Webcology

Most SEOs consider Google Search Console (GSC) their source of truth and trust the data to be accurate. What if I told you that GSC doesn’t tell you all of the keywords you’re getting traffic from? In fact, the tool doesn’t show a term for nearly half the clicks.

These instances of hidden terms account for 46.08% of all clicks in our study. The study includes one month of data across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 billion total clicks.

Google Updates Help Docs in wake of Stox’s Study.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-anonymizes-tons-of-queries-33735.html

GA4 supports Urchin Tracking Parameters (UTM) UTM Term, UTM Content, Conversion and Bounce Rate metrics 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-4-gains-utm-term-utm-content-conversion-bounce-rate-33744.html

Google My Business App has ceased functioning

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-app-no-longer-available-33743.html

Google Maps App suggested as way to be able to message customer

There is no such thing as a ratio of nofollow to follow links in Google Rankings. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ratio-of-follow-to-nofollow-links-33711.html

Is the type of CMS used to build a site a ranking factor?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/does-the-cms-matter-for-search-rankings/457580/

Massive set of updates and bug fixes released with WordPress 6.0.1

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-6-0-1-maintenance-update-released-with-multiple-bug-fixes/457471/#close

Google Data Studio and how to use it

https://searchengineland.com/google-data-studio-258871

If you are interested in sponsoring Webcology please email [email protected]

John Mueller Says Search Result pages are relatively similar to no to low effort category pages. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-query-pages-equivalent-to-low-effort-category-pages-33699.html

FCC does not have the authority to force Apple or Google to remove TikTok from their stores however the US government continues to warn against it after US data was accessed by ByteDance Engineers from within China. FCC can fine TikTok and even force reforms on the company as reported in Axios earlier today

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/07/congress-tiktok-china-privacy-data

Google Search Console Insights now supports GA4 (only) 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-insights-google-analytics-4-33706.html

From the what could go wrong file, Google testing Highly Rated By Users in Mobile Carousels. Google is testing a new carousel in the mobile search results named "Highly rated by users." This will show product results that have, um, high ratings from user reviews.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-highly-rated-by-users-carousel-33700.html

Google Merchant Center adds autotagging for all free listings on Google. When auto-tagging is enabled, after someone clicks your free product listing and free local product listing, auto-tagging adds some additional information including a parameter called "result id" to the URL parameters that searchers click on.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-merchant-center-auto-tagging-all-33709.html

Several years of Mobile First. What’s changed?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-mobile-first-index-guide/437472/

Google clarifies 15MB is really big

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-clarifies-15mb-googlebot-limit-33670.html

8 Tips on Ecommerce from Googler, Alan Kent

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-offers-8-tips-on-e-commerce-seo-33676.html

FCC Commissioner asks Google and Apple to ban TikTok from their respective stores

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/fcc-requests-tiktok-ban/456297/

Google Freshness Update explained by Roger

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/freshness-algorithm/

Google Updates structured data advice for products with multiple variants

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/freshness-algorithm/

Google rich results guidelines update now prohibits guns, 

https://searchengineland.com/google-rich-results-guidelines-now-prohibits-weapons-recreational-drugs-tobacco-vaping-products-and-gambling-related-products-386185

Greg’s Guide to Social Media Algorithms

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-algorithms/453220/

Roger Montti on LaMDA

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-lamda-sentient/454820/

Google updates its notes on HTTP status codes

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-http-status-codes-googlebot-job-posting-docs-33638.html

Google: Hypens over underscores in URLs

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-underscores-hyhens-in-urls-seo-33631.html

Content that’s not visible isn’t as critically bad as it once was says Gary surprising Martin

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-not-visible-content-33630.html

Office Hours Cut to one per Month

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-seo-office-hours-now-down-to-once-per-month-33621.html

Google Researcher Punished Saying " Google’s Artificial Intelligence Had Achieved Sentience" as Google placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system. Is AI sentient?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine

Google Business Profile – Profile Strength Widget produces a box showing a representation of your profile’s health, along with prompts for creating offers, reviews, and new content or updates.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-business-profile-strength-widget-33596.html

Google Search Console Changes

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-invalid-or-valid-classifications-33594.html

Why Google Analytics and Google Search Console data differ

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-analytics-gsc-data-mismatch/438508/ 

Complete Guide to GSC

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/guide-google-search-console/452534/

Google experimenting with more featured snippets in SERPs

https://searchengineland.com/google-testing-new-featured-snippet-layouts-385861

Internet Explorer’s dead

Compare feature in GSC performance reports

https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-testing-compare-feature-in-performance-reports-385855 

Google Core Update finished rolling out

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2022-core-update-done-rolling-out-33562.html

EU Publishers and Webmasters can’t block US traffic without also blocking Google and Googlebot 

https://www.seroundtable.com/eu-publishers-block-us-users-google-33557.html

Don’t add your company name to image alt-text. It’s redundant, undescriptive, and not helpful

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-company-name-in-blank-image-alt-text-33538.html

Yoast and IndexNow “They changed how it worked a bit (or explained it better) where we only have to ping one endpoint. With that, we basically replace the xml sitemap ping with a call to IndexNow and it’s done.””

