Without further ado, here is what the News Dashboard team read this week.

News tab filtering in Google Search Console

Now webmasters have another way to slice and dice their data in Google Search Console. Google announced via Tweet on Tuesday that users could now filter traffic coming from the News tab.

We’ve heard Webmasters ask for it, so today we’re launching 📢 a new search type filter: News! 📰 Now you can analyze traffic coming from the News tab on Google Search. Learn more about filtering data on Performance reports https://t.co/mbO1wUafuO pic.twitter.com/Fq2m7OWwjX

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) July 21, 2020

Users can filter data by the News tab going back to June 30, 2020.

Our thoughts: Great! Anything that gives more clarity to the source of a website’s traffic is certainly useful. Though it’s interesting to look at, we suspect many of the newsrooms we work with see much more traffic coming from other sources.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553#filteringdata

Mobile-first indexing delayed, for now

Webmasters, you have a few more months to prepare you site for mobile-first indexing if you haven’t already. Google announced Tuesday it was pushing back it’s mobile-first indexing switch from September 2020 to March 2021.

What mobile-first indexing means: Google will usually opt to use the mobile version of a website to index and rank content.

Take a look at Google’s announcement for tips on how to prepare your site for for the switch.

Our thoughts: This is good news for any webmasters that needed more time to optimize everything for mobile. But most sites have already made the switch. According to Google, 70% of sites on the SERP have already switched over.

• https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/07/prepare-for-mobile-first-indexing-with.html

Google Discover: The basics

Google Discover has been around for nearly two years now in its current form (previously it was “Feeds”) and we thought it might be useful to take another look at how Discover works.

Here are some nice resources directly from Google:

• Discover new information and inspiration with Search, no query required – Discover’s initial announcement
• Google Discover and your website – Google’s updated Discover documentation
• Discover content policies – What’s eligible, what isn’t

More resources: Search Engine Journal has this comprehensive guide on Google Discover, including how to optimize content for it and which kinds of content seem to perform best. According to SEJ’s study of 11,000 URLs, news sites received 99% of the clicks. Some news sites have reported that they’re receiving as much or more traffic from Discover than through traditional SEO.

Our thoughts: News Dashboard customers often ask us if we’ll one day include Google Discover metrics in our tool. Unfortunately, personalization is at the heart of Google Discover, making it difficult for a third-party service to provide deep insight into user-side data. But we’re always looking into it. In the meantime, you can track Google Discover metrics using Google’s in-house reports.

5 accounts to follow this week:

• @badams – SEO consultant, Polemic Digital and editor of State of Digital Publishing
• @CyrusShepard – Founder of Zyppy SEO and Moz contributor
• @backlinkio – Brian Dean, founder of Backlink0.com
• @stonetemple – Eric Enge, general manager of Perficient, a content marking agency
• @dannysullivan – Danny Sullivan, Google’s public search liaison

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Read more

California looks into Google, 28% CTR for Google’s top spot and what WSJ’s video carousel reporting found: What we read this week (7/17)

Google Rich Results, Redirects 101 and SEO in the age of paywalls: What we read this week (7/10) 

WordPress analytics, data for events and prepping for the election: What we read this week (7/2)

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