SEO Folks. Monday was Catfish Comstock's birthday. Catfish has been an SEO who has been a contributor to the community and knowledge-base as long as I can remember. As it turns out, it's also Carolyn Shelby's birthday. She too has dedicated her life to improving SEO and SEM. She has gone by the name Cshel forever.Google dropped a core update that day that they're going to insist on calling the June 2019 core-update. Let's informally rename it in honor of some people who have given a good part of...
Jun 06, 2019•55 min
FACEBOOK CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG has appeared before Congress in the past, to talk about the giant social network’s role in misinformation and election-meddling, but the number of times he has appeared before a government committee is vastly outweighed by the number of times he has declined to do so. The Facebook co-founder continued that streak by failing to appear in Canada this week before an international committee that is looking into Facebook’s status as a conduit for misinformation. His secon...
May 30, 2019•58 min
In the last week of April, nearly 23 percent of all traffic to news sites tracked by web analytics firm Parse.ly came from search engines. Google alone accounts for nearly half of the external referral traffic—traffic, that is, that comes from platforms, apps, and other outside sources— to news sites. Together with the fact that Facebook referral traffic is on the wane, this means that Google’s search algorithm is now perhaps the most powerful mediator of online attention to the news. Google ann...
May 16, 2019•57 min
Probably the biggest news for the SEO industry out of Google I/O yesterday was that Google said Googlebot is now evergreen, meaning it will stay up-to-date with the latest version of Chromium, their popular Chrome browser. This brings thousands of new features to Googlebot for crawling purposes. I did cover this last night at Search Engine Land and this news shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone - we saw Google testing this just a few weeks ago. Google announced it a year ago at Google I/O 2018...
May 09, 2019•55 min
Google appears to be rolling out an upgrade to Google Questions Answers (Q A) that uses previous answers to questions and Google Local Business (GMB) reviews to suggest answers to new questions in real time. A new consumer survey about Google SERP engagement, from Path Interactive , finds organic search results still dominate user attention but younger searchers are more inclined to look to content in Featured Snippets and the Knowledge Panel without clicking through to third-party sites. This p...
May 02, 2019•57 min
Canada's federal privacy watchdog plans to take Facebook to court following an investigation that found the social media giant broke a number of privacy laws and failed to take responsibility for protecting Canadians' personal information. The electric scooter company Lime’s ongoing trial period in Brisbane, Australia isn’t going so great, according to Gizmodo — at least eight scooters have been pulled from the streets because hackers replaced the usual audio messages with sexually explicit comm...
Apr 25, 2019•55 min
Blaming a “very fluid” technology industry, Emtek –who BlackBerry licensed its BBM consumer business to in 2016 –has announced that is ending BBM service, effective at the end of next month. Google is adding a new section to search results which are dedicated to AMP Stories. AMP Stories was announced over a year ago and now they’re rolling out in a big way. AMP Stories are exactly what they sound like – Instagram-like stories that are built on the AMP framework. In addition to having a dedicated...
Apr 18, 2019•55 min
Google's John Mueller was answering questions around an old topic of Google showing only a sample of links in the link report in Google Search Console at Reddit. He said that generally if the links are not shown in the tool then they are "pretty irrelevant overall." For a long time now, Google has been teasing that they are working on closing the gap between how Chrome renders pages and how GoogleBot renders pages. The web rendering engine Google uses for crawling the web is going to get a lot m...
Apr 04, 2019•55 min
AdWords Editor has historically been one of Google’s most popular advertising products. Contributor and Googler Matt Lawson lists what makes him most excited about its relaunch as Google Ads Editor. Ahrefs CEO Dmitry Gerasimenko announced a plan to create a search engine that supports content creators and protects users privacy. Dmitry laid out his proposal for a more free and open web, one that rewards content creators directly from search revenue with a 90/10 split in favor of publishers. Goog...
Mar 28, 2019•57 min
Facebook confirmed Thursday in a blog post, prompted by a report by cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, that it stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plaintext for years. The discovery was made in January, said Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati, as part of a routine security review. None of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook, he said. Facebook admitted the security lapse months later, after Krebs said logs were accessible to some 2,000 engineers and developers. It use...
