Webcology

Brand SERP optimisation and knowledge panel management with Jason Barnard

This is a day of reflection and contemplation in Canada. Please take care wishing us a "happy Canada Day". Many Canadians are thinking about the buried history of cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing that made Canada. This month Canadians have been reminded of the tens of thousands of children of First Nations who died in residential schools run by religious orders after being stolen from their parents and families in a bid to destroy their cultures. Over 1300 unmarked graves have recently been discovered at three different sites with tens of thousands more remaining to be found.

We still love our country, we just can't rest on the false histories or hide behind empty nationalism any longer. To grow into the people we aspire to be, we need to honestly and truthfully tell the stories of how we got here. Canada is built on an ongoing genocide. We want to be better.
2 deaths in our community to report
Russ Jones, Data scientists, conference speaker, father of three. Chief data scientist at Moz frim 2015 – 2020. Was CTO of Virante (now Hive Digital) before that. Well loved speaker and friend. Died in his sleep just short of his 40th birthday.
Dan Bell

Google Core Update
CWV Update
Spam Update
Google Core update just started running this morning

Jason Barnard specialises in Brand SERP optimisation and knowledge panel management.
He’s also variously been a musician, a screenwriter, a songwriter and a cartoon blue dog.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Google puts all its policies on one page.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-content-policies-31648.html (list of all it covers)
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/10622781

Spam Updates – Spam Algo update ran yesterday, another scheduled for next month.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-spam-algorithm-update-june-23rd-31649.html

Algo Updates don’t affect direct traffic
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-updates-direct-traffic-impact-31647.html

Quality takes time for Google to appreciate
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-quality-changes-several-months-31633.html

Google delays discontinuation of third party cookies/data privacy sandbox until sometime in late 2022 to mid-2023.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-extends-support-for-3rd-party-cookies/411596/

Google to keep public updated at https://privacysandbox.com/

Dave’s Disappointment with GA4
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-analytics-4-backlash/411392/

Facebook introduces new ecomm features
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-launches-4-new-ecommerce-features/411350/

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Google Page Experience update is slowly rolling out. Will ratchet it up between now and end of August. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/more-details-page-experience

June 2021 Core Update v1 done. July 2021 Core Update V1.5 still to come

Google serves 48% of all ad traffic on “fake” news sites - researchers Lia Bozarth and Ceren Budak at the University of Michigan School of Information
https://searchengineland.com/new-research-shows-google-serves-almost-half-of-all-ad-traffic-on-fake-news-sites-349702

Google tests article carousal for some US based authors in limited mobile rollout.
Evidence of usefulness for EAT? Not really but maybe a step towards...
https://searchengineland.com/google-tests-article-carousel-for-some-author-knowledge-panels-349678

SEL’s SEO periodic table 2021 edition is up

Ain’t no trick to it, just make good sites with good content.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-trick-search-31612.html

Site quality can be a metric for individual pages. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-quality-site-level-signal-31596.html

Search Console Insights – All the Good News that Googly enough to share
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-introduces-search-console-insights/410570/

Google My Business makes it easier to mind your business
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-adds-more-ways-to-edit-business-profiles-in-search/410857/
“Google now has more ways for businesses to edit the information that appears to searchers without leaving Search or Maps.”
https://searchengineland.com/facebook-testing-virtual-reality-ads-in-oculus-vr-349694?

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June 2021 Core Update:Lots of movement but this is a two part update so... Not really much to say.

Google Search Central UnConference 2021
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-central-unconference-31568.html
•June 21st, 11amET
•Application to attend is necessary, space is limited

Search ain’t Stable Sunshine
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-never-be-stability-in-search-31566.html
“Here's a secret: there will never be stability, unless someone turns off the internet.” John Mueller, 2021

Google working to demote slanderous content
https://searchengineland.com/google-demotes-slanderous-content-in-search-through-its-predatory-sites-algorithms-349449
13:58:47 From jim hedger : Digital Marketers Association Napa Valley Conference

Unique Content above fold

Delete old-Sitemap when done. Keep XML sitemap, just to show them you’re sorta serious

Take care of your bad links. If you get a manual link penalty, Google expects you to do more than just disavow the links. You should document attempts to get them removed and include that documentation in your reinclusion request.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-unnatural-link-manual-actions-clean-31552.html
Google trying to treat nofollow, USG, and sponsored link attributes differently.
"we do try to understand these and try to treat them appropriately so I could imagine in our systems that we might learn over time to treat them slightly differently." Then John added another line to downplay that difference, saying "but in general they're all with the same theme in that you're telling us these are links that are placing because of this reason and Google doesn't need to take them into account." John Mueller

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It’s almost the middle of the year! COVID is almost over in much of the developed world. A summer full of hope and opportunity is almost upon us and what does Google do? It hits us with a double whamy of a Core Update, the June/July 2021 Core Update.

