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:
- Vlog #70: Katherine Watier Ong - Growing Your SEO Team & Voice Search
Katherine Watier Ong is owner of WO Strategies and she built her first web site in 1994 but has been doing SEO for over 15 years. She started doing SEO for a non-profits, and she got hooked on SEO after an SES Chicago event... - Google Does Not Rank Pages Before Content Analysis
Google's John Mueller was asked if Google maybe does a first round of ranking of a new page based on the URL, even before it does any content analysis. John responded on Twitter "not that I'm aware of." - Google BERT Does Not Determine Content Quality But Helps Understand Your Content
Another snippet from Marie Haynes interview of John Mueller was around BERT. The short snippet, as Glenn Gabe nicely summed up, is that BERT helps Google understand content better but it does not help Google with evaluating quality. - Google: Disavowing Links Would Rarely Help You Algorithmically
Google's John Mueller in an interview with Marie Haynes said that it would be "really rare" that disavowing links would result in your web site doing better in search algorithmically. Sure, if you have a manual action, maybe but not without a manual action. - It's A Bug: Google Rich Results For Home Pages Is Going Away
Friday we reported that Google was showing rich results for home pages. Well, it turned out this was "unintended" and "it's being fixed." Gary Illyes from Google responded to me on Twitter saying "this change was unintended and it's being fixed." - Google Dublin Pool Table
I bet it collecting a lot of dust now, but here is a photo from a while back of one of the pool tables at the Google Dublin office. We have shared photos of many different pool tables at Google's var
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Coronavirus Covid-19 Discussions at WebmasterWorld, WebmasterWorld
- The disavow tool works with both UTF-8 URLs and with punycode encoded URLs, so that shouldn't be a problem., John Mueller on Twitter
- Most sites are globally active. Just create & publish the content once. There's no need to make a separate page for every city in the world -- all it does it make each version less relevant. Mak, John Mueller on Twitter
- Finally, most important, I also apologize for the concern caused here. As said, we'll keep looking at how to improve both the results we present and better ways show the proper context about them., Danny Sullivan on Twitter
- Hi there, Your website's design is [..] brilliant [...] When I was looking at your site, though, I noticed that your website not getting much traffic according to your brilliant website so if you are interested, Gary Illyes on Twitter
- I don't think I've ever seen this carousel of idioms in the Dictionary Box before. #SEO cc: @rustybrick https://t.co/wJZ36V8qPG, Mordy Oberstein on Twitter
- Using Bing's new site scan tool in Bing Webmaster Tools and freaked out a bit when it failed and only attempted to crawl one url? Don't worry, the tool isn't using Bingbot IP addresses yet. So CloudFlare is blocking crawling. S, Glenn Gabe on Twitter
- We definitely understand the concern these types of comparative searches can cause and apologize for that. More important, we have done and will continue to do work to improve. As for these results in particul, Danny Sullivan on Twitter
- Working on improving page experience can take quite some time, and users appreciate any progress you make, so getting an early start is fine!, John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
- ‘What’s an ads guy doing running Google search?’
- How to use Google Ads Explanations to understand performance changes
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
- How to Use Google Optimize: Setup, Install, Test, Analyze, and Implement, ariel lim consulting
- Using BigQuery and Data Studio with Google Analytics App + Web, Ken Williams
- Web Vitals for SEOs: A guide to using and visualising their data, SALT.agency®
Industry & Business
Local & Maps
- The World's Best Bialys and Local Search's Worst Nightmare – Robots.txt, Mike Blumenthal
- Google Maps Updated to Include Black Lives Matter Plaza, Mike Blumenthal
Mobile & Voice
- Google Assistant can directly answer 'do black lives matter', 9to5Google
- Google Assistant will soon support stylers, more doorbells, 9to5Google
SEO
- Optimize Website - Page Experience - Core Web Vitals, Samuel Schmitt
PPC
Search Features
- First Result Fascination: Google's Search for a Featured Snippet Alternative, Brodie Clark Consulting
Other Search
