Google’s Danny Sullivan affirmed that an algorithm update had taken this place last week. He stated-

“Our core algorithm is updated all the time. For major updates, we’ll continue to share about those on @searchliaison, as we have been. We haven’t had a major update of that nature, but we did have a smaller one this week.”

In a Google Webmaster Central Hangout last week, Google’s John Mueller suggested that website owners who have been affected by August core algorithm update should focus on content relevance. For dealing with such core algorithm updates, Mueller stated that it was not just about resolving specific issues. Instead, Google is more focused on the relevance of content to the queries of searchers.

On Tuesday Google announced that auctions conducted on search partner sites can utilize Smart Bidding rather than smart pricing once an advertiser has a conversion tracking set up.

Why is it important to you?

Google states that Smart Bidding can provide better performance since it includes contextual signals for optimizing bids for all auctions. Smart pricing, which has been utilized for manual bids for search partners, focuses on signals like keyboard lists or concepts which initiated the ad and the page type on which the ad was displayed.

Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller announced on twitter that Google would now convert PDF documents, along with other forms of document like Word and Excel, into HTML formats for better search indexing of the documents.

Mueller’s Tweet said, “FWIW we convert PDFs & other similar document types into HTML for indexing too, so theoretically there wouldn’t be too much difference.”

Google’s John Mueller discussed why Google showed different results for singular and plural versions of an identical phrase. Many SEO experts suggest adding synonyms to content such as plural and singular versions of a search phrase being targeted. John Mueller clarifies why it may be wiser to select singular or plural before concentrating on that.

Question related to singular and plural keyword phrases

In a recent Google Hangout, a person asked what were the reasons for totally different rankings for keywords in singular and plural. There are some instances where the plural version ranks in top five while the singular isn’t even in the top 100. John Mueller stated that there should be a similarity in search intent for both versions. It isn’t essential that Google would show the same search results for singular and plural versions of a targeted keyword.

Google announced on Wednesday morning that it is doing away with the method of URL submission to its search index. The “addurl” page, listed in this help document redirects to Google Search Console login page. Webmasters from Google stated that they had to drop public submission feature. The company, however, didn’t say that it was essential to remove it. It might be related to abuse or spam issue.

An update to Google My Business will now display the exact search queries used to look for a business listing. Search queries display to you queries used to look for your business on Google. The data will appear on the Insights tab, which tracks the most widely used terms and search trends for a specific business. You can find the common terms and search trends related to your business on this tab. Search queries concentrate on the terms used by your customers to search your business on Maps and Local Search.