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yoast-on-why-its-adopting-indexnow-protocol/453516/

Reports say Apple is likely to announce a new user-centric web search. However, for the search engine to become functional, Apple wants to wait till January 2023 to do so.

Apple published a list of things that might affect rankings back in 2020

• Aggregated user engagement with search results

• Relevancy and matching of search terms to webpage topics and content

• Number and quality of links from other pages on the web

• User location based signals (approximate data)

• Webpage design characteristics

https://www.seroundtable.com/apple-search-ranking-factors-29821.html

John Giannandrea – was head of search at Google, left for Apple in March 2018 to lead Apple machine learning and AI division. https://www.seroundtable.com/john-giannandrea-from-google-heads-to-apple-25517.html

Core Updates use data from before the update starts. They might update data between Core Update events. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-core-update-data-refresh-33509.html

This Core Update... https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2022-broad-core-update-seo-impact-33512.html

New Google author markup for article structured data

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-author-markup-best-practices-33530.html

"To help Google best understand and represent the author of the content, we recommend following these best practices when specifying authors in markup."

• Include all authors in the markup

• Specify multiple authors when applicable

• Use the additional fields that is available to you

• Only specify the author’s name in the author.name property

• Use the appropriate author type

Wix Structured Data guide

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wix-structured-data/451282/

Jim and Kristine comment on the sudden passing of the great Bill Slawski, the Dean of SEO

https://www.seroundtable.com/rip-bill-slawski-33446.html

May 2022 Broad Core Update 

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/05/may-2022-core-update

More FAQs being promoted in Rich Results?

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-showing-more-search-results-with-faq-rich-results-33479.html

Don’t get hung up on Toxic Links

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-on-toxic-links-tool-marketing-33435.html

Suing for Social Media addiction, California law allows parents

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/california-bill-allows-parents-to-sue-for-childs-social-media-addiction/451807/

WordPress 6.0 “Arturo”

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-6-0-is-released/451366/

Meta changes how it does political ads, or does it?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/meta-brings-transparency-to-electoral-political-ads/451616/

Google Russia declares bankruptcy after Russian authorities seize bank account.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/googles-russia-subsidiary-is-filing-for-bankruptcy/

Canada forces Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for loss of ad revenue – Search Engine Journal and the misuse of the word tax.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-criticizes-canadas-proposed-link-tax/450878/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-google-warns-ottawas-online-news-act-would-break-its-search-engine/

-Online News Act, Bill C18 

“to compel global tech companies such as Facebook and Google to negotiate payment agreements with news organizations as compensation for news content that appears on the large platforms.” Modeled on successful Australian legislation 

“There is no link tax. Canadians are not paying for anything, and no money goes to the government. Facebook and Google earn money from having links to news sites on their platforms because the work of independent journalists has value,” Ashley Michnowski, spokesperson for Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said. “We have had constructive conversations with Google, yet they’re pulling from their original playbook in Australia when Google tried to avoid regulation by exaggerating their concerns.”

Facebook’s Most Followed Content is mostly Spam – Facebook transparency Report

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebooks-most-widely-viewed-links-dominated-by-spam/450826/

Top 101 SEO Tools that are free – Jon Clark, Search Engine Journal

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-seo-tools-free/435299/

John Mu – Spam is Spam, no matter what language you speak

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-see-search-spam-in-multiple-languages-33438.html

Interaction to Next Paint might become a core web vital

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-core-web-vitals-fid-with-inp-33429.html

Google Says Ignore Bad SEO advice and Removes Bad SEO Advice.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-drops-word-count-keyword-density-slide-33399.html

All Search related stuff from Google I/O

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-i-o-2022-search-related-announcements-33403.html

Use it or Lose it – Google Search Console will stop gathering data if you stop looking at it

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-stop-collecting-data-33402.html

PageSpeed Insights Adds new Lighthouse Speed metrics

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-lighthouse-page-speed-metrics/449842/

Google Updates Advice on Controlling Titles in Search

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-shows-how-to-control-titles-in-search-results/449866/