Webcology

​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...

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...