Webcology On Webmasterradio.fm

[John Mueller from Google said on Twitter that if you are building a new site, then you should most likely go HTTPS from the start. I don't think anyone would argue with that. Switching from HTTP to HTTPS can have its challenges but starting your site off on HTTPS from the onset makes a lot of sense. The folks at RankRanger posted on Twitter that over 70% of the page one Google search results listings are HTTPS. Mozcast has their number of Google's top search results with HTTPS being at 78%, so they are somewhat close but not exact because both tools track different keyword sets. When people were searching for the horrible news in Florida, some noticed that some of the recent articles covering the news were labeled by Google has being written days before the event. Obviously, something that happened hours ago, written potentially minutes ago, should not be labeled in the Google search results as being written 2 or 3 days ago./>

[Today on Webcology Google is sending out new Google Search Console notifications to some webmasters asking them to "provide a manifest and high-resolution favicon for" their websites. I guess Google wants higher resolution favicons to show up in the Chrome browser. Google announced they have a new AdWords policy around ticket resellers. Specifically they now "require all event ticket resellers to be certified and to radically increase their transparency." Also today they announced a new ranking algorithm designed for mobile search. The company is calling it the “Speed Update,” and it will only impact a small percentage of queries, Google reiterated to us. Only pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users” will be impacted by this update, the company says. Most recently, Google has partnered with an open-source content management system (CMS) WordPress, arguably the largest, with market share nearing 59 percent and an estimated 1/3 of all web content published through the platform. />

[​Search ad click growth fell, ad spend rose 23% across Google, Bing, Yahoo as Bing and Yahoo saw search ad spend jump 32 percent over prior year in Q4 among Merkle's client base. Google spend growth slowed slightly from Q3. ​David Szetela, host of PPC Rockstars weighs in. ​Plus, There’s a difference between indexing and ranking, Google gets all Amped UP over words, and Ranking in Google by aligning around search content/>

[Today on Webcology our hosts bring you all the latest in SEO and Google David Harry. Harry is a senior SEO consultant with Verve Developments and the founder of the SEO Training Dojo. HuffPost has decided to shut down their entire contributor's platform, which was launched in May 2005. The platform was home to about 100,000 contributors, who covered everything from finance to relationships. In its place, HuffPost has decided to replace the contributor content with two new sections: Opinion and Personal, which are pretty self-explanatory. The New York Times reports that the contributor platform was only about 10 to 15 percent of its site traffic, so HuffPost isn’t losing a significant amount of traffic from the change. Digital agency ROAST has released a Voice Search Ranking Report which seeks to categorize and understand how Google processes and response to voice queries. It also tries to determine when Google Home uses featured snippets/Answer Box results and when it does not.The company used keyword analyt

[Facebook moves to ‘fix’ the News Feed by de-emphasizing commercial content. The company said it's trying to prevent posts from 'businesses, brands and media' from crowding out 'the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.Now, with Facebook changing its news feed to emphasize posts from friends and family, rather than those from media and brands, publishers face a new challenge to the world to which they most recently adapted. Facebook's changing algorithms will force publishers to adjust how they manage their online spaces. It likely will end – or at least reduce the effectiveness of – the common tactic of throwing every article up on the publisher's Facebook wall to see what sticks. Publishers will now have to put up content that produces conversation without using gimmicks to inflate clicks and comments. Google announced yesterday a new ranking algorithm designed specifically to downgrade the search rankings of really slow mobile pages. Google said "starting in July 2018, page speed w

[The new Google Search Console is rolling out over the next few weeks to all webmasters and you will be able to access the new Google Search Console and the old one via links in the navigation. So you can play with both side by side, as Google keeps adding more and more features in the new version. Google's John Mueller said in a video hangout that the URLs Google finds in your XML sitemap files are often used to define your canonical URLs. Then they go over a list of experts sharing the best single piece of advice they've gotten when using SEO./>

[Today on Webcology we ring in the new year with a whole new set of great breakthroughs. First the surprising thing Google learned about its employees, and what it means for today’s students. It turns out that is a gross simplification of what students need to know and be able to do, and some proof for that comes from a surprising source, Google. Also Google confirms mid-December search ranking algorithm updates. Google has confirmed what many in the search industry have seen over the past week, updates to their algorithm that are significantly shifting rankings in the SERPs. As the updates continue to roll out, early indications suggest disruptions in mobile SERPs, sites with no schema data & those relying on doorway pages being most impacted./>

