In our first monthly recap for 2019 we covered a couple smaller unconfirmed Google updates. It was a slower month with the holidays and New Years but Google launched some new features.

Google made AMP featured snippets do fancy moves, They also launched support for livestreams in search with new markup and also audio news for Google Assistant. Google Search Console moved some reports off the old version and to the new version.

Google’s mobile first index hit a big milestone this past month, hitting over half of their search results. There was a lot of chatter around links and what is allowed and not allowed. Sundar Pichai said Google has thousands working on core search and Paul Haahr said searchers can tell the difference between organic listings and paid listings in search.

In the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread, there is some limited chatter around traffic fluctuations earlier this week. It might be an update but more likely related to New Years traffic slumps. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Here is a summary of stories that I wanted to highlight over the past 30 days:

Google Algorithm Updates:
Limited Chatter: Google Search Algorithm Update This Week
A Google Search Algorithm Update Over December 15th Weekend
Google’s John Mueller On The Medic Update: Improve The Whole Site

Google News:
Sundar Pichai: Google Has Over A Thousand People Working On Core Search
Google: Searchers Can Tell The Difference Between Search Ads & Organic Listings
Google News Publishers Continue To Have Indexing/Ranking Issues

Google User Interface:
Google AMP Featured Snippets Anchor & Highlight Content
Google Zero Results For Record A Video Result
Google Tests Black URL/Breadcrumbs At Top Of Search Result Snippets
Google Tests More Movie & TV Streaming Options In Search
Google Search Pronounce Feature
Google Tests Expandable More People Carousel
Google Rolls Out Image Thumbnails In Related Searches
Google URLs In Search Results Snippets Now Clickable
Google Assistant Testing Audio News

Google Search Console:
Google Moved Some Of The Old Google Search Console Reports
Google: We Fixed The Date Bug Between Performance Reports & Search Analytics Reports
Google Search Console AMP Errors Gets More General, Less Specific
Google To Shut Down Many Old Search Console Reports December 13th

Google Mobile First Indexing:
Google Mobile-First Indexing Now Used For Over Half Of Google’s Search Results
Google Mobile First Indexing Notices Are Delayed Within Search Console

Google SEO:
New Google Livestream Support In Search With Structured Data & Indexing API
Google Recognizes Web Mentions But Says They Are Not Links
Google Link Schemes Now Includes Contractually Requiring Follow Links
Google: We Can Detect Automated Link Dropping
Google: More On When To Ignore Bad Links
Google: We Don’t Need To Notify You Of Bad Links Because We Just Ignore Them
Google: If A Random Tool Can Find Bad Links Then Google Probably Ignores Those Links Already
Google: Hard To Understand URL Structures Can Lead To Indexing Issues
Google: Links From Non-English Languages Are Not Unnatural Links
Google: We Don’t Skip Indexing Content That Is Over-Saturated On The Web
Google: Don’t Wait For Us To Change For Technical SEO
Google Getting Your Canonical URLs Wrong?
Google: We Use The Most Restrictive Crawling Command On The Page
Google Images Best Practices Guide Updated, But What Changed?

Google My Business & Local: 
Google My Business Products Beta Gets Update Design
Google Moving Google Posts Back Up?
Local SEOs Say Google Posts Traffic Significantly Declining
Google Tests Larger Messaging Buttons In Local Panels
Unicode Works Within Google Local Listings

For last month’s recap, click here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.