Webcology

John Mueller from Google said on Twitter that if you are building a new site, then you should most likely go HTTPS from the start. I don't think anyone would argue with that. Switching from HTTP to HTTPS can have its challenges but starting your site off on HTTPS from the onset makes a lot of sense. The folks at RankRanger posted on Twitter that over 70% of the page one Google search results listings are HTTPS. Mozcast has their number of Google's top search results with HTTPS being at 78%, so they are somewhat close but not exact because both tools track different keyword sets. When people were searching about the horrible news in Florida, some noticed that some of the recent articles covering the news were labeled by Google has being written days before the event. Obviously, something that happened hours ago, written potentially minutes ago, should not be labeled in the Google search results as being written 2 or 3 days ago.

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Today on Webcology Google is sending out new Google Search Console notifications to some webmasters asking them to "provide a manifest and high resolution favicon for" their web sites. I guess Google wants higher resolution favicons to show up in the Chrome browser. Google announced they have a new AdWords policy around ticket resellers. Specifically they now "require all event ticket resellers to be certified and to radically increase their transparency." Also today they announced a new ranking algorithm designed for mobile search. The company is calling it the “Speed Update,” and it will only impact a small percentage of queries, Google reiterated to us. Only pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users” will be impacted by this update, the company says. Most recently, Google has partnered with open-source content management system (CMS) WordPress, arguably the largest, with market share nearing 59 percent and an estimated 1/3 of all web content published through the platform. 

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Search ad click growth fell, ad spend rose 23% across Google, Bing, Yahoo as Bing and Yahoo saw search ad spend jump 32 percent over prior year in Q4 among Merkle's client base. Google spend growth slowed slightly from Q3. David Szetela, host of PPC Rockstars weighs in. 
Plus, There’s a difference between indexing and ranking, Google gets all Amped UP over words, and Ranking in Google by aligning around search content

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Today on Webcology our hosts bring you all the latest in SEO and Google David Harry. Harry is a senior SEO consultant with Verve Developments and the founder of the SEO Training Dojo. HuffPost has decided to shut down their entire contributor's platform, which was launched in May 2005. The platform was home to about 100,000 contributors, who covered everything from finance to relationships. In its place, HuffPost has decided to replace the contributor content with two new sections: Opinion and Personal, which are pretty self-explanatory. The New York Times reports that the contributor platform was only about 10 to 15 percent of its site traffic, so HuffPost isn’t losing a significant amount of traffic from the change. Digital agency ROAST has released a Voice Search Ranking Report which seeks to categorize and understand how Google processes and response to voice queries. It also tries to determine when Google Home uses featured snippets/Answer Box results and when it does not.The company used keyword analytics to compile a list of “616 key phrases in the UK featuring snippet answer boxes.” It then determined the top phrases by query volume across a range of verticals. The tests were run in November and compared Google Home and traditional search results.

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Facebook moves to ‘fix’ the News Feed by de-emphasizing commercial content. The company said it's trying to prevent posts from 'businesses, brands and media' from crowding out 'the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.Now, with Facebook changing its news feed to emphasize posts from friends and family, rather than those from media and brands, publishers face a new challenge to the world to which they most recently adapted. Facebook's changing algorithms will force publishers to adjust how they manage their online spaces. It likely will end – or at least reduce the effectiveness of – the common tactic of throwing every article up on the publisher's Facebook wall to see what sticks. Publishers will now have to put up content that produces conversation without using gimmicks to inflate clicks and comments. Google announced yesterday a new ranking algorithm designed specifically to downgrade the search rankings of really slow mobile pages. Google said "starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches."

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The new Google Search Console is rolling out over the next few weeks to all webmasters and you will be able to access the new Google Search Console and the old one via links in the navigation. So you can play with both side by side, as Google keeps adding more and more features in the new version. Google's John Mueller said in a video hangout that the URLs Google finds in your XML sitemap files are often used to define your canonical URLs. Then they go over a list of experts sharing the best single piece of advice they've gotten when using SEO.

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Today on Webcology we ring in the new year with a whole new set of great breakthroughs. First the surprising thing Google learned about its employees, and what it means for today’s students. It turns out that is a gross simplification of what students need to know and be able to do, and some proof for that comes from a surprising source, Google. Also Google confirms mid-December search ranking algorithm updates. Google has confirmed what many in the search industry have seen over the past week, updates to their algorithm that are significantly shifting rankings in the SERPs. As the updates continue to roll out, early indications suggest disruptions in mobile SERPs, sites with no schema data those relying on doorway pages being most impacted.

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Jim Hedger and Dave Davies are joined Jennifer Van Iderstyne, Gretchen Shelby-Dormer Jeremy Knauff and Patrick Stox for a SEO 2017 End of Year Roundtable. Google algorithm changes and search results, AI and voice search, mobile and machine learning and more. 

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U.S. regulators ditch net neutrality rules as legal battles loom, plus Google isn't just good for finding cat videos on the internet. The search giant's machine learning technology is also helping search the universe for planets outside our solar system. Plus breaking news on how Google Search Console beta adds 12+ months of data to performance reports. 

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Net Neutrality Protests in front of Verizon stores; Feud between Amazon and Google has Google cut YouTube stream to Amazon products.
If you’re in Zurich, John Meuller is thinking of doing another live hangout from Google’s Zurich offices. Contact him on Twitter @JohnMu to inquire. 
Blog for Bribes could get you penalized
Roughly three years ago, Yahoo and Mozilla announced that Yahoo would be the default search engine on Firefox in the US. That relationship ended early when Mozilla released the much-improved Firefox Quantum browser last month, with Google as the default search provider.
So Verizon is suing Mozilla for dropping Yahoo as the default search engine but Mozilla is counter-suing suggesting Yahoo didn’t keep up search quality after its sale to Verizon. 

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