvin
The new look brings some branding to the search results, but also preps the results pages for more types of content and actions for users to take right from the search results.
3. Google to treat nofollow link attribute as a 'hint' by Barry Schwartz
Google is also adding two new link attributes, one for sponsored links and one for user generated content links.
4. Google updates Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines by George Nguyen
The updates add guidelines on content expertise and interstitial pages, while lumping "E-A-T" in with "Page Quality."
5. Starting July 1, all new sites will be indexed using Google's mobile-first indexing by Barry Schwartz
Google to default to mobile-first indexing for new sites. Be sure to build web sites that work well on mobile.
6. Google hasn't supported rel=next/prev for a while (thanks for telling us) by Barry Schwartz The company feels that people are building great sites without the markup.
7. Google Search adds support for FAQ and How-to structured data by Barry Schwartz
Google now supports more structured data and adds two new enhancement reports within Google Search Console.
