Google Partners program is launching later this year, which may require current partner companies to make several changes. For companies to maintain their Google Partner status, they will have to meet a new set of requirements that go into effect in June 2020. Google is sending emails to partner companies to help them determine whether they’ll maintain partner status as per the new requirements. The Digital Analytics Association announced that they have absorbed the Search Engine Marketing Profe...
Feb 13, 2020•54 min
Social Media Sites in 2020 And Facebook Goes To Court. Today on Webcology Jim is joined by Michelle Stinson Ross, Director of Marketing at Apogee Results. Michelle is a recognized authority on the search and social media both within the industry and in the greater business world. Besides being a fairly frequent guest on this show, listeners might have read her columns at Forbes, Search Engine Journal, The SEMPost, and Marketingland. She is a regular speaker at events like the Digital Summit Seri...
Feb 06, 2020•58 min
WordPress 5.4 And Privacy Concerns today on Webcology. Jumpshot, a popular marketing analytics tool, will be shut down by parent company Avast following controversy over the unauthorized sale of user data. Vice reports that the data in question is highly sensitive and was supposed to remain confidential. Documents obtained by Vice reveal how the Avast antivirus program collects data from people who have the software installed on their computers. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/we...
Jan 30, 2020•55 min
Jim Lehrer is one of the last of the great American Journalists, dead at age 85. Founder of what became PBS Newshour. Featured snippets are special boxes where the format of regular listings is reversed, showing the descriptive snippet first. Read more about how Google's Featured Snippets work. Google's John Mueller said on Reddit "A site is not going to outrank your site just because of hidden text." He also added, "Inversely, just having hidden text on a page won't get the site banned from Goo...
Jan 23, 2020•54 min
The Look Of Paid And Organic Search Results And 2020 Core Update. Google is rolling out an updated look for paid and organic search results on desktop, bringing it more in line with the look of mobile search results. The updated design includes a more prominent “Ad” label for paid results, at least in Google’s estimation, as well as favicons next to organic results. Google’s search ads on the desktop now have a bolded “Ad” label in black text. Google says the label is more prominent, but early f...
Jan 16, 2020•57 min
SEO requirements at Google: Master’s degree or PhD in computer science, engineering, statistics, mathematics or a related discipline. On top of that, a Search Analyst for Google must also have multiple years of experience in SEO, project management, coding, and data analysis. Intent Research vs. Keyword Research, Intent and not being a pigeon. John Mueller and Fredric Dubut both mentioned Intent research this week, John in a Webmaster Hangout and Fredric in a January 3rd video at SELand. Microso...
Jan 09, 2020•54 min
Researchers at MIT have found a way to make graphene with fewer wrinkles, and to iron out the wrinkles that do appear. They found each wafer exhibited uniform performance, meaning that electrons flowed freely across each wafer, at similar speeds, even across previously wrinkled regions. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Glenn Gabe noticed that if you try to block Google from showing your news stories in just Google News by blocking Googlebot-News, it no longer works. So if you want...
Dec 19, 2019•56 min
Google has upgraded the built-in tool that shows up in search results for the query “mortgage calculator.” Now, the tool has many of the key features that were missing from the previous version of Google’s mortgage calculator. Commodity content is content that is used across a wide range of sites. For example, content that is pulled by a feed by an affiliate can be seen as commodity content. In the example above, it’s government jobs that are available. There are many solutions for pulling a fee...
Dec 05, 2019•56 min
Google has launched what it calls “Your News Update,” an audio news feed that you access through the Google Assistant. Sources, which Google paid to license, include ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, AP, Politico, USAToday and many others — though apparently not NPR. Google has updated its video structured data help document with new information on some of the latest enhancements to video search results. The updated document has details on how to mark timestamps on YouTube videos, how to monitor performance i...
Nov 21, 2019•55 min
Machine learning and entities have given search engines the capacity to better understand not just what a page is about but what various intents a searcher may have. A site owner rarely can create content to satisfy all possible intents and it's important to have methods or at the very least, develop instincts to assess which intents the engines are going to weight most heavily. This session looks at the principles behind how the engines accomplish this, but more importantly - how site owners an...
