Here is that big recap where I go over the past month of changes related to Google search and webmaster topics and sum up the more important bits. This month we had the June 2019 core update and the diversity update roll out earlier this month. We had Google say they probably will pre-announce these updates in the future.

Google will change how they process noindex and other directives in the robots.txt file. Google also submitted robots.txt to be a real web standard and open sourced its Googlebot parser for robots.txt so others can use it. Google said they may crack down on leased subdomains on third party sites. Google stopped supporting social profile markup for knowledge panels.

Google Search Console got mobile-first indexing tools and dropped the preferred domain setting this month. But with that, Google may be done with removing features from Google Search Console - I hope. Google is sending out top query changes alerts via Google Search Console. They added copy and search code to those tools and expanded the overview reports to 90-days. Google also launched their icon based new search bar earlier this month. Oh and Google Maps got some bad press this month and launched some Google My Business features.

It was a busy month to say the least and honestly last month was busy as well. The ongoing WebmasterWorld chatter is pretty slow right now, mostly July 4th traffic related.

Here are the stories you might want to review or scan for the month if you were on vacation and didn't read this site daily:

Google Algorithm Updates:

Google SEO:Google Search Console:Google User Interface & Features:Google Local:Other Google Topics:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.