Webcology

Today on the show we take a deep dive into optimizing e commerce and much more with our guest Khalid Saleh. Khalid is the co-founder of Invesp, an e commerce optimization company. He has more than 12 years of experience in ecommerce architecture, design and implementation, and is an in-demand speaker at industry events such as Emetrics, SMX, Conversion conference, DMA, PubCon and more

Today we talk about:
- The growth of Snapchats platform and advertising ability
- How Rankings for New Sites Could Fluctuate For Up to a Year
- Google Doubling Down On Guest Blog Links: Nofollow Them
- Facebook removing Trump ad for violating violence policies
Stay safe, respect each other, wash your hands, rank well, don't touch your faces, take care of each other, we'll talk to you next week

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These are extraordinary times. The most important thing is to say something and we say, empathically, BLACK LIVES MATTER. Racism has no place in policing, policy, or in our politics. We are so close to being so much better and we can be better but we have to want to be. Webcology stands for equity, equality, and collective advancement through analysis and understanding.

This was a busy episode. We looked at the protests and politics and the responses of the tech community. We talked about the differences between Twitter and Facebook's reactions to the President, Executive branch, and some GOP senators using their platforms to spread misinformation, hate speech, and threats of violence. We noted statements made by leaders in the tech and SEO community.

We also talked about:
- the SEMRush blog-network link selling controversy, also known as the New Mueller Report
- SEMRush making an outsized contribution to the community organizing some of the best information sessions out there
- Bing WebmasterTools new and vastly improved backlink reporting
- speculate about the beneficial effects of proper Schema markup and the May Core 2020 update
- and we discussed other SEOey stuff.

Stay safe, respect each other, wash your hands, rank well, don't touch your faces, take care of each other, we'll talk to you next week

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Bennett Kelley from the internet and cyberlaw business report joins Jim and Dave to talk about Trump’s Executive Order attacking social media platforms.  Bennett talks about how an Executive Order is introduced, the potential implications of this EO, what it might cover, how it might be litigated in the future, and the issues it might raise for online publishing going forward.

Dave and Jim also covered Google Core Values, the new metric introduced to Google Search Console this week, the upcoming Search Engine Journal E-Summit, Google placing paid advertising in the “Also Searched for” carousal, and observed effects of the recent Core Value update.

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Kristine Schachinger sat in this week for Dave who is taking a local staycation. We had another wide ranging conversation covering everything from the Google May Core Update to Twitter’s suggested new policy allowing posters to select who can see or comment on Tweets.

We also talked about the DoorDash - Pizza Arbitrage article that appeared in the economics blog The Margins. A pizza shop owner discovered the delivery service DoorDash had hijacked his pizzeria’s Google My Business listing and was listing a $24 pizza for $16 (while still paying $24 per pizza). DoorDash was trying to build its customer base but was misrepresenting the pizzeria’s prices. Worse yet, its customers were getting their pizzas delivered cold. Several customer complaints later, the pizzeria discovered it could make $8 per “pizza” by ordering their own products and sending themselves empty boxes. Things got especially interesting with Google search liaison Danny Sullivan tried to explain Google’s policies in the comments section. Nothing good ever happens in the contact section...

Check out this episode of Webcology for these and other search related topics.

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Google's John Mueller responded to a tweet asking why Pinterest ranks so well in Google search when the Pinterest pages have little to no textual content on the pages. John Mueller from Google said "sometimes images, even with minimal textual content, can be exactly what people are looking for. Not always, and sometimes we get it wrong, but it's certainly an option." It is hard to analyze a site like this because it covers news and there are many many spikes in traffic. Some spikes are huge and some spikes are small, and because of that, traffic is rarely ever flat for a site like this. This also includes Google organic traffic, because queries spike around news as well. But overall, I think this site's traffic is not doing as well since the May 4th Google May 2020 core update. In a Google hangout, Google’s John Mueller answered a question about getting hit by the Google BERT update. Mueller discussed what BERT does and how that fits into ranking.

