Daily Search Forum Recap: July 28, 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:

• Hacked Government Web Pages With Adult Content In Google Search
  Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison was on the defensive yesterday when there were a number of complaints that Google was showing adult content from governmental web sites. The issue is, it is not a Google bug, instead, it is the governmental web sites were hacked to show this content.
• Google Top Stories Tests "For Context" Section
  Google Top Stories is fun and we've seen Google test a lot of different features around it, including adding more descriptions. But now, Google is testing showing a news story with more context using a "For context" section that shows other news stories related to the story in the carousel.
• Bing Webmaster Tools Adds Robots.txt Tester
  In the beta version of the new Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing recently added a robots.txt tester. This is like the Google version but this quickly shows you the difference between the HTTP and HTTPS version of the URL.
• Googlers Working From Home For Another Year - Through July 2021
  Google announced it will allow its employees to work from home for another year, through July 2021. The company pushed its work from home policy out from March 2020 through July 2021. John Mueller from Google said on Twitter "It sucks. But also, the whole situation sucks for everyone. It'll get better again, but it's going to take quite a bit of time."
• Google Testing Tools Now Shows Web Story
  Google announced this morning on Twitter that its testing tools can now recognize your Web Story and label it as such. Google said "starting today, our testing tools will recognize if your AMP document is a Web Story. In our testing tools and Performance report we'll use the term Web Story to identify this format."
• SEO Is Dead Light Up Sign
  Ross Tavendale shared a photo of a new sign, I think he owns, that says "SEO Is Dead." It looks like one of those Open neon signs. This is so cool. He said on Twitter "This new sign makes me irration

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Redirects aren't directives when it comes to canonicalization :) The old-school approach is a meta refresh http-equiv, it's been around for a while now., John Mueller on Twitter
• Run away from page speed SEO myths 🏃 In ep. 3 of SEO Mythbusting, @g33konaut is joined by @stonetemple to discuss: 🔎 Page speed as a ranking factor 🧪 Testing & optimization ⚡️ Page speed, AMP, Google Webmasters on Twitter
• The AMP should be equivalent, so if you redirect one, you should redirect the other too., John Mueller on Twitter
• I can't imagine that our systems would randomly drop the "www" from indexed URLs. Canonicalization works based on a number of factors though, you can find out more at https://t.co/TMxQHIMTPu , for example., John Mueller on Twitter
• That can happen - it's not a sign that anything's wrong., John Mueller on Twitter
• When was the news sub-topic featured released? (e.g. query: coronavirus > sub: Mask > sub: Hospital) https://t.co/z0ydImiog9, DEJAN on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

• What SEOs get wrong about Google updates
• Shopify tradeoffs: What to consider before selecting your next e-commerce platform

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

• Fire Once per Page vs Once per Event vs Unlimited in Google Tag Manager, Analytics Mania
• Too Much Creative Marketing is Stifled by Attribution, SparkToro

Industry & Business

• Google to Keep Employees Home Until Summer 2021 Amid Coronavirus Pandemic, Wall Street Journal
• Police Requests for Google Users’ Location Histories Face New Scrutiny, Wall Street Journal
• Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google Prepare for Their ‘Big Tobacco Moment’, New York Times
• Google is building a new private subsea cable between Europe and the U.S., TechCrunch
• Yandex Announces Second Quarter 2020 Financial Results, Yandex

Links & Content Marketing

• A Practical Guide To B2B Content Marketing, SEM Rush

Local & Maps

• Garmin issues statement on recent outage, Business Wire
• Kosovo asks Apple to 'correctly present' its borders in Apple Maps, Appleinsider
• Taking Local SEO to the Next Level: SEO Podcast, RankRanger

Mobile & Voice

• Revoke a Google Assistant device and you might break Nest, 9to5Google
• This developer made a tool to schedule Google Assistant commands, XDA Developers

SEO

• How Fresh Content Influences Google Rankings, iPullRank
• The end of crawling and the beginning of API indexing, Kevin Indig

PPC

• 3 Tips for Google Ad Grants Accounts, WordStream
• An Introduction To Landing Page Analysis, PPC Hero