Three years ago Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, advised developers to "learn JavaScript deeply", and it's proven be to solid advice. Now Google is suggesting the same thing if you want to stay on top of the search engines.

See full show notes at: https://www.mickmel.com/podcast030/

There's been some thought that since Google knows a good bit about real-life user activity, such as when stores are busy, they might use that data to affect search rankings. At least for now, that doesn't seem to be the case.

See full show notes at: https://www.mickmel.com/podcast029/

Google has been making a lot of algorithm changes lately, but they seem to be (and should be) unrelated to the mobile-first indexing.

People working on their SEO often want to know exactly how best to build their pages; how many words, how many outgoing links, how many backlinks, things like that. Google's given us the answer -- stop counting that stuff.

Links pointing to your website are one of the biggest factors to help rank well in Google, but they're one of the most difficult and confusing to understand. Google tried to help explain more, but it's still pretty messy.

Google pushed out a pretty big update on August 1, but then on September 27 they took it a bit further.

If you dig around your website stats and see that some pages get very low traffic, that could be an indication that the page is low quality -- but not always.

Over the past few months, Google has been applying neural matching to help better understand synonyms, impacting 30% of search queries (or over a billion searches per day).

Google has recently updated the look and feel of Google Image Search, but they've also made some substantial changes behind the scenes.

Many websites in the US have been lazy about how they have handled the GDPR changes, and that's causing some trouble for Google.