Mar 21, 2019•56 min
Not long after Google released a broad core algorithm update on March 12, some in the industry began calling it the “Florida 2 update.” But the moniker has created a bit of confusion among SEOs who wonder if this week’s release is related to the Florida update in November 2003. It’s not. Here’s what you need to know. oogle does several core ranking updates per year and confirms very few updates throughout the year. Specific to broad core updates, Google has said numerous times that you cannot do...
Mar 14, 2019•54 min
Google has finally sent us an official statement about our question if Google use click through rate for rankings. Sadly the statement will lead to even more confusion and debate. After the debate around CTR rekindled last week, we asked Google for a statement from their PR team we can share around click-through rate. In short, various Googlers have told us over the years that CTR data is not used within Google’s ranking algorithm. Goodbye property sets and hello domain properties, a new automat...
Feb 28, 2019•56 min
Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes, who has been with Google for over eight years working exclusively on search-related topics, participated in an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit over the weekend. Over the course of the lengthy discussion thread, he covered everything from robots.txt to RankBrain to behavioral signals to image and video search. We’ll save you the trouble of sifting through it all by sharing all the important stuff here. One day after Google said it would be consolidatin...
Feb 14, 2019•53 min
In a case related to the New York Times investigation into American company Devumi, a court has ruled that Devumi can no longer operate in the same way as it had been, essentially outlawing the sale of social media followers and likes. The chief executive of cryptocurrency company Quadriga CX has died, and he's apparently the only one with the ability to unlock all his customers' coins. Without their digital keys, his clients lose access to their funds. The company's board of directors said last...
Feb 07, 2019•57 min
Google's John Mueller was asked on Twitter if there is a way in the new Google Search Console to remove old Sitemaps files. He said you can 404 them to remove them. Maybe Google will add a button to delete old Sitemap files there but for now, 404ing them will eventually get them to be removed. A new mic icon. Below are screens from Android on the left and the iPhone on the right, showing Google.com search results. The iPhone doesn’t show the mic, although the keyboard allows voice input. The sea...
Jan 31, 2019•54 min
We saw this coming and now Google officially released a new sign up process for service area businesses, businesses that don't operate out of a specific location(s). Google now lets them specify the locations they service, instead of being stuck without any options. Google is testing a video overlay or lightbox feature to play videos in the mobile search results. In the search results captured by Valentin Pletzer on Twitter he showed how instead of being taken to the video landing page, Google s...
Jan 24, 2019•57 min
In this episode Jim and Dave shared the mic with advertising legend, Terry O'Reilly. They discussed how brands like Gillette and Nike make the decision to push the envelope in making social commentary in their ads, the risks involved and hot to mitigate then. They went on to discuss how technology is changing the way we live, destroying some sectors and creating new ones. It was an episode you don't want to miss.Web hosting provider GoDaddy is inserting JavaScript code into websites, which could...
Jan 17, 2019•57 min
Web hosting provider GoDaddy is inserting JavaScript code into websites, which could slow down performance or break sites altogether. A snippet of JavaScript code is being added to sites in order to use a technology called Real User Metrics (RUM). Google has finally fixed the exploit with the knowledge panel in their search results. It only took them about three years to do so, but it is fixed. You can no longer create fraudulent knowledge panels with this hack. YouTube announced it is strengthe...
Jan 17, 2019•57 min
A lot of news came out yesterday evening around an old Google knowledge panel exploit that let's you manipulate almost any query to show any knowledge panel. Yes, this is embarrassing for Google but even more so because it is something that was reported back in 2016. Have a lot of pages you want removed from the Google index and don't want to use the page removal tool for each URL? Google's John Mueller said you can try to 404 and noindex all the pages you want removed and then submit a temporar...
Jan 10, 2019•52 min
Google can now link to some content it is showing in their search results in a new way. Instead of just linking to the page, Google can anchor you to the exact spot of the answer you are looking for and highlight the block of text that is most relevant to your query. This only works for some searches on Google mobile, that feature AMP content in the featured snippet block. Google is testing a bigger push for the messaging option within the local panel. Google launched messaging within Google My ...
