I am really delayed this month with the monthly Google Webmaster Report, but here it is for January. The big items were the December 15th Google update, which many many webmasters saw. Google starting rolling out the interstitial penalty two days ago, the mobile-first index isn’t live yet and it seems like the link operator is dead – maybe.

Also, Google doesn’t throttle traffic to sites, SEO is a primary reason for hacking and Google supports HTTP/2.

Google also said they are working on a year of search analytics data and made several Search Console updates this past month. The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is pretty normal and stable right now.

Here is the recap from December.

Here is the outline of the more important Google stories for webmasters:

Google Updates & Algorithms:
December 15th Google Search Algorithm Update Signals
Official: Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Now Rolling Out
Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile Penalty Only To Impact Search Result To Page
Google: We Will Treat Religious Interstitials As Legal Or Policy Interstitials
Google Algorithm Update During Holiday Break? Doubt It.

Google Links:
Google: Don’t Use Our Link Operator In Web Search
Google Reiterates There Is No Penalty For Not Linking Out
Google Calls Out Sites With Taboola Or Outbrain Links

Google Features:
Google Featured Snippets Now Displayed On More Queries
Google Showing Rich Cards In Over 10% Of Search Results
Do Google AMP Rich Cards Have Drastically Lower CTR?
AMP Comes To Google Image Search
Search Google By Tweeting Emojis To @google
Google Replaces “In The News” With “Top Stories”

Mobile First & Mobile SEO:
Google: Mobile First Index Is Not Yet Live
The Google Mobile First Index Won’t Measure Page Speed
Google: Slow Pages Might Be Labeled As Not Mobile Friendly
Google Misinforming Webmasters That Their Page Is Not Mobile Friendly
Google 2017 SEO Advice: Make Sure You Optimize For Mobile Like You Do For Desktop
Google Home & Assistant Now Allow Developers To Build Voice Commands

SEO:
Google: We Have No Web Site Page Quota & Do Not Throttle Traffic
Google: SEO Is One Of The Primary Reasons Websites Are Targeted For Hacking
Google Gives HTTP/2 GoogleBot Clearance
Google: Most 404s Are Not Webmasters Fault
Google: CDNs Are Safe & Shouldn’t Hurt Your Rankings
Google: Wix Web Sites Work Fine For Search
Google: Keep The Default CMS Robots.txt Setting
Google: Site Removal Tool Won’t Speed Up Site Migrations
Google: Similar New URLs Won’t Pick Up Old URLs Signals
Google: There Is No One Recipe For Search Rankings Success
Google: Wikipedia Is Ranked By Google Like Any Other Web Site
Google: Nofollow Attribute May Help With Crawl Budgets For Large Sites
Google Image Search Now To Use Product Schema Markup
Google: There Is No Google Sandbox
Google: Sitemaps Should Contain URLs Of Pages You Want Indexed, Not Variations
Google On Measuring Speed: Page Speed Insights & Plain Old Response Time
Google Presentation On Internationalization & Search
Google: Crawl Budget Works Differently Than You Think
Google Adds New Books Schema Markup With Buy E-Book Links

Google Search Console:
Google Actively Working On Adding A Year Of Search Analytics Data To Search Console
Google Search Console AMP Reports Differentiate Between Critical & Non-Critical Issues
Google Changes Search Console Report “Update” Line To “Note”
Google Search Console AMP & Rich Card Reports May Have Updated
Google Search Console Property Sets Now With More Reports

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.