Webcology

The Right to Remove Personal Identifiable information from Google

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-remove-pii-33326.html

Google, “we’re not stealing your content, you’re stealing ours!”

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-stealing-knowledge-panel-content-33328.html

New editor-in-chief at Search Engine Journal, Amanda Zantal-Wiener former Deputy Editor and Content Manager at HubSpot 

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/sej-eic-amanda-zantal-wiener/447271/

Using AI, false DMCA notices, and fake lawyers to generate or coerce backlinks

https://www.seroundtable.com/fake-dmca-ai-generated-lawyers-links-33308.html

EU amendments to the Digital Services Act calls for Google to show key parts of algorithm and to perhaps allow users to influence the information they see 

https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/proposal_for_a_regulation_on_a_single_market_for_digital_services.pdf

Google updates 3-strike policy for advertisers adds nine new areas of concern

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-ads-implements-3-strike-policy-rule/447780/

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-strike-based-system-9-more-33306.html

Google notes financial impact of Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine. 

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-feels-earnings-impact-from-russian-war-on-ukraine/447684/ 

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New Google tool allows you to import goals from Universal Analytics (UA3) to GA4

https://www.seroundtable.com/universal-analytics-goals-import-google-analytics-33268.html

Don’t tell them it’s broken Roger, tell them the issue is Statically Evolving. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-real-time-reporting-bugs-33291.html

Tweak New Twitter

Home > Extentions > Tweak New Twitter

Google AI creating Google sourced Knowledge Panels

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-writing-its-own-knowledge-panels-33290.html

lose-work-without-warning/

 

Don’t switch horses in mid stream. Don’t change tires while driving. Don’t try to test new URLs on live sites just because. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-change-urls-and-change-them-back-seo-33237.html

Ahrefs has raised 1.5Million for Ukraine

https://searchengineland.com/ahrefs-ukraine-fundraising-383731

Guttenberg 13.0 showing features coming in WP6

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-gutenberg-13/446758/

Best times and worst times to post to social media

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/best-times-to-post-on-social-media-in-2022/446255/

 

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March 2022 Google Product Update has completed its rollout

https://www.seroundtable.com/march-2022-google-product-reviews-update-live-33235.html

Multiple Campaigns + multiple accounts support comes to Google Ads

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-aggregate-reporting-on-manager-level-33253.html

No Technical method for achieving a featured snippet beyond great content

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-featured-snippets-gaining-33249.html

You can’t just write, “I tested this product” and expect a bump from the new Product Update

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-tested-product-reviews-update-33255.html

You need good, original review content.

Google stipulates Ai written content is against guidelines when used to manipulate Google

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-automatically-generated-content-against-guidelines-when-intended-to-manipulate-search-rankings-33243.html

Latency issue in UA3 and GA4 is fixed, again, says Google

https://searchengineland.com/google-claims-to-fix-google-analytics-latency-issues-383524

 

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Today we'll discuss a bubble chart that can help you understand which queries are performing well for your site, and which could be improved.

Data Studio Visualizations

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/04/performance-optimization-bubble-chart  

AI Content against Google Guidelines

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-ai-generated-content-is-against-guidelines/444916/

Wayback Machine archiving Ukrainian Internet

https://spectrum.ieee.org/internet-archive-ukraine

Conference Organizer, Vasil Azarov died earlier this week at age 40. Details of his death are unavailable at this time. Vasil organized the Brand Growth, B2B Growth, and the Growth Marketing Conference. He was also a community advocate and fundraiser.

Google My Business App is being discontinued

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-app-going-away-33198.html

Facebook WiFi

https://www.facebook.com/facebook-wifi/getting-started

Zuck Bucks – like Whoopie Goldberg’s Flooz but backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/04/07/1528241/meta-is-making-zuck-bucks

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/6/23013896/meta-facebook-zuck-bucks-finance-financial-services-products

Elon’s Twitter

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/elon-musk-twitter-impact/444860/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/twitter-shares-soar-more-than-25percent-after-elon-musk-takes-9percent-stake-in-social-media-company.html

Google doesn’t care who produces content as long as it’s good quality content

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-seo-outsource-content-33205.html

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Google is rolling out a new label is search results for pages that are recognized as highly cited sources. Plus, Google Analytics 4 is Examined and Jim and Dave discuss this and more with Canadian SEO, Speaker, and Analytics Wrangler Alan K’necht.

Google on support for Ukraine

https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/warsaw-announcing-more-support-ukraine/

TikTok testing search ads

https://searchengineland.com/tiktok-tests-search-ads-383234

 

Product Reviews Update causing flux

https://www.seroundtable.com/volatility-march-2022-google-product-reviews-update-33177.html

Nofollow links are not followed, period

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-nofollow-dampening-factor-33169.html

Google Now Using MUM For Detecting Personal Crisis Searches & BERT For Detecting Shocking Content

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mum-bert-crisis-shock-33176.html

MUM – multitask unified model

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-multitask-unified-model-mum-31441.html

BERT - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bert-update-28427.html

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Jim and Dave speak with Ted Harrington who argues that companies need to take a similar approach to secure their systems. He explains how important it is to think outside the box and be willing to push boundaries in potentially troublesome ways, whether the subject is application security or something else entirely.

Ted Harrington is the author of HACKABLE: How to Do Application Security Right, and the Executive Partner at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), the company of ethical hackers famous for being the first to hack the iPhone. He’s overseen security research hacking medical devices, password managers, and cryptocurrency wallets. Ted has helped hundreds of companies fix tens of thousands of security vulnerabilities, including Disney, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Adobe, Warner Brothers, Qualcomm, and more. For his stewardship of security research that Wired Magazine says “wins the prize, hands down,” Ted has been named both Executive of the Year [by American Business Awards] and 40 Under 40 [by SD Metro].  

