Google spokesperson confirmed to the Search Engine Journal about minor changes made to the core algorithm this month. He said, “We released several minor improvements during this timeframe, part of our regular and routine efforts to improve relevancy”.

Many websites experienced volatility mainly from December 12-14.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, in a Twitter post, made it appear less important. He said, “Reports calling this a single “update” or calling it “Fred” don’t reflect what we actually said: there were several minor changes that happened as they routinely do in any particular week.”

Google posted on Webmaster central blog that it is introducing of new version of structured data testing tool in order to make diagnosing your pages’ structured data easier.

A common terminology of “rich results” will be used for rich snippets, rich cards, and enriched results.

Google said the new testing tool “focuses on the structured data types that are eligible to be shown as rich results.” it would allow you to test all data sources on your pages, including the recommended JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa. Google said this new version is a “more accurate reflection of the page’s appearance on Search and includes improved handling for Structured Data found on dynamically loaded content.”

After rolling out the mobile-first index for a few sites, Google has now posted more advice regarding the mobile-first index feature.

Confirming the update, Google said “This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team.”

Previously, the snippets in the results, as well as the content on the Google cache pages were displayed in the desktop version, which frequently caused issues for the mobile searchers. However, now they will be from the mobile version of the pages, and Webmasters will see significantly increased crawling by Smartphone Googlebot.

John Mueller from Google recently shared that the company plans to roll out new and improved Search Console in 2018.

The company’s been testing the new Search Console version since summer, 2017. Its quite clear to the officials what the new version would be like and what is it going to offer. Some of the industry experts have even had their hands on the latest version.

The current version allows beta users to access data of up to 90 days. However, now, with the new version, they would be able to get access to over a year’s worth of Search Console data. It is a considerable leap ahead as it would mean four times the current data accessibility time period.

Last week, Google announced the extension of search snippets in the Google search. They also passed on the information via Danny Sullivan, a California-based technologist and journalist, that there is no requirement to update the meta description to support longer search result snippets. They said Google can handle dynamic thing like this one.

John Mueller, a Google official said that “Essentially from from a purely technical point of view these descriptions aren’t a ranking for anything. So it’s not the case that changing your descriptions or making them longer or shorter or tweaking them or putting keywords in there will affect your site’s ranking. However it can affect the way that users see your site in the search results and whether or not they actually click through to your site.”

Google recently announced that it is replacing the old PDF version of the SEO Starter Guide with a new web-based version of the guide. The PDF version was originally released about nine years back in 2008.

The update comprise combination of the Webmaster Academy and the old SEO Starter Guide PDF, which would be helpful in creating modern and search engine-friendly websites. Google said, “The updated version builds on top of the previously available document, and has additional sections on the need for search engine optimization, adding structured data markup and building mobile-friendly websites”.

Google search engine crawlers, starting from Q2 2018, will start yielding JavaScript-based web pages, without any support from AJAX crawling scheme, Google made an official statement.

It means, there will be one-notch lesser work for site owners, as now they won’t be required to provide rendered versions of these pages to Googlebot.

Google is now expanding the focus of its Google Trends, a web facility that lets anyone track what the world web searchers are looking for in both real time and non-real time. They are now going to provide even more real-time data on the popularity of search terms. The service now includes data from more Google products beyond web search with the addition of search data from verticals like Google News, Shopping, Images and YouTube.

Google Trends’ added data will allow users to explore search results in different ways than was previously possible. Below is the quick demonstration and test of the new features. Lets have a look at an example of Taylor Swift.

With the launch of Firefox Quantum, Mozilla released the most important update to its browser. Its lighter, faster and you should definitely give it a try. Other than the improved browser, you’ll also notice another change: Google is now the default search engine again.

Mozilla announced that they have terminated their search deal with Yahoo and the new version of their browser, named Firefox Quantum (Firefox 57) which is 2X faster and consumes 30% less space will feature Google as the default search engine.

Google is updating and working on the look of its product-oriented knowledge panels on mobile to show even more details about the particular item or product in the search results.

In an example by Vlad Rappoport (the image below), the shopping knowledge panel has a blue header providing details about the product and a new carousel featuring third-party editorial reviews and separate tabs for stores in addition to reviews with a number of different options and features, like videos, to provide a one-stop resource for product info.