[Jim Hedger and Dave Davies are joined Jennifer Van Iderstyne, Gretchen Shelby-Dormer Jeremy Knauff and Patrick Stox for a SEO 2017 End of Year Roundtable. Google algorithm changes and search results, AI and voice search, mobile and machine learning and more. />

[​U.S. regulators ditch net neutrality rules as legal battles loom​, plus Google isn't just good for finding cat videos on the internet. The search giant's machine learning technology​ is also helping search the universe for planets outside our solar system. ​Plus breaking news on how Google Search Console beta adds 12+ months of data​ to performance reports​. />

[​Net Neutrality Protests​ in front of Verizon stores; Feud between Amazon and Google has Google cut YouTube stream to Amazon products. If you’re in Zurich​, John Meuller is thinking of doing another live hangout from Google’s Zurich offices. Contact him on Twitter @JohnMu to inquire. Blog for Bribes​ could get you penalized Roughly three years ago, Yahoo and Mozilla announced that Yahoo would be the default search engine on Firefox in the US. That relationship ended early when Mozilla released the much-improved Firefox Quantum browser last month, with Google as the default search provider. So Verizon is suing Mozilla​ for dropping Yahoo as the default search engine but Mozilla is counter-suing suggesting Yahoo didn’t keep up search quality after its sale to Verizon. />

[Today on Webcology our hosts Jim Hedger and Dave Davies go through all of your weekly headlines. Google Expands Phone Call Organic Links In Search Results. Back in March 2016, it was reported that Google was showing phone number extensions in the organic search results snippets. Well, that seems to now be expanding beyond the US and into other regions. Twitter is testing a 280 character limit while suggesting that letting people say more will get them to tweet more. However, Twitter has every intention to roll it out to everyone if the test proves to be successful. So here’s what you need to know. The small nice-ish story Twitter had going for itself for the past few quarters was that, at the very least, its monthly active users were growing quarter-over-quarter. Also, Hugh Hefner's swinging Los Angeles party pad will be forever remembered as the Playboy Mansion, where the adult entertainment mogul worked and played for more than 45 years. But the fate of the hedonistic haven following the 91-year-old Playbo

[Jim Hedger and Dave Davies motor through a litany of topics from Googles new features to Politics. , Google said they will not be moving sites to the mobile first index that are not ready for the mobile first index. Not yet at least. Google has once again been called out for algorithmically encouraging the spread of dubious, politically charged speculation and misinformation around a topical news event. In the latest instance of the algorithmic amplification of misinformation, the news event in question is a shooting in a Texas church on Sunday. Authorities have identified 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley as the perpetrator.Also, Sen. Al Franken delivered some of the sharpest criticism yet about the dangers of tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon during a speech on Wednesday, encouraging regulators, as well as lawmakers in both parties, to better police the market power of dominant online platforms./>

[Today on Webcology we go through a massive amount content from the internet world. Google’s focus on local search the past couple of years has some expecting local search traffic to play a heightened role for brick-and-mortar retailers this coming holiday. Google is now teeing up some new shopping features and reporting capabilities ahead of the holiday shopping season. We ask the questions Do Google Posts impact ranking? A case study Columnist Joy Hawkins shares the results of a case study to see whether Google Posts can move the needle for local search rankings. Also another Google local test, this one shows a single search result towards the bottom of the Google local knowledge card. So right above the new questions & answers box, you may see "search result" for the local knowledge card./>

[Dave Davies returns from the MERGE Conference 2017 in Orlando and welcomes aboard alongside co-host Jim Hedger: Mary Davies (President of Beanstalk Internet Marketing, Inc.) who spoke on a panel about how to get traffic from Facebook, why you should boost posts, and how to properly manage Facebook campaigns. Michelle Stinson-Ross (Gruen Digital Marketing Agency, VP of Marketing & Sales)who spoke​about integrating social media into your online marketing campaigns to get more traffic and sales. Dave spoke about responsive web design, AMP, and how to rank in search on mobile devices. />

