Udit Mhatre is the Senior SEO Manager at DuMont Project…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Google’s John Mueller said this morning that the Google Search team has removed a classifier it was using to determine soft 404s. As a reminder, a ton of sites were complaining about pages being deindexed and noticed a spike in soft 404s reported by Google Search Console.

A few weeks ago marked the second Google Search Central Unconference edition, almost a year after the first one took place (though most probably remember the first edition under a slightly different name, the Virtual Webmaster Unconference).

Over the past couple of days, Google stopped showing review snippets, the stars under the search result snippets, for all queries. I did ask Google about this yesterday morning, as it really seems like a bug, but I have not heard back yet.

Google Question Hub which has been in beta for years but officially launched earlier this year seems to have undergone a redesign. I am not sure when this happened but Eric Heiken noted it on Twitter and I think he is right, it looks new.

Technically, when it comes to using file extensions in your URLs, it doesn’t really make a difference which one you use for ranking purposes. .PHP, .HTML, .ASP, etc – it doesn’t matter. But if you use image based file extensions for web page based file extensions, that might end up confusing Google Search for a period of time.

Google is rolling out a new feature for the about this result overlay that actually tells searchers (and SEOs) why Google is ranking that page for that given query. Yes, Google is telling you which high level ranking factors are the reason this page is ranking.

Google is rolling out a feature to show in the about this result overlay why the company ranked that page for that query…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

Alan Kent from the Google Search Relations team posted on the Google blog some new best practices for creating deal pages that work well in Google Search. While the advice and tips are not necessarily new, Google is saying the company now recommends the following best practices.

Gary Illyes and Lizzi Harvey published a new Google Search developer help document on an overview of of Google search operators. This document differs from the existing one in that it is more focused on what SEOs should be aware of in regards to these search operator limitations.

Gary Illyes of Google posted on Twitter that you should keep a redirect live for a year for Google Search purposes. The signals from original page A to destination page B will all be transferred and stick with page B even after the redirect is removed, if that redirect is live for a year.

Google announced a number of new Google Shopping features across both Google Ads and free Merchant Center to help merchants enhance and showcase their promotions, deals and sales in Google Search. Google said the company is making it easier for you to showcase your promotions across more surfaces on Google, customize your seasonal promotions and make better merchandising decisions.

At the beginning of this month I reported that 12% of Google’s top stories carousel URLs were not AMP pages. Well, now, about 20 days later, we are up to 23% of the top stories carousel URLs are not AMP pages.