Archive of January, 2021

January, 31 2021

Google: Duplicate Content is Not a Negative Ranking Factor Google’s John Mueller clarifies a misconception about duplicate content, saying it’s [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google: Embedded Videos Have Same SEO Value as Uploaded Content Google’s John Mueller says there’s no difference, when it comes to SEO, between [...] - Search Engine Journal

January, 29 2021

Google’s John Mueller on Cleaning Up Hacked Pages Google’s John Mueller shares SEO best practices to follow when cleaning up, and recovering [...] - Search Engine Journal
PPC award winners talk strategies for competitive times, industries, and marketplaces The Search Engine Land SEM Awards winners discuss strategies for driving charity donations, CRO in [...] - Search Engine Land
Learning to Reason Over Tables from Less Data Posted by Julian Eisenschlos, AI Resident, Google Research, Zürich The task of recognizing [...] - Google Research
Smaller Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On January 27th There may have been a smaller and unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update that touched [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Found 25 Billion Spammy Pages Each Day Google released a video talking about search spam and what Google does to protect searches from [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Offers Help On The Apple iOS 14 ATT Policy Changes Google has published a document explaining what developers need to know about the upcoming App [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 28 2021

Google Ranks Pages But Overall Site Greatly Influences The Ranking Pages There is an interesting debate going on in the SEO industry over the past couple of days on if [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
DuckDuckGo App Updated With More Privacy Protections DuckDuckGo is updating its mobile apps and desktop extensions to meet the standards of a new effort [...] - Search Engine Journal
The Industry Mourns The Loss Of Hamlet Batista: A Special & Talented SEO Soul We lost a special and talented SEO soul yesterday, Hamlet Batista. Hamlet Batista was not just [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Improving Mobile App Accessibility with Icon Detection Posted by Gilles Baechler and Srinivas Sunkara, Software Engineers, Google Research Voice Access [...] - Google Research
Entity vs. Query Rank In Google Search Mark Williams-Cook posted a super interesting example of Google Search showing a different set of [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
The Secret Behind SEO Success: Estimate and optimize your content’s rank as you create it Identify opportunities to optimize and create content for performance against your top competitors. - Search Engine Land
Google Tests Red & White Hotel Pricing Pins Normally when you do a search for hotels in a specific location, Google will show you a hotel [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 27 2021

Preparing our partners for Apple’s iOS 14 policy updates Apple’s upcoming App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy will require developers to ask for [...] - Inside Adwords
Google may not display Web Stories that are teasers Google said its users want to see the full story and not have to click through to see more. - Search Engine Land
Addressing Range Anxiety with Smart Electric Vehicle Routing Posted by Kostas Kollias and Sreenivas Gollapudi, Research Scientists, Google Research Mapping [...] - Google Research
New Google My Business Insights Platform & Device Breakdown Google My Business seems to be adding to the Insights section new metrics that businesses can use [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Mistakenly Sending Emails To Verify Sites In Search Console Google is emailing users to verify their sites in Google Search Console. The issue is that this is [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Drops Review Snippets For Lawyers It looks like Google has stopped displaying the rich results review snippets for attorneys and [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 26 2021

Google: Same Content in Different Formats is Not Duplicate Google’s John Mueller says identical content published in different formats, such as a video [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google’s John Mueller Confirms Core Updates Apply to Discover Google’s John Mueller says it’s common for broad core algorithm updates to impact [...] - Search Engine Journal
How are local service ads impacting Google Ads accounts? Make sure you are paying attention to the local service ads option with Google Ads, even if it is [...] - Search Engine Land
Flagging Reviews In Google My Business Has Changes Late last week, Google has updated the workflow to flag reviews within Google My Business. The new [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Possible Issues With Google Search Console Canonicals & AMP Reporting There may be some possible bugs or issues with Google Search Console reporting around some [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Stabilizing Live Speech Translation in Google Translate Posted by Naveen Arivazhagan, Senior Software Engineer and Colin Cherry, Staff Research Scientist, [...] - Google Research
Google Reveals Cookie Alternative - FLoC Yesterday, Google has took the cover off its alternative to cookies named FLoC or Federated [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 25 2021

How we’re helping get vaccines to more people The pandemic has taken a devastating toll on communities worldwide. While there is much uncertainty [...] - Inside Search
Building a privacy-first future for web advertising Advertising is essential to keeping the web open for everyone, but the web ecosystem is at risk if [...] - Inside Adwords
Does Google Set Limits to Search Traffic? Google's John Mueller answers if it's true that Google throttles search traffic. - Search Engine Journal
Google: Sites Can Safely Display Pop-Ups On Temporary Basis Google’s John Mueller says sites can display pop-ups without being affected by the mobile [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google adds price drop appearance rich results to search results Google automatically calculates the price drop based on changes to your structured data over time. - Search Engine Land
Google’s alternative to third-party cookies open for advertiser testing in Q2 2021 Google claims FLoC will protect the privacy of users while providing advertisers with needed [...] - Search Engine Land
Google’s John Mueller Praises Digital PR Is Digital PR a useful way to gain popularity and rank a website? Some say it is while others are [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google: Digital Public Relations Is Not Spammy Link Building Google's John Mueller has said something positive about one strategy SEOs use to attract attention [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Annoying Call To Action Overlays Can Hurt Your Google Rankings John Mueller of Google was asked by Michael Lewittes if those news websites you see overlay those [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google New Mobile Search Design Side By Side Comparison On Friday afternoon, Google announced the beginning of the rollout of its new mobile search results [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 22 2021

