A fairly interesting hodge-podge of news this week, from the obvious to the intriguing. Nothing absolutely mind-blowing, but still, some good stuff. Enjoy!

Google News

• Mueller: Just Start With HTTPS – This might seem like obvious advice, but I’m sharing it here just in case it, well, isn’t. Google’s John Mueller took to Twitter in a reply regarding HTTPS as a ranking signal, and basically said any new website should just start immediately being HTTPS-enabled. He said, “If you’re setting up a new website, just use HTTPS. It’s not required, but it’s a signal, and it’s easier to do it from the start than to add it later.”
• Mueller: Hreflang One Of The Most Complex Aspects Of SEO – Again on Twitter, Google’s John Mueller tried to impart the complexity of hreflang tags. “TBH hreflang is one of the most complex aspects of SEO (if not the most complex one). Feels as easy as a meta-tag, but it gets really hard quickly.” This highlights the need to do hreflang right from the get go.
• Google Images Makes Two Slight, Yet Important Changes – Google has removed two fairly popular features from Google Images: The “view image” button and the “search by image” functionality. Both of these changes arose from Google’s recent partnership with Getty Images, who complained that both of these featured allowed for copyrighted images to easily be stolen. Publishers were especially happy about the removal of the “view image” button, saying it’ll result in less image piracy and more traffic to the pages those images live on.

• Search Console Sees Crawl Limits Revised – According to newly-revised help documentation regarding Google’s Search Console, the amount of crawl limits has changed significantly. Before the change, you could submit 500 URLs per month, whereas now you can only submit 10 per day for the “crawl only this URL” option. For the “crawl this URL and its direct links” option, it’s been changed from 10 requests in a 30 day period to 2 requests per day.
• More Sites Being Moved To Mobile-First Index Soon – According to Google’s Gary Illyes at the recent Pubcon conference, Google would be moving a lot of sites to the mobile-first index, “in the next month and a half or so.” We’ll keep you updated if we get any further, or more firm, information.

Other News

• Embedded Image Ruling Could Have Far-Reaching Copyright Implications – Recently, a judge in New York ruled that embedding a Tweet of a copyrighted image could constitute copyright infringement. If fully upheld, this could cause severe copyright headaches for numerous bloggers and other websites who’ve embedded such data in the past. We’ll bring you more as this develops.

The post A Smattering Of SEO News – A True Hodgepodge appeared first on Wpromote Blog.