Thanks to Erika Varagouli (who has today’s coolest ever SEO name) SEMRush for naming Webcology the #1 podcast in a strong field to learn from. After who the hell knows how long of doing this show it is good to know we’re still relevant. Get ready for the insufferable to become inescapable. Crypto-ads are about to be allowed by Google https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-allow-cryptocurrency-ads-31529.html To be certified by Google, advertisers will need to:" • Be duly registered with • (a) FinCEN as a Money Services Business and with at least one state as a money transmitter; or • (b) a federal or state chartered bank entity. • Comply with relevant legal requirements, including any local legal requirements, whether at a state  or federal level.
  https://www.semrush.com/blog/learn-seo/
  • Ensure their ads and landing pages comply with all Google Ads policies Negative matching allowed in regex https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-regular-expressions-exclusions-31526.html Cumulative Metrics Shift – CLS Update (Cumulative Layout Shift) updates at Google Search Console https://www.seroundtable.com/cumulative-layout-shift-metric-google-search-console-31520.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-page-experience-label-31516.html CWV icon? No talk at Google for a while
Google News Transparancy Policy Article Level Google News Factors/Signals Here are the article level specific Google News signals it uses behind its transparency policy. Google said these factors helps Google "consider information that helps users quickly gain context about articles or the journalists covering stories." • Article byline that link to a bio describing the author's credentials and expertise • Article's publishing date (finally!) • Labeling to indicate the article type, for example Opinion or News Site Level Google News Factors/Signals Here are the site wide level Google News signals it uses behind its transparency policy. Google said these factors "helps readers understand a site's purpose, its organizational structure, and the kinds of information they can expect from that site." • Mission statement • Editorial policies and standards
Staff information and bios for both editorial and business staff • Non-generic contact information • Other organizational-level information like owners and/or funding sources (for example, state-sponsorship, relationship to political parties or PACs). Google added: • Google considers different regional and country-level expectations and practices around transparency. This is particularly important in areas with less press freedom where practices like naming a journalist can carry significant risk. • Google looks at a number of inputs and consider a breadth of editorial practices. This helps ensure that distinctive editorial philosophies—for example, publishing pieces without bylines — don't affect the credibility of an otherwise authoritative source. • Google also considers information that is clearly available to users, so that larger, more technically sophisticated sites and smaller sites that use simple text to convey information are on equal footing.

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Half the URLs Google is now crawling are HTTP/2 which saves a lot of bandwidth. This would affect your crawl budget. “Using stream multiplexing and header compression, the number of connections and the bandwidth have both gone down significantly. These improvements help both our crawling as well as your website serving infrastructure.” – John Mueller at Google I/O
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-crawling-half-of-the-urls-over-http-2-31444.html


MUM – Big BERTa with a lot more input.
Imagine if Google knew what you wanted to wear while hiking Mt. Fuji on Friday May 21. How might it know that? MUM’s the word.
Meanwhile, over at SEJ, Roger Montti points to recent machine intelligence and learning research published by Google. Long Form Answers – making experts out of Dilatants (paper by Google researcher Donald Metler)

Google I/O
Shopping / Shoppify Partnership
Part of this, Google announced a partnership with Shopify. This allows Shopify merchants to simplify the process to feature their products across Google "in just a few clicks," Google said. "Shopify will enable merchants to become discoverable to high-intent consumers across Google Search, Shopping, YouTube, Google Images and more," Google added.

Shopping graph – Looks at a lot more datapoints – looks at the merchant's website, the prices, the reviews, videos and SKU and inventory data, user experiences - plus a lot more

Google Lens - Search photos to see how information from that photo (product, place, thing) might appear in search results.
Google Holographic Calling

Page Experience Ranking coming to Desktop environment
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-page-experience-update-coming-to-desktop-31439.html

Core Web Vitals URL Grouping
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/grouped-core-web-vitals-scoring/407899/

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Half the URLs Google is now crawling are HTTP/2 which saves a lot of bandwidth. This would affect your crawl budget. “Using stream multiplexing and header compression, the number of connections and the bandwidth have both gone down significantly. These improvements help both our crawling as well as your website serving infrastructure.” – John Mueller at Google I/O
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-crawling-half-of-the-urls-over-http-2-31444.html


MUM – Big BERTa with a lot more input.
Imagine if Google knew what you wanted to wear while hiking Mt. Fuji on Friday May 21. How might it know that? MUM’s the word.
Meanwhile, over at SEJ, Roger Montti points to recent machine intelligence and learning research published by Google. Long Form Answers – making experts out of Dilatants (paper by Google researcher Donald Metler)

Google I/O
Shopping / Shoppify Partnership
Part of this, Google announced a partnership with Shopify. This allows Shopify merchants to simplify the process to feature their products across Google "in just a few clicks," Google said. "Shopify will enable merchants to become discoverable to high-intent consumers across Google Search, Shopping, YouTube, Google Images and more," Google added.

