October 2017 Google Webmaster Report
This past month was filled with many many Google algorithm shifts, ranking changes, tools going nuts and chatter at all times high. We saw lots of ranking changes last week which Google didn’t really confirm. Then the week of September 15th or so and…
Google Replaces First Click Free Program With Flexible Sampling: Metering & Lead-In
With no surprise, Google has announced they are moving away from the first click free program, which is how Google handled paywalled content in search for a decade with what they are calling “flexible sampling.”
Flexible sampling is offered in two for…
Different Title Tags To GoogleBot & GoogleBot Mobile
What if you serve GoogleBot one title tag and GoogleBot Mobile a different title tags/attributes? Google’s John Mueller said that Google would likely just ignore it…
Bing Ads Offline Conversion Imports
A couple weeks ago, Bing posted on their Bing Ads blog about a new feature to allow you to import your offline conversion data into Bing Ads. Then Bing pulled the blog post. They reposted it a few days later…
Google AdWords Restricts Addiction Rehab Ads Over Abuse
Looking for Google AdWords ads around some of the more popular drug addiction rehabilitation queries might prove to be hard these days. The Verge reported that Google is cracking down on these industries after noticing a lot of abuse in these industri…
Google: No Changes On Use Of Image Meta Data In Search
Back in 2014, Matt Cutts formerly of Google talked about meta data in images and basically said they reserve the right to use it, that Google is able to parse it out but did not comment if they use it for rankings or display or both…
Why Does Google USA Returns Snippet For Warsaw Children’s Dance School?
If you go to Google and search for [google usa] the first result that comes up has a title of “szkoÅ’a taÅ”ca dla dzieci Warszawa – Google.” That translates to “Warsaw Children’s Dance School – Google.” The URL does go to Google.com but a variation of it…
Google: Competition Different Across Different Country Domains
Google’s John Mueller in a webmaster hangout earlier this month said at the 8:30 mark into the video that just because you rank well in one Google regions, it does not mean you will rank well in another…
Google Call Only Ads Now Support Ad Extensions
While I was offline last week, Google AdWords announced that call-only ads now support new ad extensions…
Google Does Not Support TravelAction Schema, Yet
The TravelAction schema is designed markup for to markup your HTML to show the “act of traveling from an fromLocation to a destination by a specified mode of transport, optionally with participants.” But this is not yet supported in search…
Google On Algorithm & Ranking Updates This Week: We’re Always Improving Our Search Results
Starting around Tuesday of this week, we noticed Google algorithm and ranking shifts throughout the SEO industry and search results. There were significant chatter and the algorithm watching tools all, all of them, were responding heavily to the chang…
Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Algorithm Update, Sitelinks Searchbox Bug, Apple Drops Bing & Happy Birthday Google
This week in search I cover the pretty big ongoing Google algorithm and ranking shifts, you want to check this out. Google said they do look for spam patterns between Search Console accounts. Google bug dropped the Sitelinks search box…
New: Bulk Cancel Inactive Google AdWords Account
You can now cancel in bulk your inactive Google AdWords accounts from your manager account. All you need to do is login, select them and click edit and then cancel.
Sign in to your AdWords manager account…
Google Checks For Spam Patterns Between Search Console Accounts?
Google’s John Mueller responded to a question on Twitter asking if Google will penalize the other sites in your Google Search Console account if one of those sites got a penalty. John Mueller did not say no, he said it depends…
Now Live: Google Local Finder Website Mentions
It was very revealing when Google started testing website mentions in the local finder…
Google Now Serving More AMP Content In Mobile Search Results
The folks over at RankRanger show in their tracker tool that AMP, accelerated mobile pages, has shown a spike in how often they show up now, compared to a few days ago…
No, Google Isn’t Ranking M-Dot Domains Higher Than Responsive Sites
This is a funny one, I spotted John Mueller of Google having to tell a webmaster/SEO that Google is not giving a special ranking boost to m-dot mobile sites…
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 27, 2017
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:
More Google Algorithm & Search Results Shuffling
Yea, yea, yea…
Google AMP URLs With usqp=mq331AQCCAE= Is A Test
Some folks are noticing Google serving two flavors of their AMP URLs to users. One is your normal AMP URL and the other is the AMP URL with usqp=mq331AQCCAE= appended to the end of the URL…
Google Drops Sitelinks Search Box
It looks like Google has killed off the Sitelinks searchbox that launched in 2014 and has been shown for many sites in the mobile and desktop search results…