Webcology On Webmasterradio.fm

[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 share your ads received in the absolute top (the first ad at the very top of the page) and top of page (above the organic results) ad slots. It’s been proven that consumers are more likely to engage with your brand if you’re offering them excellent content. But every day, writers are overwhelming the web with more and more content; the “rules” of digital marketing are constantly changing…as are the qualities that define what an “excellent” piece of content looks like. />

[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 magazines is something Google probably isn’t too happy about. What it looks like. If you try to search for content from a popular news site and then filter to only show content within the past hour, you won’t currently be given any new real content from that site. Google announced another round of updates to how close variants will work. Queries with the same meaning could already trigger ads for exact match keywords as of September 2018. But now, close variants with the same meaning may also affect phrase and broad m

[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 surprised but still very frustrated by this news. It is Google Ads (formerly AdWords) expanding the keywords you want to match on for your ads to even more types of keyword phrases. That ultimately can lead to your ad showing more often but also it can lead to your ad showing for queries that you do not want your ads to show for. This has been the trend Google Ads has been going with since 2014 and has been a huge frustration point for the SEM industry. Google has published official guidance on Core Updates that goes beyo

[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 feature to user profiles allowing people to list the professional services they offer to clients. This creates an opportunity for users to market their services outside of their business page and possibly connect with new prospects. The new services section in LinkedIn profiles will also be a helpful way for people to communicate exactly what it is they do for work. Just think – how many times have you had to explain to someone what an SEO does? Now you can clearly list the services you perform in your profile. Over the

[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 surprisingly low percentage of clicks out of its search results pages to non-Google properties. Is Google in some way biased against conservative sites – especially in news? Some people believe this. This controversy has been growing over the last couple of years or so. This claim of bias started with the president but has even made it all the way to Congress. Today, Google will appear before Congress (again) and answer questions about these accusations of conservative censorship. The other day we reported that the Google My Bu

[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 John Mueller said it is best to be consistent with your URL structure and either choose to use slashes after the URL or not to use slashes after the URL. Try not to use both formats if possible. He posted this on Twitter when asked about slashes after URLs "The best solution is to be consistent and only use one version of a URL. Link to that version, redirect to it, use it in sitemaps, use it for rel-canonical, etc." Some searchers in India are noticing that when you enter a query into Google that has no matches and Go

[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 after, judges will begin the process of deciding which agencies, brands, and individuals will be shortlisted for the 2019 awards ceremony, happening Wednesday, October 9 at the SLS Las Vegas Hotel & Casino during Pubcon Las Vegas, the premier social media and search optimization conference./>

[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 Google-owned web site. When looking at just the searches that resulted in a click, 12% went to Google-owned sites. There are a few definitions for universal search on the web, but I prefer hearing it from the horse’s mouth on things like this. While Google hasn’t given a strict definition that I know of as to what universal search is from an SEO standpoint, they have used the following definition in their Search Appliance documentation. Google has released a statement on how it will handle song lyrics in search results fo

[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 in Google's search results. We had John Mueller from Google said links matter for PageRank and thus building trust. Gary Illyes from Google say that HTML title tags also matter for SEO. />

[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 their lives to our industry. Now, I actually support the use of date-month-year naming for core updates. In the long run its the best way to track their implementation and effect. That said, each should have informal names crafted by the community that obsesses over them most because they're puzzles with solutions that belong to those who solve them or make use of the solutions./>

[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 second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, also refused to attend. As a result, the Canadian government issued an open-ended summons that requires both Zuckerberg and Sandberg to appear before Parliament should they enter Canada for any reason. If they fail to do so, they could be held in contempt. The Trust Project, a technology-backed news initiative made up of dozens of global news companies, announced Thursday that it raised an additional $2.25 million from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook and the Democracy Fund. There

[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 announced tons of new ad features yesterday - two of the more controversial ones within the SEO community are the discover ads that show up on the Google mobile home page and the gallery ads that make some of the search ads on the search results page massively. This week, WhatsApp began urging its 1.5 billion or so users to update their apps to get the latest security patch. The Facebook-owned company — which touts its "simple, secure" messaging — said it discovered spyware had been installed remotely on "dozens" of smar

[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 but didn't launch FAQ and How-to structured data until a year later at this years 2019 Google I/O event. It comes with new rich results and new Google Search Console enhancement reports. At Google I/O they demonstrated a new report within Google Search Console named the Speed Report. It is currently in beta or experimental mode but they showed some screen shots of it in action./>

[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 phenomenon has been dubbed “no-click” search results and is a worrying trend for many publishers. Google tweeted Thursday that it may have selected unrelated canonical URLs for some pages and that breadcrumb trails on mobile might show the unrelated URLs. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a keynote presentation at the F8 Conference where he revealed that Facebook-owned WhatsApp is moving toward hosting web shops where customers can browse a store’s products and make purchases. This may represent a way to move

[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 comments. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that the nofollow link attribute has been and still is working fairly well. He added hasn't "seen many cases of sites causing themselves significant issues, or of pages not getting credit in quite some time."/>

[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 more advanced but Google won't say when. Martin Splitt from Google, who is close to the project on making this happen, said at SMX Munich the other day that he knows when it is scheduled to happen but he won't say. Google has posted a warning in the Google Search Console data anomalies page that you can expect those reports to see an increase in the number of issues and affected items and/or pages starting on April 3, 2019. The reason is Google has started to collect data from more pages than it previously did./>

[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. Google Maps is letting users create public events associated with specific locations–a feature that could compete with Facebook events. This feature hasn’t been officially announced, although it has been confirmed in the sense that there’s a dedicated help center article. People have also reported seeing it in search results already. Events can be added to a Google Maps listing from the Contribute tab in the Android app.There are a number of competing theories about what the March 2019 Update was about. This article evalu

[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 used to be that Google’s algorithm tried its best to give users the answers they were searching for. However, today, things aren’t that simple. With concepts like user intent and the buyer’s journey becoming increasingly important, Google has revamped its algorithm in order to better understand what users are actually searching for when they type in a phrase or question.Google has stopped supporting the rel=next/prev markup it launched back in 2011. The interesting part is, Google has not supported it for the past few ye

[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 anything specific to fix your rankings. Google’s previous advice is, “there’s no ‘fix’ for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.” An article was highlighted yesterday but some folks in the search community implied that after a rater visits your site your rankings can immediately improve or drop down - that is not true./>

[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 automated way to aggregate your whole site's data into one Google Search Console view. Google announced it has launched “domain properties,” a feature that lets you see data from a whole domain in one view within Google Search Console. This can consolidate your http, https, www, non-www, m-dot, etc into a single property to get an aggregate view of your site’s performance and errors/warnings in a single Google Search Console property./>