Webcology

Probably the biggest news for the SEO industry out of Google I/O yesterday was that Google said Googlebot is now evergreen, meaning it will stay up-to-date with the latest version of Chromium, their popular Chrome browser. This brings thousands of new features to Googlebot for crawling purposes. I did cover this last night at Search Engine Land and this news shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone - we saw Google testing this just a few weeks ago. Google announced it a year ago at Google I/O 2018 but didn't launch FAQ and How-to structured data until a year later at this years 2019 Google I/O event. It comes with new rich results and new Google Search Console enhancement reports. At Google I/O they demonstrated a new report within Google Search Console named the Speed Report. It is currently in beta or experimental mode but they showed some screen shots of it in action.

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Google appears to be rolling out an upgrade to Google Questions Answers (Q A) that uses previous answers to questions and Google Local Business (GMB) reviews to suggest answers to new questions in real time. A new consumer survey about Google SERP engagement, from Path Interactive , finds organic search results still dominate user attention but younger searchers are more inclined to look to content in Featured Snippets and the Knowledge Panel without clicking through to third-party sites. This phenomenon has been dubbed “no-click” search results and is a worrying trend for many publishers. Google tweeted Thursday that it may have selected unrelated canonical URLs for some pages and that breadcrumb trails on mobile might show the unrelated URLs. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a keynote presentation at the F8 Conference where he revealed that Facebook-owned WhatsApp is moving toward hosting web shops where customers can browse a store’s products and make purchases. This may represent a way to move beyond the advertising model by becoming an eCommerce platform.

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Canada's federal privacy watchdog plans to take Facebook to court following an investigation that found the social media giant broke a number of privacy laws and failed to take responsibility for protecting Canadians' personal information. The electric scooter company Lime’s ongoing trial period in Brisbane, Australia isn’t going so great, according to Gizmodo — at least eight scooters have been pulled from the streets because hackers replaced the usual audio messages with sexually explicit comments. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that the nofollow link attribute has been and still is working fairly well. He added hasn't "seen many cases of sites causing themselves significant issues, or of pages not getting credit in quite some time."

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Blaming a “very fluid” technology industry, Emtek –who BlackBerry licensed its BBM consumer business to in 2016 –has announced that is ending  BBM service, effective at the end of next month. Google is adding a new section to search results which are dedicated to AMP Stories. AMP Stories was announced over a year ago and now they’re rolling out in a big way. AMP Stories are exactly what they sound like – Instagram-like stories that are built on the AMP framework. In addition to having a dedicated block in search results, AMP Stories can be linked to just like any other web page. That’s the key difference between AMP Stories and other types of stories. A recent exchange on Twitter between Rand Fishkin and Google’s Danny Sullivan highlighted the tension between Google and the SEO community regarding links.  This time it was over the idea of links to sources that are quoted by websites like news organizations.

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Google's John Mueller was answering questions around an old topic of Google showing only a sample of links in the link report in Google Search Console at Reddit. He said that generally if the links are not shown in the tool then they are "pretty irrelevant overall." For a long time now, Google has been teasing that they are working on closing the gap between how Chrome renders pages and how GoogleBot renders pages. The web rendering engine Google uses for crawling the web is going to get a lot more advanced but Google won't say when. Martin Splitt from Google, who is close to the project on making this happen, said at SMX Munich the other day that he knows when it is scheduled to happen but he won't say. Google has posted a warning in the Google Search Console data anomalies page that you can expect those reports to see an increase in the number of issues and affected items and/or pages starting on April 3, 2019. The reason is Google has started to collect data from more pages than it previously did.

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AdWords Editor has historically been one of Google’s most popular advertising products. Contributor and Googler Matt Lawson lists what makes him most excited about its relaunch as Google Ads Editor. Ahrefs CEO Dmitry Gerasimenko announced a plan to create a search engine that supports content creators and protects users privacy. Dmitry laid out his proposal for a more free and open web, one that rewards content creators directly from search revenue with a 90/10 split in favor of publishers. Google Maps is letting users create public events associated with specific locations–a feature that could compete with Facebook events. This feature hasn’t been officially announced, although it has been confirmed in the sense that there’s a dedicated help center article. People have also reported seeing it in search results already. Events can be added to a Google Maps listing from the Contribute tab in the Android app.There are a number of competing theories about what the March 2019 Update was about. This article evaluates each theory and proposes an idea of how to diagnose a ranking drop and how to fix it.

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Facebook confirmed Thursday in a blog post, prompted by a report by cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, that it stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plaintext for years. The discovery was made in January, said Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati, as part of a routine security review. None of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook, he said. Facebook admitted the security lapse months later, after Krebs said logs were accessible to some 2,000 engineers and developers. It used to be that Google’s algorithm tried its best to give users the answers they were searching for. However, today, things aren’t that simple. With concepts like user intent and the buyer’s journey becoming increasingly important, Google has revamped its algorithm in order to better understand what users are actually searching for when they type in a phrase or question.Google has stopped supporting the rel=next/prev markup it launched back in 2011. The interesting part is, Google has not supported it for the past few years and didn’t tell anyone! Google has released another video around JavaScript and SEO, this one on how to do testing and debugging to make sure your JavaScript web site is performing well in search.

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Not long after Google released a broad core algorithm update on March 12, some in the industry began calling it the “Florida 2 update.” But the moniker has created a bit of confusion among SEOs who wonder if this week’s release is related to the Florida update in November 2003. It’s not. Here’s what you need to know. oogle does several core ranking updates per year and confirms very few updates throughout the year. Specific to broad core updates, Google has said numerous times that you cannot do anything specific to fix your rankings. Google’s previous advice is, “there’s no ‘fix’ for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.” An article was highlighted yesterday but some folks in the search community implied that after a rater visits your site your rankings can immediately improve or drop down - that is not true.

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Google has finally sent us an official statement about our question if Google use click through rate for rankings. Sadly the statement will lead to even more confusion and debate. After the debate around CTR rekindled last week, we asked Google for a statement from their PR team we can share around click-through rate. In short, various Googlers have told us over the years that CTR data is not used within Google’s ranking algorithm. Goodbye property sets and hello domain properties, a new automated way to aggregate your whole site's data into one Google Search Console view. Google announced it has launched “domain properties,” a feature that lets you see data from a whole domain in one view within Google Search Console. This can consolidate your http, https, www, non-www, m-dot, etc into a single property to get an aggregate view of your site’s performance and errors/warnings in a single Google Search Console property.

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Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes, who has been with Google for over eight years working exclusively on search-related topics, participated in an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit over the weekend. Over the course of the lengthy discussion thread, he covered everything from robots.txt to RankBrain to behavioral signals to image and video search. We’ll save you the trouble of sifting through it all by sharing all the important stuff here. One day after Google said it would be consolidating the data within the Google Search Console’s performance report to the canonical URL, the company decided to start the preview of the consolidated data view on Thursday, a month or so earlier than they planned. Represented as a percentage, click share is an indication of how many clicks your ads received out of the total number of times Google estimates your ads could been clicked. It helps show how effectively your ads are engaging users compared to the competition. Impression share, on the other hand, shows how effective you’ve been at getting your ads shown to users.

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