Webcology

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.

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Google's John Mueller talked about YMYL, specific to the health space, and mentioned that it is if you are writing about a topic on health that you are not an expert on then you are starting off already on a "shaky foundation." He said it probably makes sense for you to find experts to write or review what you wrote so that the content is "correct and it's trustworthy." He added it is content you want to feel comfortable that your friends can share with other friends. LinkedIn is adding a new feature to user profiles allowing people to list the professional services they offer to clients. This creates an opportunity for users to market their services outside of their business page and possibly connect with new prospects. The new services section in LinkedIn profiles will also be a helpful way for people to communicate exactly what it is they do for work. Just think – how many times have you had to explain to someone what an SEO does? Now you can clearly list the services you perform in your profile. Over the past few weeks or so there has been lot of rumors around why those suspensions have happened. Google has not be exactly clear about the issue but they did say they restored the suspended listings. That was not true and we waited. Now, Candour shared on Twitter a screen shot of Google My Business saying the shortnames connected bug with suspensions should be resolved soon, probably within 48 hours. The direct message reads "our engineering team has conformed that there was a technical issue connected to short names that is in profess of being fixed. If however, you are still experiencing the issue after 48 hours, please reply here with your dashboard URL."

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Google was in a hearing this week in congress around antitrust issues, so was Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Well, Congressman David N. Cicilline questioned Google on the Google's mission on getting people to go off of the search results page and on to a different site as quickly as possible. He then referenced a study Rand Fishkin published on SparkToro named As the Antitrust Case Against Google Kicks Off, Here’s Where the DOJ Should Start. This study basically shows that Google sends a surprisingly low percentage of clicks out of its search results pages to non-Google properties. Is Google in some way biased against conservative sites – especially in news? Some people believe this. This controversy has been growing over the last couple of years or so. This claim of bias started with the president but has even made it all the way to Congress. Today, Google will appear before Congress (again) and answer questions about these accusations of conservative censorship. The other day we reported that the Google My Business issues were reportedly fixed according to Google. Well, many local SEOs and businesses are saying this is not true. Google told Greg Sterling "all listings that were not visible have been restored." That might not be 100% true.

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Google’s John Mueller recently explained how query relevancy is determined for pages blocked by robots.txt. It has been stated that Google will still index pages that are blocked by robots.txt. But how does Google know what types of queries to rank these pages for? Dejan posted a Twitter poll the other day and it received almost 600 responses from within the SEO community. The question was "Good UX impacts rankings." The responses available were "directly," "indirectly," or "neither." Google's John Mueller said it is best to be consistent with your URL structure and either choose to use slashes after the URL or not to use slashes after the URL. Try not to use both formats if possible. He posted this on Twitter when asked about slashes after URLs "The best solution is to be consistent and only use one version of a URL. Link to that version, redirect to it, use it in sitemaps, use it for rel-canonical, etc." Some searchers in India are noticing that when you enter a query into Google that has no matches and Google has no idea what you are looking for, Google will show you a section called "some popular queries."

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Google recently began informing YouTube users that Hangouts is being discontinued in 2019. This affects Google’s Webmaster Hangouts. Google’s John Mueller received notice at the same time as everyone else. Many of the tools available as part of the ‘Google for Small Business’ initiative have been developed based on feedback received from small business owners. The 2019 U.S. Search Awards has officially launched and is accepting entries until July 5. Don’t wait – get your submissions in now! Soon after, judges will begin the process of deciding which agencies, brands, and individuals will be shortlisted for the 2019 awards ceremony, happening Wednesday, October 9 at the SLS Las Vegas Hotel & Casino during Pubcon Las Vegas, the premier social media and search optimization conference.

