Webcology

Social Media Sites in 2020 And Facebook Goes To Court. Today on Webcology Jim is joined by Michelle Stinson Ross, Director of Marketing at Apogee Results. Michelle is a recognized authority on the search and social media both within the industry and in the greater business world. Besides being a fairly frequent guest on this show, listeners might have read her columns at Forbes, Search Engine Jour...

WordPress 5.4 And Privacy Concerns today on Webcology. Jumpshot, a popular marketing analytics tool, will be shut down by parent company Avast following controversy over the unauthorized sale of user data. Vice reports that the data in question is highly sensitive and was supposed to remain confidential. Documents obtained by Vice reveal how the Avast antivirus program collects data from people wh...

Jim Lehrer is one of the last of the great American Journalists, dead at age 85. Founder of what became PBS Newshour. Featured snippets are special boxes where the format of regular listings is reversed, showing the descriptive snippet first. Read more about how Google's Featured Snippets work. Google's John Mueller said on Reddit "A site is not going to outrank your site just because...

The Look Of Paid And Organic Search Results And 2020 Core Update. Google is rolling out an updated look for paid and organic search results on desktop, bringing it more in line with the look of mobile search results. The updated design includes a more prominent “Ad” label for paid results, at least in Google’s estimation, as well as favicons next to organic results. Google’s search ads on the desk...

SEO requirements at Google: Master’s degree or PhD in computer science, engineering, statistics, mathematics or a related discipline. On top of that, a Search Analyst for Google must also have multiple years of experience in SEO, project management, coding, and data analysis. Intent Research vs. Keyword Research, Intent and not being a pigeon. John Mueller and Fredric Dubut both mentioned Intent r...

​Researchers at MIT have found a way to make graphene with fewer wrinkles, and to iron out the wrinkles that do appear. They found each wafer exhibited uniform performance, meaning that electrons flowed freely across each wafer, at similar speeds, even across previously wrinkled regions. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Glenn Gabe noticed that if you try to block Google from showing...

Google has upgraded the built-in tool that shows up in search results for the query “mortgage calculator.” Now, the tool has many of the key features that were missing from the previous version of Google’s mortgage calculator. Commodity content is content that is used across a wide range of sites. For example, content that is pulled by a feed by an affiliate can be seen as commodity content. In th...

Google has launched what it calls “Your News Update,” an audio news feed that you access through the Google Assistant. Sources, which Google paid to license, include ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, AP, Politico, USAToday and many others — though apparently not NPR. Google has updated its video structured data help document with new information on some of the latest enhancements to video search results. The up...

Machine learning and entities have given search engines the capacity to better understand not just what a page is about but what various intents a searcher may have. A site owner rarely can create content to satisfy all possible intents and it's important to have methods or at the very least, develop instincts to assess which intents the engines are going to weight most heavily. This session l...

Dr. Pete, Pete Meyers, from Moz, posted on Twitter "Any algo update that impacts query interpretation or relevance will impact Featured Snippets." This was retweeted by Google's John Mueller, so I guess that is a vote of confidence without passing DA ;-). In all seriousness, we've all seen it, featured snippets are very finicky and change a lot but algorithm updates can cause them...

The Google My Business app is testing allowing business owners communicate with its customers not just through text but also through photos. Some business owners can now send photos to customers who message them via Google Maps and Google Local. Google added messaging to the Google My Business app a year ago after launching it in 2017 via SMS. Now according to Jane Manchun Wong, she posted on Twit...

Google announced that publishers can now create how-to “actions” for Google Assistant by using structured data. This is an opportunity for publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience on Google Assistant. Yahoo announced that all Yahoo Groups will be shut down on Monday, October 21st, and all Groups content will be removed on December 14th. After October 21st, users will no longer be able...

There is some early chatter in the SEO forums, including WebmasterWorld and some on social media. Some of the tools are showing some fluctuations as well today, where some others have not updated yet. Google announced it is changing the user agent name of the current GoogleBot in December. We knew this was coming when Google launched the new Evergreen GoogleBot. Google didn't change the user a...

​Tomorrow is Google's 21st birthday and Google has already released its very own birthday Doodle to celebrate. The Doodle depicts a desktop computer from 1998 and the old Google home page and old Google logo. Google's John Mueller said that if someone takes your image and embeds it on their site using your image URL as the source, also known as hotlinking images, that image would not be co...

Google announced an algorithm update intended to rank original news higher. Despite Google’s update, apparently an authority site like Yahoo News can syndicate content and outrank the original. In the past 24 hours or so, we had numerous reports sent to us that searchers are seeing only URLs for the Google search results snippets. The title and description portion of the snippets were missing. Lin...

​Google announced a change to the nofollow link attribute yesterday and with that announcement, Googlers spent the next day responding to questions about it on Twitter. I will go through what changed according to the announcement and then cover almost all of the responses from Google (removing duplicates) so you get a full perspective of this change. Nofollow is an HTML attribute that is added to...

In the latest installment of the #AskGoogleWebmasters video series, John Mueller tackles the topic of how Google chooses canonical URLs. Mueller says its common for websites to have multiple, unique URLs that lead to the same content. For example, there’s WWW and non-WWW versions of a URL. Another common configuration is when the homepage is accessible as index.html, or when upper and lowercase ch...

Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position. In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top i...

Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position. In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top i...

Google has confirmed that as of earlier this morning it is unable to index new content across the web. There is a bug that Google said is “impacting some sites.” But it is bigger than some sites. From our view, this seems much larger than just “some sites.” Clearly Google is eager to fix any indexing issues, because Google wants to surface the most recent content from publishers. For Google to not...

Google has confirmed that as of earlier this morning it is unable to index new content across the web. There is a bug that Google said is “impacting some sites.” But it is bigger than some sites. From our view, this seems much larger than just “some sites.” Clearly Google is eager to fix any indexing issues, because Google wants to surface the most recent content from publishers. For Google to not...

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 w...

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 w...

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...

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...