Welcome to another edition of ‘Top SEO News For The Week’. Since last week, up till now, nothing really big or disruptive happened in the SEO world. Only the usual few twitter threads or online forums talking about their observations about Google.

However, I will still share with you everything that concerned SEO in this past week.

Let’s get into it!

#1 Pages With Featured Snippets Will No Longer Appear Twice On Page 1

Google has confirmed that it will no longer display a page with featured snippets twice anymore. This is done in a bid to decluster the SERPs and make it easy for users to check through other relevant results. This new update was deployed globally for both mobile and desktop.

Previously, you must have noticed that Google displays the same page twice, because that particular page has been used as a featured snippet. Then it reappears again in its right position, usually between position 1 – 3.

This new update is cool right?

#2 You Can Now Add Images To Your Google Collections

In a bid to make things easy for searchers, Google has enabled a feature whereby you can add images on SERP to your collections so you can go back to it later on. You know there are times when you are searching for a particular thing, probably a cooking tutorial, without the intention of doing it immediately?

When you get the search results, you often forget to copy the link or even go through the stress of bookmarking the page on your browser.

Now, you can simply add to your collections and access it anywhere your Google account is logged in by typing www.google.com/collections in your browser.

Isn’t that exciting?

#3 Google’s Dataset Search Engine Is Out of Beta Stage

Google launched dataset search in September 2018, and it was in its beta stage. Now, Google has declared that it is officially out of beta and it has indexed about 25 million datasets.

In case you are wondering what this dataset search is all about, well, it is an engine dedicated majorly for users that intend to know everything about a particular subject, maybe dogs or cancer or biology, etc. Publishers get their research works indexed by Google, who then display to searches who need it.

Simply put, the new dataset engine helps you to find all the data available on the particular subject you are interested in. There is a specific markup for displaying data tables in search results.

#4 Violating One Of Google Webmasters’ Guidelines May Not Result To Manual Action

Manual action is the peak of all penalties, when your site is singled out manually for penalty after you must have tricked the algorithm so many times without getting caught. On Reddit, Google’s John Mueller was asked by an SEO why his competitor was outranking him despite the fact that he was using hidden, keyword stuffed text?

Mueller responded by saying, the hidden text is not the only factor considered for ranking, rather, it is just one of many. Hence, a site may not be banned because it has violated one of these rules. Also, some sites unintentionally use hidden texts, and Google has factored this into their algorithm to be lenient with this set. A case of ‘not throwing away the baby with the bathwater’.

Going by this, can we advise people to cut corners since the chances of being banned is now slim?

CONCLUSION
This is it for this week. I hope you are now up-to-date as regarding some of the happenings in SEO for this past week. I will bring more to you this coming week.

Please like and share this if you like it. Thanks.

See you next week Sunday .