Google announced a bit after 1pm ET on July 12th that the July 2021 core update is “effectively complete.” That means, in Google lingo, that it is done rolling out 12-days after it first started rolling out on July 1, 2021.

A few years ago we reported that Google may treat a 308 redirects as a 301 redirect. Then shortly later we said you can’t rely on that because it was not documented. Three years later it was added to the official Google documents that Google treats 308 redirects like 301 redirects – so now it is official.

Google’s John Mueller said that “you’ll start to see positive effects once you get out of the “poor” area in core web vitals.” This means that you may see a positive impact around the Google page experience update once your pages are out of the red area. Scoring 100 is not necessary.

Google’s John Mueller said that Google Search tries “to find the primary language per page.” So when you mix languages, that might cause issues with Google doing that. He added on Twitter “but what you put on different pages is totally up to you.”

I found a question and answer dialog between an SEO and John Mueller of Google on last Friday’s hangout interesting. The answer to the question for most of you is obvious, exchanging a link for a link is against Google’s guidelines but it seems some may think it is not if they are topically relevant.

I found it interesting that the local tracking tool, BrightLocal’s Local RankFlux, showed big ranking fluctuations in the local results at around the same time we saw the ranking spikes for the July core update.

On Friday, July 9th, it looks like the Google July 2021 core update spiked again. Glenn Gabe asked Danny Sullivan of Google if the update was done and Danny said on Friday “not quite done.” I suspect we saw the end wave of this update around July 9th.

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…

Last year Google added the ability for users to send a message to a business through a Google Posts. Well, now according to Ben Fisher, Google is showing in the Google My Business messages area when a message is received via a Google Post.

Richard Nazarewicz is the Technical SEO Manager at the Wall Street Journal and I was actually suppose to visit him over a year ago, before COVID hit, at the WSJ offices but then COVID happened…

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…

Google said that starting in August 2021 it will change its insufficient contact information policy in the Google Merchant Center guidelines from having two forms of contact information, to only one form of contact information on your site.

Google has a disavow tool, a tool that reluctantly launched in 2012 that lets you tell Google which links you don’t want them to count that are pointing to your site. It turns out, there are a number of SEOs that end up disavowing their disavow tool – which has no impact on anything – but it is done.

Darcy Burk asked John Mueller of Google if you still get the HTTPS ranking boost if you have HTTPS, but all your other page experience signals are poor. So your core web vitals are horrid but your URLs are over HTTPS, do you lose out on the HTTPS ranking boost which is part of the page experience update?

Google is once again testing just showing the domain name of the search result snippet and not the full URL or breadcrumb of that snippet. I saw several people notice this test this week notice this both on the mobile and desktop search results. Google has tested this in the past.