Webcology

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...

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...