Webcology

Jim Lehrer is one of the last of the great American Journalists, dead at age 85. Founder of what became PBS Newshour. Featured snippets are special boxes where the format of regular listings is reversed, showing the descriptive snippet first. Read more about how Google's Featured Snippets work. Google's John Mueller said on Reddit "A site is not going to outrank your site just because of hidden text." He also added, "Inversely, just having hidden text on a page won't get the site banned from Google."

Google uses many signals for ranking, John explained. He said "Lots of sites get things wrong, lots of sites have text accidentally hidden or even purposely hidden until you interact with the UI. The sites aren't perfect and so our algorithms work to deal with these imperfections in a reasonable way. Sometimes that means the top ranking site is one that does a lot of things technically incorrect." This is the one our algorithms currently think is a good match for a user's query. The person who started this Reddit thread wrote: "My Competition is cheating – is there anything I can do?". He explained, "Two of my biggest competitors use invisible keyword stuffing text". John Mueller from Google is saying said: "Well, it isn't that simple".

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The Look Of Paid And Organic Search Results And 2020 Core Update. Google is rolling out an updated look for paid and organic search results on desktop, bringing it more in line with the look of mobile search results. The updated design includes a more prominent “Ad” label for paid results, at least in Google’s estimation, as well as favicons next to organic results. Google’s search ads on the desktop now have a bolded “Ad” label in black text. Google says the label is more prominent, but early feedback suggests users are finding the paid results harder to identify. Being a broad core update, the January 2020 core update will impact all search results on a worldwide scale. It’s not an update that targets something specific that webmasters can improve upon, like the “Speed Update.” Google’s guidance regarding this update remains the same as previous core updates. Google points to this blog post specifically. Google has informed us that you may see a spike in errors in the unparsable structured data report within Google Search Console. This is a bug in the reporting system and you do not need to worry. The issue happened between January 13, 2020, and January 16, 2020. After Google Ads announced it would be sunsetting average position, Microsoft Advertising introduced impression share reporting metrics but said it would continue showing average position as well. That always felt a bit half-hearted, though, particularly when most advertisers mostly shrugged off the change. Google is acquiring Irish startup Pointy, the companies announced Tuesday. Pointy has solved a problem that vexed startups for more than a decade: how to bring small, independent retailer inventory online. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Pointy had raised less than $20 million so it probably wasn’t an expensive buy for Google. But it could have a significant impact on the future of product search.

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SEO requirements at Google: Master’s degree or PhD in computer science, engineering, statistics, mathematics or a related discipline. On top of that, a Search Analyst for Google must also have multiple years of experience in SEO, project management, coding, and data analysis. Intent Research vs. Keyword Research, Intent and not being a pigeon. John Mueller and Fredric Dubut both mentioned Intent research this week, John in a Webmaster Hangout and Fredric in a January 3rd video at SELand. Microsoft’s Bing Search App has been updated with a new design aesthetic and its latest update, version 6.48, brings direct site navigation via voice to iOS users.

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​Researchers at MIT have found a way to make graphene with fewer wrinkles, and to iron out the wrinkles that do appear. They found each wafer exhibited uniform performance, meaning that electrons flowed freely across each wafer, at similar speeds, even across previously wrinkled regions. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Glenn Gabe noticed that if you try to block Google from showing your news stories in just Google News by blocking Googlebot-News, it no longer works. So if you want to follow the old advice (I do not see new advice) to block Google News, you can no longer use the feature to block Googlebot-News. Just to be clear, this is specific to using noindex for Googlebot-News. Russ Jones from Moz did a Twitter poll asking if you report rankings related to Bing and Yahoo to your clients and stakeholders. With almost 900 responses, 86% said they do not, while only 14% said they do. Joy Hawkins posted in the Local Search Forums that she is now seeing, sometimes, a new delivery truck icon in some local panels in the Google mobile results. When you click on that delivery truck icon or the the text on the same line, it will show you where that business serves outside of the primary location listed.​

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Google has upgraded the built-in tool that shows up in search results for the query “mortgage calculator.” Now, the tool has many of the key features that were missing from the previous version of Google’s mortgage calculator. Commodity content is content that is used across a wide range of sites. For example, content that is pulled by a feed by an affiliate can be seen as commodity content. In the example above, it’s government jobs that are available. There are many solutions for pulling a feed and automatically displaying the information on a website. It can help a publisher scale their publishing while also automating it. The downside is that these solutions are available to other publishers as well. A new study suggests the performance of virtual assistants, like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri, may have plateaued. Perficient Digital released its annual evaluation of virtual assistants. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that none of the top virtual assistants are improving when it comes to answering questions accurately. Not only are they not improving, but the accuracy of every virtual assistant dropped slightly compared to last year’s study. This may be an indication that these technologies have reached their limit, says Eric Enge of Perficient Digital.

