Webcology

Content, from an SEO perspective, is the connection of entities by relationships. In the statement, “SEO is dead” there is the entity “SEO”, there is the entity “dead” and there is the relationship that one connects to the other and the direction of the said relationship. All content is fundamentally like this. Google's John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a video hangout that Google does not use the BBB, Better Business Bureaus score or reviews as well as other third-party trust sites in their ranking algorithm. So all that talk about making sure you have a good BBB score with the core updates is really completely unrelated to core search rankings. The other day, Google launched a new portal named web.dev that pretty much has lighthouse, another Google tool, results for your audit. One of the lighthouse results is an SEO score. So I asked SEOs, should Google be scoring their SEO this way? 

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Long gone are the times of monthly Google PageRank updates, Google dances, and checking Google data centers - and to be honest, I somewhat miss those days. But the question I see asked a lot is how much have things changed? The answer is a lot has changed but fundamentally nothing has changed. Several people have recently reported seeing double featured snippets in Google search results. A double featured snippet is a featured snippet with a second featured snippet beneath it. This arrangement effectively shows information from two websites and advertising in the space normally showing ten websites. Growing up in India, there was one good library in my town that I had access to—run by the British Council.  It was modest by western standards, and I had to take two buses just to get there. But I was lucky, because for every child like me, there were many more who didn’t have access to the same information that I did. Access to information changed my life, bringing me to the U.S. to study computer science and opening up huge possibilities for me that would not have been available without the education I had.  

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Google's Gary Illyes said at PubCon last week that Google finds content mostly through links and XML Sitemaps. He said the number one way is through links, crawling links on the web and the number two way is through XML Sitemaps. Google announced it is now rolling out the Google Lens button within Google Image search results. Google Lens, which was introduced in May 2017, is a visual search tool to help people learn more about images and what they are visually looking at.Google has announced that Maps now provides accessibility information for more than 40 million listings. The company attributes this accomplishment to an initiative launched last year. In July 2017, Google started letting users add accessibility details to business listings. At that time, Google said accessibility information was available to roughly 7 million listings around the world. In a little over a year, that number has increased by over 30 million.

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Google seems to be testing an ad format on mobile search where they remove the description section from the ad. The ad copy is removed, the only thing you see are the headlines and URL. This was being tested on mobile in the bottom ad units.Facebook announced it’s expanding fact-checking efforts to review the accuracy of photos and videos. Until now Facebook’s fact-checking efforts have been focused on reviewing articles to reduce the spread of false news. Going forward, all of Facebook’s 27 fact-checking partners in 17 countries will also be focused on reducing the spread of misinformation through photos and videos. Amazon will surpass Oath and Microsoft to become the third largest digital ad seller in the U.S. behind Facebook and Google. That’s the latest from research firm eMarketer, which predicts Amazon’s ad growth will more than double this year. As eMarketer notes, the change in projection — up 60 percent from March — is due to a combination of an accounting change and 10 to 12 percent increase in stronger-than-expected ad revenue growth.

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Google has announced the new Google Search Console is out of beta after being tested for over a year. Over the year, Google has done a full open beta invite to all users and has been migrating features from the old Google Search Console to the new version. Google has launched a new type of search engine designed specifically around helping people find data. Simply called “Dataset Search,” the tool provides easier access to millions of datasets across thousands of data repositories on the web. Chrome 69 introduces performance enhancements as well as changes that will affect how users search. Chrome also introduces opportunities for developers to create interesting user experiences on mobile devices.The most dramatic change is a new feature called Omnibox Smart Answers. It allows users to get answers to questions in the address bar without loading a website.  These are rich results shown in the address bar. Chrome calls the address bar the Omnibox. And it calls the rich results shown in the Omnibox, Smart Answers. 

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Google has launched a new type of search engine designed specifically around helping people find data. Simply called “Dataset Search,” the tool provides easier access to millions of datasets across thousands of data repositories on the web. Chrome 69 introduces performance enhancements as well as changes that will affect how users search. Chrome also introduces opportunities for developers to create interesting user experiences on mobile devices. Google has announced the new Google Search Console is out of beta after being tested for over a year. Over the year, Google has done a full open beta invite to all users and has been migrating features from the old Google Search Console to the new version.

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Google has officially launched their structured data codelab, which allows you to walk through a step-by-step process to make your own structured data for your web site. Google's codelab walks you through adding several types of structured data to a simple HTML site, including where to place structured data on a site and how to validate it. Google also announced some important changes to how user management and rights work within the Google Search Console. In a pair of tweets Tuesday morning the president said, “Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me others, so that almost all stories news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of…. results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. 

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Google trends analyst John Mueller strongly recommended that people migrating from HTTP to HTTPS do so with 301 redirects on a per-URL basis. He said you should not use other types of redirects, such as 303s or others; you should stick with 301 redirects for these migrations. Google has now added a link to the help document for this new report, saying the new report is “more accurate than the old Links to your site report.” Google felt the need to explain this so people would know that a drop in links from the old to the new report doesn’t mean Google sees fewer links to their site, it just means the new report is more accurate. Facebook has a life event feature in which users create a special post declaring the life event and details like the date, description, and even photos. To check it out, go to your name on your personal page on the top left, select “about”, you will find out how to add life events to your personal Facebook page. This will give you an idea more about the life event posts from the user experience.

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Google Confirms Broad Core Algorithm Update: The Facts Advice; Google mobile speed update has no impact on general mobile rankings; Bing Ads rolls out Target CPA Maximize Conversionsbidding strategies.

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Davie Davies reports from MozCon 2018, and he speaks with Rob Bucci, the CEO of STAT Search Analytics talks about his presentation on Near me or Far: How Google May Be Deciding Your Local Intent for You annd Jono Alderson, the Mad Scientist at Yoast who spoke on The Democratization of SEO.

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