Product Reviews Update, Search Console, MUM, BERT, UI & More

Welcome to April, the real April, not April 1st, and with that, I have the monthly Google webmaster report for you all. This is a big one, so get comfy and start reading. We had the product reviews update start rolling out, we had the page experience update for desktop finish rolling out and several unconfirmed updates. This includes a Spring update and two other unconfirmed web search updates, plus a local search update that may have reversed the December local search update.

Google expanded its use of MUM and BERT AI in search and touted reducing irrelevant results by over 50% and pushing out over 5,000 changes in search last year with a whopping 800,000 experiments – and you wonder why I have so much to write. Google Maps blocked a 100 million fraud and abusive edits and more.

Google released a new highly cited and come back later sign in Google Search. Google has a much more visual design for some mobile queries and refine and broaden this search is fully rolled out. Google also released the trusted store badge for those merchants who score highly with the shopping experience scorecard.

Google Search Console will kill the killer URL parameter tool this coming month. But in bigger news, Google Analytics 4 will replace Universal Analytics 3 next year.

It was a wild wild month and that it just a quick summary of the organic changes in Google Search. Here are some of the more important stories I think you should review, in case you missed one:

Google Algorithms:

Google Search Console:
Google SEO:
Google Search Features & User Interface:
Google Local, Maps & Business Profiles:
Google Analytics:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.