Google Search Copied Content Mirror Site Canonical Bug
We’ve heard of Google ranking copied scraped content before and even getting the canonical wrong. But here is a clear night and day example of a site that copied another site completely, with the logo and everything but the URLs and Google Search thoug…
Google Search Planning New Virtual Events & Conferences For 2021
Martin Splitt of Google announced and confirmed that he and his colleagues are in the middle of the planning stages for the 2021 line up of Google Search virtual events and conferences. He said on Twitter “Good news, everyone! We are in the middle of s…
Google Confirmed Launching Subtopics Ranking In Mid-November 2020
Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that the search company launched the subtopics ranking feature or algorithm in November 2020, just weeks after announcing it at the Search On event in October 2020.
Google: 410 Status Code or 404 Status Code Are Both Fine
Google’s John Mueller responded to a concern in the Reddit forums that when it comes to the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the only real way to use a 404 page not found, is not to use a 404 but a 410 status code. John Mueller of Google said “404 is fine. …
Google News Intent Article Labels
Google seems to be categorizing and labeling news articles in mobile search by intent, such as interviews or other intents. Valentin Pletzer shows a screen shot of this in action. I am not sure if this is new but it is interesting to see Google autom…
Google Ads Begins Identity Verification
Since last March, March 2020, Google has been giving us a heads up about the Google Ads team doing some sort of verification for your Google Ads account. We learned a bit more in April but now I am seeing advertises getting emails from Google that say…
Vlog #102: Phillip Thune On The FindWhat Days In 2000 To Running Textbroker in 2020 – Part One
Here is episode 102 with industry vet Phillip Thune.
Phillip Thune’s Deep History In Search:
Phillip Thune is the current CEO of Textbroker and has been for over 10 years, but he goes back further in the search space including working for FindWhat in …
You Can Now Exclude Data From Google Ads Smart Bidding
Google Ads now allows you to exclude data from your smart bidding to prevent conversion tracking issues. Google said “to make it easy for you to prevent these technical issues from impacting Smart Bidding, we’re introducing data exclusions for Search,…
Google Does Not Issue Web Spam Actions Due To Email Spam
You don’t have to worry about email spam getting you in direct trouble in Google web search. Gary Illyes from Google confirmed that Google won’t take action in web search, through a manual action in Search Console, if you get caught spamming folks via …
Google Search Knowledge Graph For 25th Amendment and US Constitution
Google has a neat interactive knowledge graph box or panel for searches done on various amendments within the Constitution of United States of America. A lot of people now are searching for the 25th Amendment, which is about the removal of the sitting…
Google Ads Reps Get “Very Firm Reminder” If They Pitch Organic Ranking Benefits
We’ve covered here numerous times that Google Ads (formerly AdWords) spend has no impact on your Google organic web search rankings. In fact, we just covered that a search engineer said he has personally launched organic features that negatively impac…
Google My Business Begins Rolling Out New Performance Metrics / Insights
Google has been teasing us for some time about new performance metrics to replace or add-on to the Google My Business insights. Now I am seeing a new section in the Google My Business dashboard that says “Your metrics will move to a new-look report. S…
Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update Signals – January 7th & 8th 2021
I am seeing some signals and signs of a Google search ranking algorithm update touching down in the past day or so. The chatter is limited but it is there and it is unusual. The tools, most of them, are showing big shifts in the Google organic search…
Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Question Hub Expands, Bing Webmaster Tools Crawl & Index Data & Google My Business Performance Reports
I posted the monthly Google Webmaster Report for January 2021, it is a good place to catch up on the past month of SEO stuff. I am seeing some early signs of another unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update…
Google Local Panel Health & Safety Pop Up Overlay
Back in October 2020 businesses could add health and safety information to their Google My Business profile. Shortly later Google began testing displaying them in the local panel for those businesses. Now the desktop interface has changed a bit that …
Google Search Interesting Finds List Adds Related Tags
Google has been adding “interesting finds” to the search results since 2018. But now, if you click to show more results for interesting finds, Google will let you expand those results by related tags or topics. Glenn Gabe spotted this and posted an e…
Carolyn Lyden Joins The Search Engine Land & SMX: Reaction
As you all know, I have been with Search Engine Land and SMX since the company was founded and the company has been through many changes over the past 14+ years. And one of those changes happened this week with the hire of the new “director of search …
Google Data Studio Can Pull Search Console News Queries
The folks at the Google Analytics posted on Twitter yesterday that if you are using Google Data Studio and using the connection feature to Search Console, you can now bring in query data filtered by Google News sources. Google said “the Data Studio Se…
Google Working On Improving Robots.txt Tester Tool
Gary Illyes from Google confirmed he is slowly working on improving the robots.txt tester tool, which is currently available on the old version of Google Search Console. He said on Twitter “we’re currently in the process(*) of integrating the tester wi…
Google Maps Calling Out Square Ad Pins As Ads
In June Google launched new square map pins to take the shape of advertisements in Google Maps. Well, now Google is making it clear to some Google Maps users that these square pins are ads. Aaron Grote shared a screenshot of Google overlaying a dialog…