1. Google Ads’ Updated Experiments Page - In the new Experiments pages, advertisers no longer have to create a separate campaign draft and changes made to the original campaign are automatically synced to the experiment as well.
 
This streamlined experiments workflow saves advertisers time by eliminating campaign draft creation. Similarly, the experiment sync feature is also a timesaver because advertisers may no longer have to manually copy changes over from their original campaigns, which can be particularly time-consuming when running multiple experiments simultaneously. And, the ability to apply the changes from an experiment to the base campaign with just one click also makes implementation easier.


2. Google Search Console Now Includes Desktop Page Experience - Google Search Console has a new report dedicated to evaluating Page Experience criteria on the desktop versions of webpages. This report can help you prepare for the launch of the page experience algorithm update on desktop, which will begin rolling out in February and finish at the end of March.

The desktop report can be accessed from the Page Experience tab in Search Console, directly underneath the mobile report. It looks identical to the mobile report, with the exception of the Mobile Usability section.

About Page Experience On Desktop: Google has confirmed the three Core Web Vitals metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS, and their associated thresholds will apply for the desktop ranking. Other aspects of page experience signals, such as HTTPS security and the absence of intrusive interstitials, will remain the same as well.

3. Yoast Now Supports SEO on Shopify - Like the WordPress version of the app, Shopify merchants can use it to optimize their products and posts to show organic, non-shopping results. Yoast SEO for Shopify costs $29 per 30 days, unlike the WordPress version of the app, which operates under a freemium model.

Yoast SEO is one of the most commonly used SEO apps in the WordPress ecosystem and the launch of an app for Shopify speaks to the rise of e-commerce (particularly over the last two years).

4. Why Site/SEO Migrations Are Hard - John Mueller from Google explained that URL changes are not simple for search engines to deal with because Google stores in its index a set of URLs, its on a URL or page by page basis. John said, "this may at first sound like a small change within a website." He said, however "it's not that simple for search engines." Why? John explained that "search engines like Google store their index on a per-page basis." "So if you change the address or the URL of a page that page's data has to be forwarded somehow otherwise it gets lost," he explained.

First, John recommends you deeply study the Google site move documentation, it was vastly improved in 2014 and updated since then over time. John then summarized what you should do, but it is important to see all those details in the help docs: 

And he said these changes can take Google several months to process with the more important URLs happening faster and the less important URLs happening slower. Google has said most of the time these moves take a few months but again, John reminded us to keep the redirects in place for at least a year.

5. Google New robots tag: indexifembedded - Google has a new robots tag for when you use embedded content on your pages named indexifembedded. Google said with this new tag “you can tell Google you’d still like your content indexed when it’s embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag.”

If you embed content on your site and want to control indexing of the content on the page, now you have more control with this new indexifembedded robots tag.

Google explained that sometimes publishers want the content on the page to be indexed and sometimes not when they embed content. This new robots tag gives you more control over communicating those wishes to Google Search.