Jan 03, 2019•56 min
Today were joined by Michelle Stinson-Ross, the Director of Marketing Operations at Apogee Results to discuss a plethora of topics. Google has released its annual list of top searches around the world, including overall searches and searches in various categories. Top queries reflect everyday questions, as well as the people and events that made headlines in 2018. Certain events led to people searching for how to improve their everyday lives, Google notes.Google's John Mueller said that moving t...
Dec 13, 2018•56 min
Aaseesh from Google responded to a complaint about Google not picking up on a web site's canonical tags. He said that "even if you setup the canonical tags properly, other signals like inconsistent redirects can make Google not select your preferred URL". As you know, Search Engine Land was delisted from Google's search results for most of the day on Friday because a bug in Google's hack sites classifier labeled the site as being hacked. Colin McDermott ran a Twitter poll asking if Google should...
Dec 06, 2018•54 min
Content, from an SEO perspective, is the connection of entities by relationships. In the statement, “SEO is dead” there is the entity “SEO”, there is the entity “dead” and there is the relationship that one connects to the other and the direction of the said relationship. Google's John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a video hangout that Google does not use the BBB, Better Business Bureaus score or reviews as well as other third-party trust sites in their ranking algorithm. So all that talk about...
Nov 29, 2018•56 min
Content, from an SEO perspective, is the connection of entities by relationships. In the statement, “SEO is dead” there is the entity “SEO”, there is the entity “dead” and there is the relationship that one connects to the other and the direction of the said relationship. All content is fundamentally like this. Google's John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a video hangout that Google does not use the BBB, Better Business Bureaus score or reviews as well as other third-party trust sites in their r...
Nov 15, 2018•53 min
Long gone are the times of monthly Google PageRank updates, Google dances, and checking Google data centers - and to be honest, I somewhat miss those days. But the question I see asked a lot is how much have things changed? The answer is a lot has changed but fundamentally nothing has changed. Several people have recently reported seeing double featured snippets in Google search results. A double featured snippet is a featured snippet with a second featured snippet beneath it. This arrangement e...
Nov 01, 2018•54 min
Google's Gary Illyes said at PubCon last week that Google finds content mostly through links and XML Sitemaps. He said the number one way is through links, crawling links on the web and the number two way is through XML Sitemaps. Google announced it is now rolling out the Google Lens button within Google Image search results. Google Lens, which was introduced in May 2017, is a visual search tool to help people learn more about images and what they are visually looking at.Google has announced tha...
Oct 25, 2018•54 min
Google seems to be testing an ad format on mobile search where they remove the description section from the ad. The ad copy is removed, the only thing you see are the headlines and URL. This was being tested on mobile in the bottom ad units.Facebook announced it’s expanding fact-checking efforts to review the accuracy of photos and videos. Until now Facebook’s fact-checking efforts have been focused on reviewing articles to reduce the spread of false news. Going forward, all of Facebook’s 27 fac...
Sep 20, 2018•56 min
Google has announced the new Google Search Console is out of beta after being tested for over a year. Over the year, Google has done a full open beta invite to all users and has been migrating features from the old Google Search Console to the new version. Google has launched a new type of search engine designed specifically around helping people find data. Simply called “Dataset Search,” the tool provides easier access to millions of datasets across thousands of data repositories on the web. Ch...
Sep 13, 2018•55 min
Google has launched a new type of search engine designed specifically around helping people find data. Simply called “Dataset Search,” the tool provides easier access to millions of datasets across thousands of data repositories on the web. Chrome 69 introduces performance enhancements as well as changes that will affect how users search. Chrome also introduces opportunities for developers to create interesting user experiences on mobile devices. Google has announced the new Google Search Consol...
Sep 06, 2018•57 min
Google has officially launched their structured data codelab, which allows you to walk through a step-by-step process to make your own structured data for your web site. Google's codelab walks you through adding several types of structured data to a simple HTML site, including where to place structured data on a site and how to validate it. Google also announced some important changes to how user management and rights work within the Google Search Console. In a pair of tweets Tuesday morning the...
Aug 30, 2018•53 min