Nov 14, 2019•57 min
Dr. Pete, Pete Meyers, from Moz, posted on Twitter "Any algo update that impacts query interpretation or relevance will impact Featured Snippets." This was retweeted by Google's John Mueller, so I guess that is a vote of confidence without passing DA ;-). In all seriousness, we've all seen it, featured snippets are very finicky and change a lot but algorithm updates can cause them as well. Google announced it is now limiting the number of service areas a business can list to no more than 20. Goo...
Nov 07, 2019•58 min
The Google My Business app is testing allowing business owners communicate with its customers not just through text but also through photos. Some business owners can now send photos to customers who message them via Google Maps and Google Local. Google added messaging to the Google My Business app a year ago after launching it in 2017 via SMS. Now according to Jane Manchun Wong, she posted on Twitter that Google has given her the ability to send photos to customers through the messaging componen...
Oct 31, 2019•54 min
Google announced that publishers can now create how-to “actions” for Google Assistant by using structured data. This is an opportunity for publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience on Google Assistant. Yahoo announced that all Yahoo Groups will be shut down on Monday, October 21st, and all Groups content will be removed on December 14th. After October 21st, users will no longer be able to upload new content to groups, but it will still remain on the network. Google Ads is rolling out ...
Oct 17, 2019•53 min
There is some early chatter in the SEO forums, including WebmasterWorld and some on social media. Some of the tools are showing some fluctuations as well today, where some others have not updated yet. Google announced it is changing the user agent name of the current GoogleBot in December. We knew this was coming when Google launched the new Evergreen GoogleBot. Google didn't change the user agent from Chrome 41 to what it was really running to not cause issues for some who hardcoded scripts for...
Oct 07, 2019•54 min
Tomorrow is Google's 21st birthday and Google has already released its very own birthday Doodle to celebrate. The Doodle depicts a desktop computer from 1998 and the old Google home page and old Google logo. Google's John Mueller said that if someone takes your image and embeds it on their site using your image URL as the source, also known as hotlinking images, that image would not be considered a link to your web site. So if you take an image from my site, but don't just copy it to your serve...
Sep 27, 2019•54 min
Google announced an algorithm update intended to rank original news higher. Despite Google’s update, apparently an authority site like Yahoo News can syndicate content and outrank the original. In the past 24 hours or so, we had numerous reports sent to us that searchers are seeing only URLs for the Google search results snippets. The title and description portion of the snippets were missing. LinkedIn is introducing skill assessments which allow users to demonstrate their expertise and add a “v...
Sep 19, 2019•51 min
Google announced a change to the nofollow link attribute yesterday and with that announcement, Googlers spent the next day responding to questions about it on Twitter. I will go through what changed according to the announcement and then cover almost all of the responses from Google (removing duplicates) so you get a full perspective of this change. Nofollow is an HTML attribute that is added to links. It tells Google that a link is not trusted. It was originally designed to combat blog comment...
Sep 12, 2019•56 min
In the latest installment of the #AskGoogleWebmasters video series, John Mueller tackles the topic of how Google chooses canonical URLs. Mueller says its common for websites to have multiple, unique URLs that lead to the same content. For example, there’s WWW and non-WWW versions of a URL. Another common configuration is when the homepage is accessible as index.html, or when upper and lowercase characters in URLs lead to the same pages. Hackers are reportedly exploiting vulnerabilities in over t...
Sep 06, 2019•54 min
Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position. In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate — introduced last year. These indicate the percentage of impressions and impression s...
Aug 15, 2019•55 min
Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position. In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate — introduced last year. These indicate the percentage of impressions and impression s...
Aug 15, 2019•55 min
Google has confirmed that as of earlier this morning it is unable to index new content across the web. There is a bug that Google said is “impacting some sites.” But it is bigger than some sites. From our view, this seems much larger than just “some sites.” Clearly Google is eager to fix any indexing issues, because Google wants to surface the most recent content from publishers. For Google to not show breaking news from the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other popular ...
