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: The New Link Attributes Are Designed To Help Us Understand Better
Google's Gary Illyes said it again, the reason Google released those new link attributes, the rel sponsored and ugc attributes, is only to help Google understand links on the web better. Gary said you don't have to use it, if you do, it will help Google. - Google: Core Updates Are Not About Bad Links
Most of you know this already but Gary Illyes from Google said the other day at PubCon that cleaning up your link profile will not help you recover from a core update. He was quoted as saying this by numerous people during his PubCon talk on Tuesday. - Google: All You Need Is Google's Link Tool, Not Third-Party Tools
Google's Nathan Johns said at PubCon yesterday that you do not need to use third-party link tools, that all you need to worry about are the links reported in Google Search Console's link tool. This is despite Google's tool only showing you a sample of the links you really have. - Google: Forcing Crawling Of Pages To Discover Links Won't Do Much
This is hard to put in a title, but in short, Google's John Mueller seems to have said that if you want Google to discover links added to a page that doesn't get crawled much or ever, you will have a hard time benefiting from those links. John said on Twitter " If the page is such that our systems aren't crawling it, then those links aren't going to do much -- and "forcing" a crawl won't change that at all." - Bing To Make BingBot Evergreen
Bing announced yesterday that BingBot is going evergreen, just like GoogleBot did. Bing said this will happen over the next few months and the user agent for BingBot might change but most sites don't need to do anything or worry about anything with this change. - Google Pencil Shavings Logo Art
Here is a photo from Google of the G logo made up of colored pencil shavings. Pretty artistic, right? I am not an artist, so I really don't know. But it does look cool to me. This was shared on Insta
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- In April of 2019, Google lost parts of their index. Shortly after that they had a completely urelated rendering failure. Some of the highest profile urls in the index were swapped out for random lower quality ones. @methode, Marie Haynes on Twitter
- PSA: if you or someone you know works at Instart, specifically on Instart Logic, please get in touch with @JohnMu or me., Gary Illyes on Twitter
- Apple Maps Traffic in Google Analytics, Local Search Forum
Search Engine Land Stories:
- Google: Stick to structured data guidelines if you want the rich result
- Should you do 100% of your SEO in-house?
- Bingbot goes evergreen
- Quora adds 3 new targeting options for advertisers
- Moz launches Domain Analysis, free tool for SEO metrics
- Invoca ‘Signal Discovery’ promises automated optimization from predictive call intelligence
- Behind the scenes at SMX East
- If Google says H1s don’t matter for rankings, why should you use them? Here’s why
- With loss of Yahoo and image search, Google Shopping search partner traffic nosedives
- 7 ways to use SEO and PPC together
- Video: Britney Muller Of Moz on Google’s feature snippets
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
- gago: Blazingly fast Google Analytics API downloads with Go, Mark Edmondson
- Using Google Cloud for Marketing, Adswerve
Industry & Business
- 14 Things I've Learned During My 20+ Year Career, SuccessWorks
- To Live or Die by Google Searches Brings an Escalating Cost, Bloomberg
Links & Promotion Building
- #519 Link Analysis in 2020: Interview with Dixon Jones, SiteVisibility
Local & Maps
- [Update: Google teaser] Dark mode signs show up in Google Maps, Android Police
- Volvo’s first EV will run native Android, The Verge
Mobile & Voice
- Move your music between rooms with stream transfer, Google Blog
- HomeKit vs. Alexa vs. Google Home – Which smart home platform is best?, Homekit News and Reviews
- Hey Google, talk like Issa, Google Blog
SEO
- How to Compete for Featured Snippets in Google, Portent
- How To Grow Your SEO Career: Advice From SEO Veterans, Botify
- SEO Best Practices for Landing Page Optimization, KoMarketing
- We Analyzed 5.2 Million Webpages. Here's What We Learned About PageSpeed, Backlinko
- 18 Ways to Diagnose a Decline in Organic Traffic, Seer Interactive
- A Breakdown of HTML Usage Across ~8 Million Pages (& What It Means for Modern SEO), Moz
- SEO Content Writing Done Right - Content that Google Wants to Rank, Cognitive SEO
- Top Google Search Rank Factors According to SEO Experts | Study, MarketingProfs
PPC
- 3 Unique Features to Microsoft Ads, Metric Theory
- A privacy-safe approach to managing ad frequency, Google Blog
- How to Find Wasted PPC Spend in Minutes, Seer Interactive
- Unifying Organic and Paid Content, Search Metrics
