Webcology

There is some early chatter in the SEO forums, including WebmasterWorld and some on social media. Some of the tools are showing some fluctuations as well today, where some others have not updated yet. Google announced it is changing the user agent name of the current GoogleBot in December. We knew this was coming when Google launched the new Evergreen GoogleBot. Google didn't change the user agent from Chrome 41 to what it was really running to not cause issues for some who hardcoded scripts for user agent detection. The only way to see which version of Chrome GoogleBot was running was to see what features that GoogleBot can render. A WebmasterWorld thread has some complaints that the number of external links reported in Google Search Console's link report is down by about 50%. Like Google cut out about half of the links they were originally reporting.

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

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

​Tomorrow is Google's 21st birthday and Google has already released its very own birthday Doodle to celebrate. The Doodle depicts a desktop computer from 1998 and the old Google home page and old Google logo. Google's John Mueller said that if someone takes your image and embeds it on their site using your image URL as the source, also known as hotlinking images, that image would not be considered a link to your web site. So if you take an image from my site, but don't just copy it to your server, instead you request the image from your server, that won't be considered an inbound link. Gary Illyes from Google said last night on Twitter that emailing Google for support with your SEO and your ranking problems in Google never really works. He said "That’s impossible" when someone claimed that emailing Google did help his ranking issues. He joked "Yeah cos emailing google is a great solution" after seeing a photo from a presentation that said "We sent emails to Google staff we knew."​

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

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

Google announced an algorithm update intended to rank original news higher. Despite Google’s update, apparently an authority site like Yahoo News can syndicate content and outrank the original. In the past 24 hours or so, we had numerous reports sent to us that searchers are seeing only URLs for the Google search results snippets. The title and description portion of the snippets were missing. LinkedIn is introducing skill assessments which allow users to demonstrate their expertise and add a “verified skill” badge to their profile. New research from LinkedIn shows that 76% of professionals wish that employers were able to verify their skills. In response to that feedback, LinkedIn is providing a way for professionals to validate their skills to employers, which can help them stand out amongst other candidates.

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

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

​Google announced a change to the nofollow link attribute yesterday and with that announcement, Googlers spent the next day responding to questions about it on Twitter. I will go through what changed according to the announcement and then cover almost all of the responses from Google (removing duplicates) so you get a full perspective of this change. Nofollow is an HTML attribute that is added to links. It tells Google that a link is not trusted. It was originally designed to combat blog comment spam. It evolved for use on advertising links and for user generated links that couldn’t be 100% trusted. Google’s systems cannot verify the accuracy of content; instead, it relies on signals that the company thinks aligns with “relevancy of topic and authority,” according to Danny Sullivan, Google’s search liaison, in a tweet posted from his personal account on September 9. This attracted attention from SEOs and kicked off a conversation.​

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

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

In the latest installment of the #AskGoogleWebmasters video series, John Mueller tackles the topic of how Google chooses canonical URLs. Mueller says its common for websites to have multiple, unique URLs that lead to the same content. For example, there’s WWW and non-WWW versions of a URL. Another common configuration is when the homepage is accessible as index.html, or when upper and lowercase characters in URLs lead to the same pages. Hackers are reportedly exploiting vulnerabilities in over ten WordPress plugins in order to backdoor sites with rouge admin accounts. This is an escalation of an attack that was reported on back in July in which attackers were hijacking sites to serve ads, scams, and malicious app downloads. Now, the same hacker group is taking complete control of vulnerable sites using similar tactics. ZDNet reports as of August 20 the hacker group modified the malicious code planted on hacked sites.

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

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

Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position. In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate — introduced last year. These indicate the percentage of impressions and impression share your ads received in the absolute top (the first ad at the very top of the page) and top of page (above the organic results) ad slots. It’s been proven that consumers are more likely to engage with your brand if you’re offering them excellent content. But every day, writers are overwhelming the web with more and more content; the “rules” of digital marketing are constantly changing…as are the qualities that define what an “excellent” piece of content looks like. 

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

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

Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position. In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate — introduced last year. These indicate the percentage of impressions and impression share your ads received in the absolute top (the first ad at the very top of the page) and top of page (above the organic results) ad slots. It’s been proven that consumers are more likely to engage with your brand if you’re offering them excellent content. But every day, writers are overwhelming the web with more and more content; the “rules” of digital marketing are constantly changing…as are the qualities that define what an “excellent” piece of content looks like. 

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

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

Google has confirmed that as of earlier this morning it is unable to index new content across the web. There is a bug that Google said is “impacting some sites.” But it is bigger than some sites. From our view, this seems much larger than just “some sites.” Clearly Google is eager to fix any indexing issues, because Google wants to surface the most recent content from publishers. For Google to not show breaking news from the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other popular magazines is something Google probably isn’t too happy about. What it looks like. If you try to search for content from a popular news site and then filter to only show content within the past hour, you won’t currently be given any new real content from that site. Google announced another round of updates to how close variants will work. Queries with the same meaning could already trigger ads for exact match keywords as of September 2018. But now, close variants with the same meaning may also affect phrase and broad match modified keywords. Google expects advertisers to see around a 3 to 4% lift in clicks and impressions on the affected keywords with 85% of those being incremental for the account.

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

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

Google has confirmed that as of earlier this morning it is unable to index new content across the web. There is a bug that Google said is “impacting some sites.” But it is bigger than some sites. From our view, this seems much larger than just “some sites.” Clearly Google is eager to fix any indexing issues, because Google wants to surface the most recent content from publishers. For Google to not show breaking news from the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other popular magazines is something Google probably isn’t too happy about. What it looks like. If you try to search for content from a popular news site and then filter to only show content within the past hour, you won’t currently be given any new real content from that site. Google announced another round of updates to how close variants will work. Queries with the same meaning could already trigger ads for exact match keywords as of September 2018. But now, close variants with the same meaning may also affect phrase and broad match modified keywords. Google expects advertisers to see around a 3 to 4% lift in clicks and impressions on the affected keywords with 85% of those being incremental for the account.

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

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

Dan Shure posted on his podcast his audio notes from after a private dinner with Gary Illyes of Google from April 4th 2017. Basically, they had a dinner with several SEOs, after the dinner when Dan got into his car, he took audio notes of what he remembered from that dinner. Google announced that in the coming weeks broad match modifier and phrase match keywords will also begin matching to words within the search query that share the same meaning as the keyword. The SEM/PPC community is not surprised but still very frustrated by this news. It is Google Ads (formerly AdWords) expanding the keywords you want to match on for your ads to even more types of keyword phrases. That ultimately can lead to your ad showing more often but also it can lead to your ad showing for queries that you do not want your ads to show for. This has been the trend Google Ads has been going with since 2014 and has been a huge frustration point for the SEM industry. Google has published official guidance on Core Updates that goes beyond anything published before. The guidance covers four areas of content and recommends becoming acquainted with Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines to learn how to judge your own content. The guidance additionally mentioned that updates could affect Google Discover.

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

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