Round up of Google and SEO updates from February 2020

With the big SEO and Google algorithm updates to start off January 2020 , February hasn’t seen as many large updates but there have been a umber of smaller updates across the month of February.

4th February 2020 Early algorithm updates?

With the volatility of January seemingly behind us, February started off with a little more volatility but not a core update.

Google said “we do updates all the time” with not much more being know about this early update, although it seems more like a minor algorithm update than a huge core algorithm update like we saw in January .

So, if your SEO took a bit of a dive in early February, this is likely why.

6th Feb – Google’s shopping ads to reach Gmail

Users of Google Shopping Ads were notified that they will soon be able to target Gmail with their ads.

This will become active from 4th March 2020 and will be automatically shown as long as you have selected “YouTube, Gmail and Discover” from the networks tab in your ad settings.

6th Feb – New Google maps updates

Google released a blog post detailing 5 new features planned for Google maps.

The features are:

• Explore – Which details other activities around a selected location
• Saved – You will be able to create lists of your favourite locations and save them
• Contribute – Updating key pieces of information about the area which is used to provide valuable information to other users of Google maps
• Commute – A great feature which will allow users to plan their journeys and view live traffic updates
• Updates – This will give users the latest news and updates from businesses in the local area

24th February – “Find results on” launched

You may of seen this one in action, but n the Google search results, when you search for something like a restaurant or taxi in a certain area, Google now shows third party results in a nice little tab from places such as Trip Advisor or Yell.

It’s believed this was launched by Google due to a fine from the EU, regarding Google promoting their own results first instead of other third party results.