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Google has launched what it calls “Your News Update,” an audio news feed that you access through the Google Assistant. Sources, which Google paid to license, include ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, AP, Politico, USAToday and many others — though apparently not NPR. Google has updated its video structured data help document with new information on some of the latest enhancements to video search results. The updated document has details on how to mark timestamps on YouTube videos, how to monitor performance in Search Console, and more screenshots to show the new structured data types in action. Mike Blumenthal posted a screen shot on Twitter showing a possible sign that Google My Business may be experimenting with doing its own booking or reservation system or engine. He showed that under the booking tab, that Google was listed as a provider.

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Machine learning and entities have given search engines the capacity to better understand not just what a page is about but what various intents a searcher may have. A site owner rarely can create content to satisfy all possible intents and it's important to have methods or at the very least, develop instincts to assess which intents the engines are going to weight most heavily. This session looks at the principles behind how the engines accomplish this, but more importantly - how site owners and SEOs can use this information to generate content strategies and page layouts to maximize their own probability of improving their rankings.

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Dr. Pete, Pete Meyers, from Moz, posted on Twitter "Any algo update that impacts query interpretation or relevance will impact Featured Snippets." This was retweeted by Google's John Mueller, so I guess that is a vote of confidence without passing DA ;-). In all seriousness, we've all seen it, featured snippets are very finicky and change a lot but algorithm updates can cause them as well. Google announced it is now limiting the number of service areas a business can list to no more than 20. Google wrote in the Google Ads Help page "service area businesses are now limited to having a maximum of 20 service areas per business." Google added the limit, which was previously not listed at all, on the help document, which now reads "you can add up to 20 service areas." What if you need more? Google said they "recommend expanding the existing ones to cover larger areas. You can set your service area based on a combination of entire cities, districts, postal codes, or other areas that you serve." What if you already have over 20 service areas listed? Google said you will "receive suggested updates to their service areas to cover the same geographic area while only using 20 areas." One of the takeaways from the Google Webmaster Conference was that if Google tries to access your robots.txt file is unreachable but it does exist then Google won't crawl your site. Google said about 26% of the time GoogleBot cannot reach a robots.txt file. WordPress might make changes in order to reduce this error rate.

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The Google My Business app is testing allowing business owners communicate with its customers not just through text but also through photos. Some business owners can now send photos to customers who message them via Google Maps and Google Local. Google added messaging to the Google My Business app a year ago after launching it in 2017 via SMS. Now according to Jane Manchun Wong, she posted on Twitter that Google has given her the ability to send photos to customers through the messaging component in the app. Google announced it will stop indexing and ranking Flash content in its search engine. This means Google will no longer process content within Flash SWF files, either on websites designed fully in Flash or web pages that have portions of the page in Flash. Google confirmed it’s rolling out lead form ad extensions in the coming weeks, a feature that was recently spotted in testing. Google has been testing ad extensions that have the ability to capture leads. After tapping a call-to-action button, users can quickly submit a form which is pre-populated with the contact information from their Google account.

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Google announced that publishers can now create how-to “actions” for Google Assistant by using structured data. This is an opportunity for publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience on Google Assistant. Yahoo announced that all Yahoo Groups will be shut down on Monday, October 21st, and all Groups content will be removed on December 14th. After October 21st, users will no longer be able to upload new content to groups, but it will still remain on the network. Google Ads is rolling out two new ways to reach your target audiences in Google Search. Over the coming weeks, Google Ads will be launching affinity audiences and seasonal event segments for in-market audiences. Here’s more about each of these targeting options. Gary Illyes from Google was asked if Google search tracks or recognizes authors. He said for Google Search it is more about entities, not authors. But for Google News and Google Scholar, Google does recognize authors.

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