Webcology

A general show about SEO and Google news. Dave and Jim talk about Google’s upcoming open virtual conference, announcements Google reps made during the week, the difference in importance between content and links, and weirdness with the newest version of WordPress. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

A new episode Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Jim and Dave walk through the weekly news touching on many of the things affecting the search engine world this week. We spend a lot of time talking about how search engines now render pages based on an article Dave wrote in Search Engine Journal with input from a few notable Googlites. We also cover a vulnerability in DIVI WordPress Themes, TikTok as a Greased Up Punching Bag, how four-letter com...

A new episode Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Jim and Dave talk through a weird set of news stories that point to a future in marketing built on writing, crafting, treating, and moving data. It was a strange episode because we meant to cover a series of seemingly unrelated stories without realizing the thread connecting the majority of them was improvements in AI and how big data is changing the careers of search marketing professionals. Adve...

One of the originals, Terry Van Horne joins Dave and Jim to talk about both old school and new entity driven SEO. A wide ranging conversation touching on Terry's new podcast with Bill Slawski, the evolution of Google over Terry's career, and how schema and AI are changing the ways Google works. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/pri...

Week 18 of the COVID crisis and the world feels like it's trying to find control. This turned out to be a general news show looking at a dozen or so things that happened over the week. When you've lost Lego, you've lost the moral high ground. Hundreds of brands have vanished from Facebook as the advertising boycott pushes Mark Zuckerberg down to 4th richest person on Earth and driven F...

Today on the show we take a deep dive into optimizing e commerce and much more with our guest Khalid Saleh. Khalid is the co-founder of Invesp, an e commerce optimization company. He has more than 12 years of experience in ecommerce architecture, design and implementation, and is an in-demand speaker at industry events such as Emetrics, SMX, Conversion conference, DMA, PubCon and more Today we tal...

These are extraordinary times. The most important thing is to say something and we say, empathically, BLACK LIVES MATTER. Racism has no place in policing, policy, or in our politics. We are so close to being so much better and we can be better but we have to want to be. Webcology stands for equity, equality, and collective advancement through analysis and understanding. This was a busy episode. We...

Bennett Kelley from the internet and cyberlaw business report joins Jim and Dave to talk about Trump’s Executive Order attacking social media platforms.  Bennett talks about how an Executive Order is introduced, the potential implications of this EO, what it might cover, how it might be litigated in the future, and the issues it might raise for online publishing going forward. Dave and Jim also co...

Kristine Schachinger sat in this week for Dave who is taking a local staycation. We had another wide ranging conversation covering everything from the Google May Core Update to Twitter’s suggested new policy allowing posters to select who can see or comment on Tweets. We also talked about the DoorDash - Pizza Arbitrage article that appeared in the economics blog The Margins. A pizza shop owner dis...

Google's John Mueller responded to a tweet asking why Pinterest ranks so well in Google search when the Pinterest pages have little to no textual content on the pages. John Mueller from Google said "sometimes images, even with minimal textual content, can be exactly what people are looking for. Not always, and sometimes we get it wrong, but it's certainly an option." It is hard to...

LinkedIn's www.linkedin.com pages dropped out of the Google search results for about 10 hours. But when it came back, it all came back really quickly. The SEO community is asking how did Google reprocess everything so quickly and how did LinkedIn return in Google search so quickly. The easiest way to explain it was that IF (we do not know what LinkedIn did for sure) LinkedIn went into Google S...

Google Meet, the company’s premium video conferencing product, is now free for anyone who wants to use it. Previously known as ‘Google Hangouts Meet,’ the tool has only been available to G Suite customers until now. Last month, the premium version of Meet was made free to existing G Suite users. People could join a Meet call without paying for the product, but the call still had to be started by s...

SERP analysis is an essential step in the process of content optimization to outrank the competition on Google. SERP (Search Engine Result Page) analysis is part of keyword research and helps you understand if the query that you identified is relevant for your business goals. More importantly by analyzing how results are organized, we can understand how Google is interpreting a specific query. Goo...

Jim and Dave welcome Daniel Faggella, the Head of research and CEO of Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research. Called upon by the United Nations, World Bank, INTERPOL, and many global enterprises, Daniel is a globally sought-after expert on the competitive strategy implications of AI for business and government leaders. He also hosts the AI in Business Podcast where he interviews top AI and machine...

There is no denying that the global COVID-19 pandemic has, and will continue to have, an incredibly profound impact on life as we know it. In the wake of cascading national lockdowns, people worldwide are depending on digital mediums more than ever to stay connected, communicate critical information, and continue to do business. Today we’re sharing a collection of revelatory, deeply compelling dat...

Brian Freiesleben shared a screenshot of a featured snippet showing up not in the first position of the Google Search results page but lower down on the page. Back in the old days, I thought featured snippets can show in multiple locations but we could be wrong. Maybe since the new deduplication change, it stopped. Google search will adopt the SpecialAnnouncement structured data type, the company...

COVID-19 has evolved into a global event impacting public health as well as the economy. These are uncertain times, and we don't have all the answers, but what we do know now is that small businesses have felt sudden changes in their campaign performance as a result of this worldwide pandemic. We’ve seen that global events often impact PPC performance, and COVID-19 is no exception. As business...

Google support is one of the biggest issues people have been worried about since the beginning of COVID-19. Google has been posting notices in the Google Ads and Google My Business (as well as other products) help areas that phone and other support areas may be slow or unavailable. Google said this is "in light of COVID-19" challenges. We should all be patient with each other during these...

Google announced, "In March 2020, Google will introduce a new Business Operations verification program." Basically, if you are asked to verify your business and you do not within 30-days, Google Ads may place restrictions on advertiser's ads serving. It says "Advertisers may be asked to provide information about their business operations as part of a new verification program. This...

Tulsi Gabbard lost a lawsuit she filed against Google when U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled Gabbard had no valid claim that Google violated the 1st Amendment because Google is a private company, not a governmental agency. Gabbard’s campaign was trying to argue Google should be considered a “state actor”, the equivalent of a government or government department and thus subject to the...

Search Console is being upgraded by Google thus giving users the ability to download complete sets of data from reports. Previously, the Search Console only allowed users to download specific table views. In addition to exporting more and better data, Search Console reports will be easier to read once they’re downloaded. This change is being made in response to requests from Search Console users a...

Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller is planning to investigate a particular link building practice and is seeking assistance from SEOs. Aleyda Solis started a thread on Twitter bringing attention to a deceitful form of link building that has been popping up. The tactic involves an individual claiming to own an image used in an article and demanding credit in the form of a backlink. Solis...

Google Partners program is launching later this year, which may require current partner companies to make several changes. For companies to maintain their Google Partner status, they will have to meet a new set of requirements that go into effect in June 2020. Google is sending emails to partner companies to help them determine whether they’ll maintain partner status as per the new requirements. T...