Recently, in a Webmaster Central Hangout, John Mueller from Google discussed content optimization for voice search and Google Assistant, and answered queries related to the same. He classified good and bad content, and suggested what’s not a good fit. He advises to avoid over-optimizing and provided examples of what might be perceived as a spam.

Some time back, Google launched Google Assistant for speakers and cars. They sent notice to publishers suggesting them ways to upgrade their content to be more visible on Google Assistant. Currently, the feature is applicable only to a handful kinds of content, which would surely expand to other types of content. Thus, understanding content optimization for Google Assistant would be an important aspect of search marketing in 2018.

Google recently announced about launching another resource for you to understand your website better and improve its performance. It has begun with a new series of short videos, which they call SEO snippets, used for providing short & to the point answers to specific questions.

Have a look at the following video for detailed understanding of SEO snippets:

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.”