July 2020 Google News & Updates

July has been a relatively quiet month for once, or so it seemed now that we have hit August, the team here at ALT Agency noticed some interesting things with Google and also some signs of some sort of a ranking update mid-July until the beginning of August.

There has been lots of talk and reports throughout the month as well as people seeing their traffic drop and reappear over a few days, with what is suspected to be a Google algorithm update of some sort.

This is nothing new as Google does these updates many times a year, with big algorithm updates coming every few months.

There was lots of talk around the middle of July with reports coming around 23rd and 24th July that some sort of algo update had happened.

SERoundtable cover this quite in-depth and it appears something did happen and continue into early August as it stands with people noticing over the July/August weekend rankings dropping and traffic dropping, despite no changes to their website.

July 9th – Not all link building is bad…

John Mueller was providing more insights on link building on Twitter and came out to say “There are lots of ways to work on getting links that are fine, and useful for both the site and the rest of the web. To say all link building is bad would be wrong.”

Whilst John didn’t elaborate further, it’s always best to follow the Google guidelines when it comes to link building, mark guest links as no follow/sponsored etc where necessary and try not to game the algorithm.

July 22 – Google delays Mobile First Indexing

Google has announced that they will be giving website owners and SEO experts a little more time to prepare for the Mobile First indexing which was due to come into force during September 2020.
Whilst Google announced in early March that 70% of websites were already indexed for Mobile first, there are a few things you can do such as Robot meta tags and lazy load which are all covered in Googles blog post .

July 23/24 – Possible Google movement

Reports started coming in about a possible Google algo tweak with many reporting they had made no changes to their website but their traffic was dropping along with some search positions.
This may tie in with

June 30/August 1st – Fluctuations in search rankings over the weekend

We noticed this amongst a number of sites and forums across the SEO industry are alight with conversation about a possible update due to fluctuations in rankings over the weekend.

This hasn’t been confirmed by Google, but it’s worth taking note if your traffic and keywords have dropped over the weekend.

That’s all the latest SEO activity , news and happenings from the world of Google for now.