Google’s new SMITH Algorithm Outperforms BERT
The new algorithm understands passages better, which allows Google to understand longer documents. While this algorithm helps Google understand passages, and Google is rolling out passage ranking, they have not confirmed if the SMITH algorithm is currently in use. Read more here.
Google Search Console: Index Coverage Data Improvements
Based on the announcement, here are the updates:
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Removal of the generic "crawl anomaly" issue type - all crawls errors should now be mapped to an issue with a finer resolution.
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Pages that were submitted but blocked by robots.txt and got indexed are now reported as "indexed but blocked" (warning) instead of "submitted but blocked" (error).
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Addition of a new issue: "indexed without content" (warning).
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Soft 404 reporting is now more accurate.
Google Search Console: URL Inspection Tool Updates
It now displays multiple referring pages. Here’s more coverage of what SEOs spotted.
How the URL Inspection Tool reports on URLs
Just a reminder that GSC only reports on final destination URLs. They will “silently” follow redirects and report on the destination URL only.
You can follow the Twitter conversation here.
Google Search Console: Crawl Stats report
You will see more crawls in your crawl stats report, but Google has been unclear about what this report is now tracking. It could be all Googlebot types, including Adbot for Google Ads, Imagebot, and more.
Google wrote, “The crawl stats report has increased its reporting coverage for additional types of crawls. As a result, you may see a jump in the number of crawls reported for your site. This does not reflect additional crawling of your site, only improved reporting.” Read more here.
Google Search Console: News Reporting 411
Today’s tip is from Brody Clark. (or @BrodieSEO on Twitter)
There are now two Google Search Console reports that report on your site’s news performance, but they measure different things.
The first report is under the Search Results tab, where you can filter to the news option. That will show your results returned in the “news” tab and will display a sampled version of these queries.
The second separate Google News report you can see on the right rail inside Google Search Console is traffic from news.google.com or the Google news app. Both serve the user results based on their interest profile, so the report for you as a webmaster does not have query data.
Note that the top stories carousel also has news, but you can't pull that reporting from Google Search Console.
John Mueller explains the confusing parts about the Mobile-First Index
It turns out the part that is the most confusing is m.dot sites (separate mobile sites) that also have hreflang (multiple languages). He recommends that those types of sites are better off moving to a responsive setup when they next redesign their site.
Google Search Indexing Tiers
It turns out that if Google thinks that your content is requested more often, it will store it on a faster-responding server tier. More here.
Updates to robots.txt testing tool
Google is also improving the robots.txt Tester Tool (which is usually found in the old Google Search Console). More to come.
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