Google Tests Desktop Results Without Favicons; The Old Design
Some folks are seeing Google test the old Google desktop search interface. Remember the one before Google launched those (what I feel are horrible) favicons and black ad labels for the snippets? Yea, Google is testing showing the old interface to some…
Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Featured Snippet Deduplication, Data-Vocabulary Deprecation, Google Datasets Search & More
This week in search Google deduplicated, as they are calling it, the featured snippets URLs, so if you have a featured snippet…
Google Rolls Out Profile Icon To Local Knowledge Panel
Google announced this a while back but now it seems to be rolling out. Profile icons for your local knowledge panel is now showing up on many local knowledge panels. Google has been testing this for about a year but it should be live for most business…
Google Dataset Search Is Now Out Of Beta With New Features
Google announced that Google Dataset Search which launched in beta in 2018 is now out of beta. With that launch, it added several new features. This can probably be used for awesome research when developing rich content and might also send traffic to…
Google Search Console Performance Reports Not Impacted By Featured Snippet Change
Just to be clear, and honestly, I am surprised so many people do not know this, but the featured snippet change from the other day has no impact on the Google Search Console performance reports. That report only counts the top-most result anyway, so th…
A Google Search Algorithm Ranking Update On January 23rd?
This is going to be a hard one to judge because I see chatter within the SEO community and also many of the tracking tools are lighting up. These are all signs that there was a Google search ranking algorithm update. But truth is, this can be directl…
Google’s Gary Illyes Not Surprised When SEOs Complain When Low Quality Content Is Not Indexed
Gary Illyes from Google posted on Twitter a sarcastic GIF of what he said “Everyone’s reaction when low quality and spammy content is not indexed anymore.” I posted that GIF above, so you can see it, but here is the tweet:
Google Now Drops A Site’s Normal Snippet When Featured Snippet Is Displayed
In November 2019 we saw Google testing removing the normal snippet from the Google search results when Google shows a featured snippet for that site/URL. Well after numerous tests, Google has launched this yesterday and is no longer showing a featured…
Google: Reciprocal Links Aren’t Necessarily Bad But…
John Mueller from Google said on Twitter that “Reciprocal links aren’t necessarily bad.” But he did warn that Google is good at finding “link schemes & similar games that are sometimes played in that space.” Here is the tweet:
John Mueller Once Messed With A Web Site Hacker
John Mueller from Google said that he once messed with web site hacker who hacked content onto one of his sites. He said the content started to rank, so he locked out the hacker and replaced the hacker’s affiliate links with his own.
Google Sending data-vocabulary.org Schema Deprecation Notices
Google announced yesterday that starting on April 6, 2020 it will no longer support data-vocabulary.org schema. Hours later, Google began sending notifications via Google Search Console about this happening. Here is an example from Peter Nikolow.
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Google Still Does Support Microformats; At Least For Now
With Google saying yesterday that they are deprecating support for data-vocabulary markup because of the “popularity of schema.org” – some would assume microformats is next. But John Mueller from Google said microformats are still supported and there…
Google: .gov Domain Names Do Not Get A Ranking Boost
John Mueller of Google said again, .gov TLDs, top level domain names, do not get a ranking boost or preference in Google search. Having a .gov, just because it is a .gov, does not directly help you rank better. However, a lot of .gov domain names hav…
Google: A Site Won’t Outrank You Just By Using Hidden Text
Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit “A site is not going to outrank your site just because of hidden text.” He also added “Inversely, just having hidden text on a page won’t get the site banned from Google.”
Google: We Made Significant Updates To Mobile-First Indexing Developer Docs
Google has announced that it made “significant updates” to its developers documentation on mobile-first indexing. You can see the new docs over here and here is the cached version that is old (updated in October 2019).
Vlog #39: Mike Grehan – The Search Industry Pioneer Who Sees The Future
Mike Grehan (@mikegrehan) is one of the first people I looked to for guidance, knowledge and education when I first began my journey in the SEO industry…
Video: Google Image Search Ranking & Optimization
Google has released a new video on how image search rankings work. John Mueller of Google answered how to rank images on Google and provided useful tips on the topic.
Daily Search Forum Recap: January 21, 2020
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
Google To Drop Data-Vocabulary On April 6th…
Overthinking Natural Links? Google: If It Is Natural, It Is Natural.
Is it this simple? John Mueller of Google said on Twitter “You’re overthinking it. If the link is natural, then it’s a natural link.” It makes sense to me? I mean, if you are building and forcing new links, is that natural? Is there a gray area?
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Google AMP Stories Expands To Animals, Insects & More
When Google launched AMP Stories, it was mostly to cover people and news events around people. Now it seems to have expanded beyond human beings and to animals, insects and more.