we launched an effort that included updates to our Search Quality Rater Guidelines to provide more detailed examples of low-quality webpages for raters to appropriately flag, which can include misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories. This work has helped our systems better identify when results are prone to low-quality content. If detected, we may opt not to show a featured snippet.

Showing more than one featured snippet may also eventually help in cases where you can get contradictory information when asking about the same thing but in different ways.

Failure to read and follow the guidelines for specific data types can lead to a variety of errors. Those errors can result in a manual penalty.

Just because the structured data validates in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, it doesn’t mean it’s correct.Familiarize yourself with Google’s General Structured Data Guidelines. The importance of understanding those guidelines cannot be overstated.

Publicly-facing departments that operate as distinct entities should have their own page. The exact name of each department must be different from that of the main business and that of other departments. Typically such departments have a separate customer entrance and should each have distinct categories.

Including unnecessary information in your business name is not permitted, and could result in your listing being suspended

Google can also detect category information from your website and from mentions about your business throughout the web.

Your favicon should be a multiple of 48px square, for example: 48x48px, 96x96px, 144x144px and so on. SVG files, of course, do not have a specific size. Any valid favicon format is supported. Google will rescale your image to 16x16px for use in search results, so make sure that it looks good at that resolution. Note: do not provide a 16x16px favicon.

The favicon URL should be stable (don’t change the URL frequently).

Depending on the type of website, sometimes organization markup fits best on the home page.Other times it may fit in on the contact page

Some companies may put review markup on every page in hopes that a star rating is shown for all pages in search results.That’s not a good practice, Mueller says.

Google said that the top 5% of local businesses in a category will be awarded a “Local Favorite” badge. Google was vague about what criteria will be used to determine who qualifies. The company generally said that it would reward businesses that kept their profiles updated and were responsive to their customers.

When a consumer searches or inputs the URL, it will lead directly to the merchant’s GMB profile. In the near future, users will be able to search Google Maps for @shortname and bring up the profile as well.

It’s impossible to specify different images/formats/files for different networks, other than for Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook image is used, by default, for all other networks/systems). This is a limitation of how these platforms work. The same goes for titles and descriptions

The image size and cropping won’t always be perfect across different platforms, as the way in which they work is inconsistent.

Specifically, your images should look great on ‘broadcast’ platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but might sometimes crop awkwardly on platforms designed for 1:1 or small group conversations, like WhatsApp or Telegram.

All of the other major platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, recognize Open Graph tags. Twitter actually has its own meta tags for Twitter Cards, but if Twitter robots cannot find any, Twitter uses Open Graph tags instead.

The tags can affect conversions and click-through rates hugely

Adding Open Graph tags to your website won’t directly affect your on-page SEO, but it will influence the performance of your links on social media

Private WhoIs information may be a sign of “something to hide”.

Google does in fact crawl, index and even rank content within the title attribute tag of an image

80% of the answers delivered by Google’s voice assistant came from the three top results in search engine results pages.Even more, 60% of the results came from featured snippets and 70% overall came from SERP features.

If you think of optimizing the paragraph for the intent of voice, make sure it’s around 42 words,

SEMrush found schema was indeed in use in the vast majority of results, but 36% of the answers given by the Google Home devices contained no Schema at all.

If you use WordPress, if you use Yoast plugin, you can actually have your title tags update automatically year-to-year or even month-to-month leveraging that. It's not right for all circumstances, but for certain keyword queries it works pretty well.

when interacting with (i.e. clicking on) a featured snippet image, presently you are kept within Google’s ecosystem and taken to an expanded version of the image under Google Image Search results

May 2019, Google has now announced an upcoming feature for Image Search on mobile that would provide searchers the option to “swipe up to navigate” to the AMP article associated with the image

Google could begin experimenting or simply announce a decision to bypass the Google Image Search step altogether and take searchers directly to the source page

Did you add trust signals to your site? Authors to articles, author bios, links to professional social media accounts etc

Organic click share is dramatically lower on mobile devices yet SEO optimization remains critical.

Equally important is looking into appearing in other types of results, such as image search and YouTube