He leads a team that started and organizes IoT Village, an event whose hacking contest is a three-time DEFCON Black Badge winner, and which represents the discovery of more than 300 zero-day vulnerabilities (and counting). Ted‘s work has been featured in more than 100 media outlets, including The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today. Ted is a Boston Marathon finisher, and holds a Bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, where he started his first company while a student.

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Beware the Ides of March! Google announces end to Universal Analytics . 

“Universal Analytics was built for a generation of online measurement that was anchored in the desktop web, independent sessions and more easily observable data from cookies,” Russell Ketchum, director, product management at Google, said in the announcement. “This measurement methodology is quickly becoming obsolete.”

https://searchengineland.com/google-deprecate-universal-analytics-on-july-1-2023-382648

Google explained the timeline as follows:

• Until July 1, 2023, you can continue to use and collect new data in your Universal Analytics properties.

• After July 1, 2023, you'll be able to access your previously processed data in your Universal Analytics property for at least six months. We know your data is important to you, and we strongly encourage you to export your historical reports during this time.

• In the coming months, we'll provide a future date for when existing Universal Analytics properties will no longer be available. After this future date, you'll no longer be able to see your Universal Analytics reports in the Analytics interface or access your Universal Analytics data via the API.

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Jim and Dave discuss how John Mueller of Google responded to a complaint on Reddit where the SEO or site owner was upset his one month old site was not performing on Google Search. The SEO said despite him "created backlinks on top websites with good DA and low spam score" his site is just not showing up.

SERoundtable shared the back and forth.

Here was his post, "I have created backlinks on top websites with good DA and low spam score but its been 1 month and still I'm unable to see my backlinks getting index on google search. I cant even find them on Semrush. Is there any solution or I have to wait more?"

John Mueller's response was like a teacher giving a harsh one-on-one to a kid who caused trouble in class. John replies:

(1) You are wasting your time:

I'm torn about leaving a snarky reply, but to be a bit more useful, I'd consider that perhaps you're not spending your time on things that are as effective for SEO as you'd like. Dropping links on random sites is not SEO anymore, it's just spam. All search engines have had to deal & ignore these kinds of things for years now.

(2) You are focused too much on the tools:

This is not to mention that a SEO tool will never be able to tell you if a "link is indexed". Everyone who crawls the web does it in a different way, with different speeds, with different assumptions. Even if you can see a link in the Google cache, that says absolutely nothing about whether that link is used for anything in search.

(3) Throw your strategy away and focus on long term, real effort strategies:

If you're trying to improve on SEO, my strong recommendation would be to throw all of this thinking out. You're wasting your own time on it now, and even if something accidentally happens to stick for a bit, it will quickly dry up - search engines have a lot of practice with low-effort, low-quality stuff, and they have no interest in spending any energy on it if they can.

So the response from the SEO was that he has "no technical issues" on his site and the "content is of good quality and unique" but he is super upset about his backlinks (which makes no sense but okay). He then goes to list that he has "dofollow links" from sites like HotFrog, Yelp, Foursquare, Chamber of Commerce. He then demands that his "backlinks cant be ignored."

So John Mueller replies again in a harsher but caring way:

I don't know your site (and don't really have time to dig into anything at the moment), but to be quite honest, all of what you've said there raises red flags for me in terms of low-effort / low-quality sites. Maybe it's ok enough to scrape by at some point, but at that level, you're going to see things come & go randomly, as updates happen across search engines.Maybe you don't care about long-term success, maybe getting some quick traffic & leaving is fine for you - that's ultimately up to you and everyone has done quick hacks in the past too. If you do care about long-term success in search with this site, or want to learn how to work on legitimate long-term sites, I'd recommend, well, not spending too much time on trying to hack together links like this.

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This week we have another special guest, Olesia Korobka, a SEO consultant based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Olesia is compiling a list of SEOs in Ukraine who need work or stability.

Google Search Central Virtual Unconference Returns at the end of the month – Martin Splitt tweeted with a “stay tuned” notice

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-central-virtual-unconference-back-for-2022-33018.html

No such thing as quotas for the number of rankings a website can achieve https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ranking-quotas-33014.html

Index Now added to Duda, All in One WordPress, and Rank Math SEO Plugins https://www.seroundtable.com/indexnow-duda-all-in-one-wordpress-rank-math-seo-plugins-33001.html

Yoast suggests IndexNow a lot more When than Now – Doesn’t improve crawl efficiency or lead to more traffic

https://www.seroundtable.com/yoast-indexnow-proof-33013.html

GSC URL Inspection Tool Errors

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-url-inspection-tool-errors-33010.html

They shalt not blocketh Americans https://www.seroundtable.com/blocking-usa-users-googlebot-33005.html

If you are not allowed to show your website to users based in the United States, then you also cannot show that website to Googlebot.

CSS colours are not ranking factors. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/css-colors-are-not-a-google-ranking-factor-32968.html

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Today's episode was recorded the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Jim and Dave speak with two SEO industry members living and working in Kiev, Igor Shulezhko and Anton Shulke.

Igor Shulezhko is a Russian speaking Ukranian living in Kiev. He is a brand ambassador for Serpstat, a cofounder of rankUP, and co-owner of Shmeo.link/. He has a friend translating for him.

Anton Shulke is head of Influencer Marketing at Duda, the highly SEO friendly CMS platform. Originally from Moscow, Anton lives in Kiev, Ukraine.

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