Shopping graph – Looks at a lot more datapoints – looks at the merchant's website, the prices, the reviews, videos and SKU and inventory data, user experiences - plus a lot more

Google Lens - Search photos to see how information from that photo (product, place, thing) might appear in search results.
Google Holographic Calling

Page Experience Ranking coming to Desktop environment
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-page-experience-update-coming-to-desktop-31439.html

Core Web Vitals URL Grouping
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/grouped-core-web-vitals-scoring/407899/

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Google I/O runs next Tuesday May 18 – Thursday May 20 – Open to everyone
https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-related-sessions-at-google-i-o-31405.html
https://events.google.com/io/?lng=en
Preparing for page experience ranking
Immersive storytelling on the web
What's new in Search
AMA: Web Vitals

Schema.org markup validator is live
https://www.seroundtable.com/schema-org-markup-validator-now-live-31403.html
Google Scooters – Dave and Mary got em
https://www.seroundtable.com/photos/google-partner-escooters-31390.html
Google My Business now features a Call History feature which when enabled produces a Google phone number that forwards to the business number.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-call-history-data-31399.html
The Trust Project, not used for search rankings, directly...
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-trust-project-31394.html
SEO Automation w/JavaScript
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-automation-with-javascript/406582/?ver=406582X2
H1 headings value and myth and ?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/h1-headings-for-google/406720/
Ryan Jones answers what to do with old content
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/will-older-outdated-articles-hurt-my-seo/405625/?ver=405625X3
Canadian Search Awards Judging story
https://tv.avclub.com/amazon-promises-they-arent-wasting-that-465-million-on-1846881901?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark
$465MM to film a season of LOTR.

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Trump’s Ban from Facebook continues for at least six more months. Oversight committee asks Facebook to clarify rules in light of how easy it is to pass disinformation and ferment sedition on the platform. The perma-ban from Twitter is, according to Twitter, permanent. 

IP detection and content changes might not be penalizable.  What was once seen a cloaking might now be up to the perceived intent of the webmaster


https://www.seroundtable.com/ip-content-change-google-penalty-31371.html

We’ll say this slowly, speed is good but it’s not the panacea. It’s more of a tiebreaker, which apparently happens more than you’d think. – Steve.


https://www.seroundtable.com/google-talks-hypothetically-about-speed-as-a-ranking-factor-31375.html

Adding images won’t make you rank higher


https://www.seroundtable.com/google-adding-images-rank-higher-search-31362.html

Not using Google Analytics won’t make you rank lower

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-no-search-penalty-31361.html

Facebook Neighborhoods – Nextdoor Killer

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-neighborhoods/405911/

Jim Boykin scrapes Yahoo Answers! And makes them available to public and publishes y-answers.com 

Embedded links in feature snippets was a bug, an error, a mistake, a big nothingburger of nothing to see here. Ooops. 


https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-embedded-links-in-featured-snippets-a-bug/405658/

Core Web Vitals and Sponsored Content

Cloudinary at SearchEngineLand and SEMRush at Search Engine Journal

Cyrus Shepard is an SEO, online marketer, content publisher, speaker, and writer. He has several years experience building highly qualified traffic through SEO and content marketing. His experience leading SEO at Moz and teaching others has introduced him to 1000s of top online marketers across the globe. 

Here is a recent link building guide that listeners can be pointed to if you'd like: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building.

Moz has been on a link-building building spree. I see you’ve been advertising webinars on link building recently. Domain Authority has been a somewhat controversial topic lately. A certain founder has been found himself in the middle of a bunch of controversy, again. 

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Canada’s Bill C10 described as a full blown assault on free expression online. What started as a way to ensure Canadian content continued to be shown on Canadian screens has turned into a hybrid monster that has grown bigger than the government grasps. Canada’s government intends to regulate all digital content that emulates broadcast so if it moves or speaks online, the government will have say over its existence online.
https://nationalpost.com/news/full-blown-assault-on-free-expression-inside-the-comprehensive-liberal-bill-to-regulate-the-internet

Brands value DA, a metric that really has no Google value
https://www.seroundtable.com/brand-value-domain-authority-google-does-not-31329.html

How to report issues with Google to Google
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-indexing-issue-reporting-31332.html

Pre-Rendering revealed by martin split – there is a layer above google’s web rendering service that “handles "prioritization, error retry, quality of service guarantees, caching and it also interacts with a crawling subsystem to actually fetch things."
https://www.seroundtable.com/above-the-google-search-web-rendering-service-31323.html

We need to stop quoting zero click studies – Jeff Ferguson Dropped this
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/stop-quoting-zero-click-search-studies/403763/


John Mueller says consistency is everything in SEO

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