Webcology

Facebook said Wednesday that as many as 87 million people might have had their data accessed — an increase from the 50 million disclosed in published reports. Apple Hires Google’s A.I. Chief as Ben Gomes To Take Over Search At Google, John Giannandrea Steps Down. John Giannandrea who replaced Amit Singhal as head of Google Search is going to Apple. Plus, how structured Data helps a site rank, SEO...

Jim Hedger and guest host Kristine Schachinger welcome Alicia Wanless-Berk – Digital Propaganda Expert @ La Generalista. La Generalista is an online publication that investigates influence and propaganda in a digital age.  Plus, with Google pushing into retail and Amazon into advertising, where should you invest your ad budget, and No Reset button for penalized sites Advertising Inquiries: https:/...

Google will start deactivating AdWords accounts next week if they have not spent any money in the past 15 months. This will occur automatically in an attempt to “speed up” the AdWords experience. An email notification will be sent to individual AdWords users when their account has been deactivated. Mike Blumenthal reports that Google is now slowly rolling out the new Google My Business dashboard t...

According to a report from Reuters, the European Commission has proposed new rules that will require search engines, commerce sites and online platforms to explain how they rank results and to reveal why companies are penalized or removed from listings or results. Google is showing answers in the search results without showing any organic listings or ads or anything but the answer. Yehoshua Coren...

Joost de Valk opens a Diversity Fund. It aims to cover the cost of travel and accommodation for speakers that increase the diversity of speakers at a given conference. Plus, Site  or page update frequency is not a ranking signal   Occlus Wrecked? Google: Titles Descriptions Are Easy Wins For SEO; Bing has confirmed support for JSON-LD formatted Schema.org markup; Google Image Search Product Schema...

Backlinko has done an extensive analysis of “voice search ranking factors” and identified 11 variables tied to appearing in Google Home results. The company examined 10,000 results delivered over the smart speaker. What Backlinko found was consistent with what many others have been saying but there were also a few surprises. For example, the study discounts the impact of Schema to some degree and...

RIP Jill Sampey; Google: Content Order, Position Placement Matters. Where you place your content on your page can impact your rankings.  Daron Babin got a couple cats. WebmasterRadio. FM just wanted to be sure everyone knows that. We’re one of the 12 best! We’re one of the 12 best! Vote early, vote often. Vote like a Ruskiebot with a stolen VPN. China cracks down on funeral strippers hired to ente...

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 l...

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...

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 align...

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...

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 fa...

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 file...

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 alg...

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

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.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redc...

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...

Today on Webcology our hosts Jim Hedger and Dave Davies go through all of your weekly headlines. Google Expands Phone Call Organic Links In Search Results. Back in March 2016, it was reported that Google was showing phone number extensions in the organic search results snippets. Well, that seems to now be expanding beyond the US and into other regions. Twitter is testing a 280 character limit, whi...

Jim Hedger and Dave Davies motor through a litany of topics from Googles new features to Politics. , Google said they will not be moving sites to the mobile first index that are not ready for the mobile first index. Not yet at least. Google has once again been called out for algorithmically encouraging the spread of dubious, politically charged speculation and misinformation around a topical news...

Today on Webcology we go through a massive amount content from the internet world. Google’s focus on local search the past couple of years has some expecting local search traffic to play a heightened role for brick-and-mortar retailers this coming holiday. Google is now teeing up some new shopping features and reporting capabilities ahead of the holiday shopping season. We ask the questions Do Goo...

Dave Davies returns from the MERGE Conference 2017 in Orlando and welcomes aboard alongside co-host Jim Hedger: Mary Davies (President of Beanstalk Internet Marketing, Inc.) who spoke on a panel about how to get traffic from Facebook, why you should boost posts, and how to properly manage Facebook campaigns. Michelle Stinson-Ross (Gruen Digital Marketing Agency, VP of Marketing Sales)who spokeabou...

Lurie has recently posted a presentation entitled Burying Hate Speech in the SERPS, where he explains,"Google tries to handle hate sites, but they can't. Racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic, and other content find their way into the rankings every day. Lurie talks about two strategies I've used to push those sites down the rankings. Gord Downie, the lead singer for the beloved Canadian...

Today on Webcology we start off with a Google Search Algorithm Ranking Update. We had a Google algorithm update over the weekend, starting probably late Friday, October 6th and rolling out over the weekend. Most took notice on Saturday, October 7th but the chatter is still fairly strong and will likely remain strong for a net couple of days. It turns out Google Mobile Ranking updated. A lot of fol...

Today on Webcology we talk about everything need to know up and coming in internet toys. Plus we touch a very cool way a band used facebook live delay. Google's John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a hangout at the 15:38 mark that Google is indeed testing the mobile first index in the live search results. With this test, Google is not only looking to see how much it impacts the searchers and cu...

Today on Webcology the guys get into a bunch of different topics to keep you in the know. They speak about Google expanding phone call organic links in search results, Google was showing phone number extensions in the organic search results snippets. Well, that seems to now be expanding beyond the US and into other regions. Is Twitter on the decline? The rest of Twitter’s business looked more or l...