Daily Search Forum Recap: January 13, 2021

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.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Small Google Algorithm Update Around January 12, 2021?
I know I just reported about an unconfirmed Google ranking algorithm update around January 7th and 8th but I think I am seeing signs of another one that started to get noticed January 12th or maybe the day before.

No, Google SMITH Algorithm Is Not Live
There is some speculation in certain SEO groups and forums that Google has launched a new algorithm that is better than BERT and RankBrain named SMITH. SMITH stands for Siamese Multi-depth Transformer-based Hierarchical (SMITH) Encoder. This is not live, it is currently just a research paper from Google.

Google Search Console Google News Performance Report
Google has launched a brand new performance report just for Google News publishers within Google Search Console. Only Google News publishers should be able to see it, like only those who get Google Discover traffic can see the Discover performance report.
Google Might Not Launch The Page Experience & Core Web Vitals Label/Icon In Search
When Google announced the launch date of the Google Page Experience Update it also said that they may launch a label or indicator in the search results to convey to the searcher which pages do well with those metrics. We saw Google testing this icon a while back as well. But keep in mind, this indicator may never launch.

Google: Too Focused On One SEO Tactic Can Hurt Overall SEO Results
If you are too focused on one specific area of your website, you can be missing out on other areas that need your attention. Being too laser focused, in any area, can cause you to lose sight of the larger picture and can end up hurting you in the long run. This is good generic advice and good SEO advice.

Google Colorful Fabric Swing Bench
Here is a photo from one of the spaces in the Google Malaysian office of a cafe I think named Gerai Gugel. You can see this appealing looking colorful fabric swing bench next to still benches. This wa

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

I don’t think there’s a way to see whether it’s been looked at. Most kinds get processed fairly quickly, the link ones can take a bit longer (weeks, in some rare cases a few months)., John Mueller on Twitter
If you want to have particular pages indexed & used as the canonical URLs, you need to be consistent and align all the signals. If you mix things up, maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. If you want the algorithms t, John Mueller on Twitter
Up to you. There’s no preference in search (I’d just avoid confusing characters like spaces & commas since they make it harder to link properly)., John Mueller on Twitter
Yes, that’s correct. It’s not common that it would appear for queries where there’s crawlable content from your site, but it can happen., John Mueller on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

Yelp launches “health and safety measures” community feedback feature
Unlock actionable search tactics at SMX Report
Google News performance report added to Google Search Console

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