Here are some key points brought up during the keynote at SMX by Google’s Gary Illyes:
Authorship
Google has completely stopped usage and display of authorship data. Although it has been a long time since the announcement, it has taken till now for it to be completely removed from the index.
RankBrain
He also said that you cannot optimize for RankBrain. He confirmed that it is a ranking factor, but one that does not have a score or a numerical figure associated with it. This ties in with the assumption that it is mostly used to optimize queries.
Panda
The panda update is continuous and slow. It can take months for the score assigned to each site by Panda to make it into the actual index and affect search results.
Penguin
Google is working on another penguin update but at this point there is no definite timeline on when its release can be expected.
Mobile index
He also talked about the mobile index that Google is still working on. It is meant to be a separate index only for mobile queries. At present both mobile and desktop searches are served by the same index.
HTTPS
One of the most interesting statistics to come out of this was that HTTPS within the Google index has now hit 34%. This is a huge jump from the single digits in the last few years. He recommends moving to HTTPS as quickly as possible.