Aug 08, 2019•57 min
Google has confirmed that as of earlier this morning it is unable to index new content across the web. There is a bug that Google said is “impacting some sites.” But it is bigger than some sites. From our view, this seems much larger than just “some sites.” Clearly Google is eager to fix any indexing issues, because Google wants to surface the most recent content from publishers. For Google to not show breaking news from the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other popular ...
Aug 08, 2019•57 min
Dan Shure posted on his podcast his audio notes from after a private dinner with Gary Illyes of Google from April 4th 2017. Basically, they had a dinner with several SEOs, after the dinner when Dan got into his car, he took audio notes of what he remembered from that dinner. Google announced that in the coming weeks broad match modifier and phrase match keywords will also begin matching to words within the search query that share the same meaning as the keyword. The SEM/PPC community is not surp...
Aug 01, 2019•56 min
Dan Shure posted on his podcast his audio notes from after a private dinner with Gary Illyes of Google from April 4th 2017. Basically, they had a dinner with several SEOs, after the dinner when Dan got into his car, he took audio notes of what he remembered from that dinner. Google announced that in the coming weeks broad match modifier and phrase match keywords will also begin matching to words within the search query that share the same meaning as the keyword. The SEM/PPC community is not surp...
Aug 01, 2019•56 min
Google's John Mueller talked about YMYL, specific to the health space, and mentioned that it is if you are writing about a topic on health that you are not an expert on then you are starting off already on a "shaky foundation." He said it probably makes sense for you to find experts to write or review what you wrote so that the content is "correct and it's trustworthy." He added it is content you want to feel comfortable that your friends can share with other friends. LinkedIn is adding a new fe...
Jul 25, 2019•55 min
Google was in a hearing this week in congress around antitrust issues, so was Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Well, Congressman David N. Cicilline questioned Google on the Google's mission on getting people to go off of the search results page and on to a different site as quickly as possible. He then referenced a study Rand Fishkin published on SparkToro named As the Antitrust Case Against Google Kicks Off, Here’s Where the DOJ Should Start. This study basically shows that Google sends a surprising...
Jul 18, 2019•58 min
Google’s John Mueller recently explained how query relevancy is determined for pages blocked by robots.txt. It has been stated that Google will still index pages that are blocked by robots.txt. But how does Google know what types of queries to rank these pages for? Dejan posted a Twitter poll the other day and it received almost 600 responses from within the SEO community. The question was "Good UX impacts rankings." The responses available were "directly," "indirectly," or "neither." Google's J...
Jul 11, 2019•53 min
Google recently began informing YouTube users that Hangouts is being discontinued in 2019. This affects Google’s Webmaster Hangouts. Google’s John Mueller received notice at the same time as everyone else. Many of the tools available as part of the ‘Google for Small Business’ initiative have been developed based on feedback received from small business owners. The 2019 U.S. Search Awards has officially launched and is accepting entries until July 5. Don’t wait – get your submissions in now! Soon...
Jun 27, 2019•55 min
The data, provided by marketing analytics firm Jumpshot, showed that zero-click searches on Google have steadily risen over the past three years. In the first quarter of 2019, 48.96% of all U.S. Google searches captured by Jumpshot ended without a click, an increase of 12% from the first quarter of 2016. The data also showed that, in the first quarter of 2019, 41.45% of Google searches resulted in organic clicks to non-Google sites and 5.9% of searches ended with the user heading to another Goog...
Jun 20, 2019•54 min
In a Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller answered a question from a web publisher who asked what to do about a suspected negative SEO attack. The web publisher asked if he should wait until he received a manual action from Google. John Mueller then stated that the links were likely normal spam links. Normal spam links happen naturally all the time. This has been the case since as long as I can remember. Guess what - in 2019 - it turns out that links and title tags still matter to doing well...
Jun 13, 2019•55 min