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LinkedIn's www.linkedin.com pages dropped out of the Google search results for about 10 hours. But when it came back, it all came back really quickly. The SEO community is asking how did Google reprocess everything so quickly and how did LinkedIn return in Google search so quickly. The easiest way to explain it was that IF (we do not know what LinkedIn did for sure) LinkedIn went into Google Search Console and accidentally requested a removal of the www domain in Google Search, then that doesn't technically remove the pages from Google's index. All it does is flag those pages as to be hidden from showing in the Google Search results. So when you remove the flag to remove these pages, since those pages have never technically been removed from the index, they will pop back in pretty quickly for a search on LinkedIn in Google. Scripts are awesome for many reasons but the business conditions brought on by coronavirus have highlighted one of their most powerful benefits: they can be created cheaply and quickly. So much so that they can be deployed in quick response to unexpected events, even when there’s no expectation they will be useful for a long time. And when it comes to COVID scripts, we all hope those will be irrelevant sooner than later. But until then, they can at least help us get through stressful times with one less thing to worry about.

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Google Meet, the company’s premium video conferencing product, is now free for anyone who wants to use it. Previously known as ‘Google Hangouts Meet,’ the tool has only been available to G Suite customers until now. Last month, the premium version of Meet was made free to existing G Suite users. People could join a Meet call without paying for the product, but the call still had to be started by someone with a paid G Suite account. That’s changing so everyone can start calls on Meet without having to pay for anything. Google has said this many times, in many different ways, Google does not use Google Analytics for web search. John Mueller of Google said the other day on Twitter that Google does not use Google Analytics for indexing purposes. Google's John Mueller said it would be "extremely rare that Googlebot would submit a form" on your web site. He said Google did this more often in the old days, especially on governmental web sites where there was no site navigation and the only way to get to public content was to use a search box on the site. But nowadays most sites have good navigation through links and it is rare for Google to have to submit forms.

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SERP analysis is an essential step in the process of content optimization to outrank the competition on Google. SERP (Search Engine Result Page) analysis is part of keyword research and helps you understand if the query that you identified is relevant for your business goals. More importantly by analyzing how results are organized, we can understand how Google is interpreting a specific query. Google announced some big news - Google Shopping is now free. That means you can add your products for free to the Google Shopping tab in Google Search. Google said, "Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google." If you already pay for your products to show in Google Shopping, Google said: "you don't have to do anything to take advantage of the free listings." But "for new users of Merchant Center, we'll continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months," Google added. Google announced today they will begin requiring documentation of user identity and geographic location for advertisers. The new policy is tied to their 2018 policy update requiring identification verification for political advertisements.

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Jim and Dave welcome Daniel Faggella, the Head of research and CEO of Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research. Called upon by the United Nations, World Bank, INTERPOL, and many global enterprises, Daniel is a globally sought-after expert on the competitive strategy implications of AI for business and government leaders.


He also hosts the AI in Business Podcast where he interviews top AI and machine learning executives, investors, and researchers from globally renowned organizations.



He talks about bringing crucial AI research to investors and law enforcement alike to create essential frameworks – from media formats to regulatory guidelines and gradients of punishment – that deal with the shift in audio and visual contents, from artifacts of real things in the past to tinkered content which can range from simple pranks to "Deepfakes" that can affect stock markets, politics, and global security.

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There is no denying that the global COVID-19 pandemic has, and will continue to have, an incredibly profound impact on life as we know it. In the wake of cascading national lockdowns, people worldwide are depending on digital mediums more than ever to stay connected, communicate critical information, and continue to do business. Today we’re sharing a collection of revelatory, deeply compelling data that tells the tale of what search looks like right now. We’ve uncovered fascinating insights by comparing Yext’s aggregate customer data with third-party data sets — including the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and search interest in “Coronavirus” reported from Google Trends. In light of the rapidly changing events around COVID-19, Google Ads sent an announcement they are suspending the planned changes to their Partners program until 2021. Google has published the first in what will be a series of blog posts dedicated to SEO case studies. The aim of this series is to share success stories that demonstrate the value of SEO. Google says the intended audience for these case studies are people who may need some extra convincing that SEO is a good investment. A new survey validates the importance of maintaining your SEO efforts through the coming downturn. The survey, by Conductor, had 317 respondents drawn from Conductor’s extended network across a range of industries, including B2B (24%), Retail (12%), Healthcare (11%), Media (10%) and others (travel and hospitality, consumer technology, financial services, insurance, automotive, e-commerce, and manufacturing).

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