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The data, provided by marketing analytics firm Jumpshot, showed that zero-click searches on Google have steadily risen over the past three years. In the first quarter of 2019, 48.96% of all U.S. Google searches captured by Jumpshot ended without a click, an increase of 12% from the first quarter of 2016. The data also showed that, in the first quarter of 2019, 41.45% of Google searches resulted in organic clicks to non-Google sites and 5.9% of searches ended with the user heading to another Google-owned web site. When looking at just the searches that resulted in a click, 12% went to Google-owned sites. There are a few definitions for universal search on the web, but I prefer hearing it from the horse’s mouth on things like this. While Google hasn’t given a strict definition that I know of as to what universal search is from an SEO standpoint, they have used the following definition in their Search Appliance documentation. Google has released a statement on how it will handle song lyrics in search results following allegations that it stole content from Genius. Song lyrics in search results are sourced from third parties and going forward the sources will now be credited. 

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In a Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller answered a question from a web publisher who asked what to do about a suspected negative SEO attack. The web publisher asked if he should wait until he received a manual action from Google. John Mueller then stated that the links were likely normal spam links. Normal spam links happen naturally all the time. This has been the case since as long as I can remember. Guess what - in 2019 - it turns out that links and title tags still matter to doing well in Google's search results. We had John Mueller from Google said links matter for PageRank and thus building trust. Gary Illyes from Google say that HTML title tags also matter for SEO. 

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SEO Folks. Monday was Catfish Comstock's birthday. Catfish has been an SEO who has been a contributor to the community and knowledge-base as long as I can remember. As it turns out, it's also Carolyn Shelby's birthday. She too has dedicated her life to improving SEO and SEM. She has gone by the name Cshel forever.Google dropped a core update that day that they're going to insist on calling the June 2019 core-update. Let's informally rename it in honor of some people who have given a good part of their lives to our industry. Now, I actually support the use of date-month-year naming for core updates. In the long run its the best way to track their implementation and effect. That said, each should have informal names crafted by the community that obsesses over them most because they're puzzles with solutions that belong to those who solve them or make use of the solutions.

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FACEBOOK CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG has appeared before Congress in the past, to talk about the giant social network’s role in misinformation and election-meddling, but the number of times he has appeared before a government committee is vastly outweighed by the number of times he has declined to do so. The Facebook co-founder continued that streak by failing to appear in Canada this week before an international committee that is looking into Facebook’s status as a conduit for misinformation. His second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, also refused to attend. As a result, the Canadian government issued an open-ended summons that requires both Zuckerberg and Sandberg to appear before Parliament should they enter Canada for any reason. If they fail to do so, they could be held in contempt. The Trust Project, a technology-backed news initiative made up of dozens of global news companies, announced Thursday that it raised an additional $2.25 million from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook and the Democracy Fund. There are lots of opinions out there about Wix SEO. Some people love it, some hate it. But it’s hard to overlook how dedicated Wix is to helping business owners get their websites found online. There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO – it’s an ongoing challenge. But Wix isn’t afraid of challenges. In fact, they encourage them. That’s why they spent this past year consulting with SEO experts to bridge the gaps and create tools for a more professional user base.

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In the last week of April, nearly 23 percent of all traffic to news sites tracked by web analytics firm Parse.ly came from search engines. Google alone accounts for nearly half of the external referral traffic—traffic, that is, that comes from platforms, apps, and other outside sources— to news sites. Together with the fact that Facebook referral traffic is on the wane, this means that Google’s search algorithm is now perhaps the most powerful mediator of online attention to the news. Google announced tons of new ad features yesterday - two of the more controversial ones within the SEO community are the discover ads that show up on the Google mobile home page and the gallery ads that make some of the search ads on the search results page massively. This week, WhatsApp began urging its 1.5 billion or so users to update their apps to get the latest security patch. The Facebook-owned company — which touts its "simple, secure" messaging — said it discovered spyware had been installed remotely on "dozens" of smartphones through the app. The hack affected both Apple and Android users. Without naming the company, WhatsApp described the hackers as "a private company that has been known to work with governments to deliver spyware." Jim and Kristine also welcome the new host of LPO: Landing Page Optimization and the founder of Conversion Sciences, Brian Massey. They discuss the pressing issues affecting those working on landing pages and conversion and the evolution of that space over the span of the last 24 months. 

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