Webcology

Google’s John Mueller recently explained how query relevancy is determined for pages blocked by robots.txt. It has been stated that Google will still index pages that are blocked by robots.txt. But how does Google know what types of queries to rank these pages for? Dejan posted a Twitter poll the other day and it received almost 600 responses from within the SEO community. The question was "Go...

Google recently began informing YouTube users that Hangouts is being discontinued in 2019. This affects Google’s Webmaster Hangouts. Google’s John Mueller received notice at the same time as everyone else. Many of the tools available as part of the ‘Google for Small Business’ initiative have been developed based on feedback received from small business owners. The 2019 U.S. Search Awards has offic...

The data, provided by marketing analytics firm Jumpshot, showed that zero-click searches on Google have steadily risen over the past three years. In the first quarter of 2019, 48.96% of all U.S. Google searches captured by Jumpshot ended without a click, an increase of 12% from the first quarter of 2016. The data also showed that, in the first quarter of 2019, 41.45% of Google searches resulted in...

In a Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller answered a question from a web publisher who asked what to do about a suspected negative SEO attack. The web publisher asked if he should wait until he received a manual action from Google. John Mueller then stated that the links were likely normal spam links. Normal spam links happen naturally all the time. This has been the case since as long as I ca...

SEO Folks. Monday was Catfish Comstock's birthday. Catfish has been an SEO who has been a contributor to the community and knowledge-base as long as I can remember. As it turns out, it's also Carolyn Shelby's birthday. She too has dedicated her life to improving SEO and SEM. She has gone by the name Cshel forever. Google dropped a core update that day that they're going to insist o...

FACEBOOK CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG has appeared before Congress in the past, to talk about the giant social network’s role in misinformation and election-meddling, but the number of times he has appeared before a government committee is vastly outweighed by the number of times he has declined to do so. The Facebook co-founder continued that streak by failing to appear in Canada this week before an inter...

In the last week of April, nearly 23 percent of all traffic to news sites tracked by web analytics firm Parse.ly came from search engines. Google alone accounts for nearly half of the external referral traffic—traffic, that is, that comes from platforms, apps, and other outside sources— to news sites. Together with the fact that Facebook referral traffic is on the wane, this means that Google’s se...

Probably the biggest news for the SEO industry out of Google I/O yesterday was that Google said Googlebot is now evergreen, meaning it will stay up-to-date with the latest version of Chromium, their popular Chrome browser. This brings thousands of new features to Googlebot for crawling purposes. I did cover this last night at Search Engine Land and this news shouldn't come as a surprise to any...

Google appears to be rolling out an upgrade to Google Questions Answers (Q A) that uses previous answers to questions and Google Local Business (GMB) reviews to suggest answers to new questions in real time. A new consumer survey about Google SERP engagement, from Path Interactive , finds organic search results still dominate user attention but younger searchers are more inclined to look to conten...

Canada's federal privacy watchdog plans to take Facebook to court following an investigation that found the social media giant broke a number of privacy laws and failed to take responsibility for protecting Canadians' personal information. The electric scooter company Lime’s ongoing trial period in Brisbane, Australia isn’t going so great, according to Gizmodo — at least eight scooters hav...

Blaming a “very fluid” technology industry, Emtek –who BlackBerry licensed its BBM consumer business to in 2016 –has announced that is ending  BBM service, effective at the end of next month. Google is adding a new section to search results which are dedicated to AMP Stories. AMP Stories was announced over a year ago and now they’re rolling out in a big way. AMP Stories are exactly what they sound...

Google's John Mueller was answering questions around an old topic of Google showing only a sample of links in the link report in Google Search Console at Reddit. He said that generally if the links are not shown in the tool then they are "pretty irrelevant overall." For a long time now, Google has been teasing that they are working on closing the gap between how Chrome renders pages an...

AdWords Editor has historically been one of Google’s most popular advertising products. Contributor and Googler Matt Lawson lists what makes him most excited about its relaunch as Google Ads Editor. Ahrefs CEO Dmitry Gerasimenko announced a plan to create a search engine that supports content creators and protects users privacy. Dmitry laid out his proposal for a more free and open web, one that r...

Facebook confirmed Thursday in a blog post, prompted by a report by cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, that it stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plaintext for years. The discovery was made in January, said Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati, as part of a routine security review. None of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook, he said. Facebook admitted the security laps...

Not long after Google released a broad core algorithm update on March 12, some in the industry began calling it the “Florida 2 update.” But the moniker has created a bit of confusion among SEOs who wonder if this week’s release is related to the Florida update in November 2003. It’s not. Here’s what you need to know. oogle does several core ranking updates per year and confirms very few updates th...

Google has finally sent us an official statement about our question if Google use click through rate for rankings. Sadly the statement will lead to even more confusion and debate. After the debate around CTR rekindled last week, we asked Google for a statement from their PR team we can share around click-through rate. In short, various Googlers have told us over the years that CTR data is not used...

Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes, who has been with Google for over eight years working exclusively on search-related topics, participated in an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit over the weekend. Over the course of the lengthy discussion thread, he covered everything from robots.txt to RankBrain to behavioral signals to image and video search. We’ll save you the trouble of sifting throug...

In a case related to the New York Times investigation into American company Devumi, a court has ruled that Devumi can no longer operate in the same way as it had been, essentially outlawing the sale of social media followers and likes. The chief executive of cryptocurrency company Quadriga CX has died, and he's apparently the only one with the ability to unlock all his customers' coins. Wi...

Google's John Mueller was asked on Twitter if there is a way in the new Google Search Console to remove old Sitemaps files. He said you can 404 them to remove them. Maybe Google will add a button to delete old Sitemap files there but for now, 404ing them will eventually get them to be removed. A new mic icon. Below are screens from Android on the left and the iPhone on the right, showing Googl...

We saw this coming and now Google officially released a new sign up process for service area businesses, businesses that don't operate out of a specific location(s). Google now lets them specify the locations they service, instead of being stuck without any options. Google is testing a video overlay or lightbox feature to play videos in the mobile search results. In the search results captured...

Web hosting provider GoDaddy is inserting JavaScript code into websites, which could slow down performance or break sites altogether. A snippet of JavaScript code is being added to sites in order to use a technology called Real User Metrics (RUM). Google has finally fixed the exploit with the knowledge panel in their search results. It only took them about three years to do so, but it is fixed. Yo...

In this episode Jim and Dave shared the mic with advertising legend, Terry O'Reilly.  They discussed how brands like Gillette and Nike make the decision to push the envelope in making social commentary in their ads, the risks involved and hot to mitigate then. They went on to discuss how technology is changing the way we live, destroying some sectors and creating new ones.  It was an episode y...

A lot of news came out yesterday evening around an old Google knowledge panel exploit that let's you manipulate almost any query to show any knowledge panel. Yes, this is embarrassing for Google but even more so because it is something that was reported back in 2016. Have a lot of pages you want removed from the Google index and don't want to use the page removal tool for each URL? Google&...

Google can now link to some content it is showing in their search results in a new way. Instead of just linking to the page, Google can anchor you to the exact spot of the answer you are looking for and highlight the block of text that is most relevant to your query. This only works for some searches on Google mobile, that feature AMP content in the featured snippet block. Google is testing a bigg...

Today were joined by Michelle Stinson-Ross, the Director of Marketing Operations at Apogee Results to discuss a plethora of topics. Google has released its annual list of top searches around the world, including overall searches and searches in various categories. Top queries reflect everyday questions, as well as the people and events that made headlines in 2018. Certain events led to people sear...