[Lurie has recently posted a presentation entitled Burying Hate Speech in the SERPS, where he explains,"Google tries to handle hate sites, but they can't. Racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic, and other content find their way into the rankings every day. Lurie talks about two strategies I've used to push those sites down the rankings. Gord Downie, the lead singer for the beloved Canadian alt-rock band the Tragically Hip, died Tuesday at the age of 53. The cause was terminal brain cancer. Downie was diagnosed with brain cancer in December 2015, but didn't reveal his disease publicly until May 2016. />

[Today on Webcology we start off with a Google Search Algorithm & Ranking Update. We had a Google algorithm update over the weekend, starting probably late Friday, October 6th and rolling out over the weekend. Most took notice on Saturday, October 7th but the chatter is still fairly strong and will likely remain strong for a net couple of days. It turns out Google Mobile Ranking updated. A lot of folks are not just continuing with their chatter on the Google Columbus update but also now we are seeing specific ranking changes in Google mobile results. It is hard to tell if the chatter is specific to mobile or desktop or both. But when you look at the tracking tools, a lot of them are showing huge swings specific to the mobile Google search results. Also, Google Suggests They Use Off-Site Sentiment Analysis For Ranking as well. Gary Illyes from Google was quoted by several SEOs as saying at the State of Search event that Google uses a form of sentiment analysis for search rankings. He said that Google looks at

[Today on Webcology we talk about everything need to know up and coming in internet toys. Plus we touch a very cool way a band used facebook live delay. Google's John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a hangout at the 15:38 mark that Google is indeed testing the mobile first index in the live search results. With this test, Google is not only looking to see how much it impacts the searchers and current rankings but they are also building new classifiers for debugging purposes. Have a session idea for SMX West? They would love to hear from you, especially if your idea is about e-commerce marketing. SMX wants your input to help them plan the upcoming SMX West conference, which will be taking place on March 13-15, 2018. Specifically, if you have a great idea for a session that you think should be on the agenda. This is almost too amazing! Using the delayed audio and video from a Facebook Live, the band managed to create a loop version of their song "Bear Claws." It's a little easier to understand if you actually se

[Today on Webcology the guys get into a bunch of different topics to keep you in the know. They speak about Google expanding phone call organic links in search results, Google was showing phone number extensions in the organic search results snippets. Well, that seems to now be expanding beyond the US and into other regions. Is Twitter on the decline? The rest of Twitter’s business looked more or less fine, but it seems that Wall Street was still relying on Twitter to continue that even small user growth. Its revenue is still falling, coming down to $574 million as its advertising business continues to decline. Then Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem too happy that President Donald Trump bashed his company in a tweet Wednesday morning. />

[Today on Webcology the guys talk about the Equifax leak, Google Brain, and changing your HTML to affect your search rankings. Sometimes you see the most obvious questions posted to Googlers and you think, hmm, I wonder how many others don't think this is obvious. In any event, when you change your content and HTML on a page, it can and often does, impact your rankings for better or worse. HTML changes without content changes can also do the same but it depends what exactly you change on the page. It was not 100% clear if he was talking about just training the models or if it directly impacts the live search results. It might just be used for building new models later based on the feedback they get back from these models. Google has time and time again said that they do not use click data for ranking purposes because it is too easy to spam and too noisy. Equifax has been intensely investigating the scope of the intrusion with the assistance of a leading, independent cybersecurity firm to determine what inform

[Today on Webcology the guys talk about everything from Google to mobile web development. Ever wonder what the number one, most important, search ranking factor is in Google's algorithms? Is it links? Is it content? Is it a special hidden meta tag? Nope, it is none of that. It is awesomeness.Yep, that is what John Mueller of Google said, the number one, most important ranking factor Google uses to rank search results is awesomeness. Google is offering a mobile web developer certification. for the low-low price of just 99 dollars! If you need the self-assurance of Google to vouching for you as a competent mobile web developer, this is for you. You can pay the $99 fee to take an exam and get patted on the back with an electronic badge. Once you receive the electronic badge you can add it to your resume, display it on your website, or add it to your online profiles./>