Google might remove search in Australia if forced to pay to link to sites This comes after Google signs an agreement with French publishers to pay for some content. - Search Engine Land
A Google designer takes us inside Search’s mobile redesign The beginning of a new year inspires people everywhere to make changes. It's when many of us take [...] - Inside Search
Google Introduces Price Drop Rich Result Google updated the Product Structured Data requirements with a new Price Drop search appearance for [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Search launches updated mobile design and interface With a new, modern experience, Google says the redesign is easier to read and use. - Search Engine Land
Google My Business updates flag review feature The new form and options are much more detailed now, compared to the old method. - Search Engine Land
Contextual links in featured snippets may present new opportunities and risks The change has SEOs questioning which sites will win and which will lose, but one thing is certain: [...] - Search Engine Land
SEO strategies from the Search Engine Land SEO initiative award winners This year’s Search Engine Land Award winners for Best SEO Initiative sat down with Search [...] - Search Engine Land
Chrome 88 Adds to Core Web Vitals DevTools Chrome 88 allows you to view your site's LCP, FIP, and CLS data in dev tools. - Search Engine Land
Improving Indian Language Transliterations in Google Maps Posted by Cibu Johny, Software Engineer, Google Research and Saumya Dalal, Product Manager, Google [...] - Google Research
Google Search Pushing More Local News William Vambenepe, the head of the Product Management team of Google News, said Google is not just [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Chrome 88 Performance Recordings Adds Core Web Vitals Lane With the release of Chrome 88, you can now see Core Web Vitals data in the developer tools [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Optimizing digital customer experiences to deliver “light” in #IgniteMoments Optimizing digital customer experiences to deliver “light” in #IgniteMoments COVID-19 [...] - DeepCrawl Blog

January, 21 2021

RxR: A Multilingual Benchmark for Navigation Instruction Following Posted by Alexander Ku, Software Engineer and Peter Anderson, Research Scientist, Google Research [...] - Google Research
Google Clarifies Pause of Job Training Feature in Search Google clarifies the feature availability of the Job Training search experience feature currently [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Ads Insights Tab Rolling Out To More Advertisers Google has been dripping out the insights page and section to Google Ads advertisers since November [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Health & Medical Sites Ranking Too Well For Non-Medical Queries? There are some interesting complaints that Google is ranking medical and health related sites well [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Corona and Consumer Demand – Insights from 2020 Understanding consumer demand is a core part of any company’s success. In any year, an [...] - Searchmetrics

January, 20 2021

Google Uses Faster Storage For High Demand Pages Google’s Gary Illyes reveals the search index uses a tiered system where the most popular [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Continues Injecting Links Into Featured Snippets Last November, I reported that Google was testing showing links in a featured snippet that links [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Expandable Knowledge Panels More Visible Google seems to be expanding showing its expandable knowledge panels user interface. What is meant [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
The importance of SEO and developer relationships (and how to get it right) The importance of SEO and developer relationships (and how to get it right) The closing tech track [...] - DeepCrawl Blog

January, 19 2021

Google Confirms a Way to Hide Internal Links Google's John Mueller seems to confirm that the PRG Pattern PageRank Sculpting tactic actually [...] - Search Engine Journal
DuckDuckGo’s focus on privacy-minded users pushes it past 100 million searches in a single day Although it’s a long way from being a Google competitor, DuckDuckGo’s business model [...] - Search Engine Land
Google’s John Mueller Clears Confusion About Mobile-First Index Google’s John Mueller addresses a few technical aspects of mobile-first indexing that [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google crawl stats report now showing more crawls Google said this is just a reporting change and the change you see in crawling is not reflective of [...] - Search Engine Land
Google: Best To Put Structured Data On The Page, Not Using Google Tag Manager Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that it is best to implement your structured data on the page [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google On Mobile-First Indexing For Separate Mobile URLs To be clear, none of this is exactly new, but John Mueller of Google took the time to explain how [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Joel Janovsky; One Of The First SEOs Fully Vaccinated - Search Engine Roundtable
Google: There's No Timeframe For Out Of Stock Product Pages Soft 404ing Google's John Mueller said that there is no specific timeframe for when an out of stock product [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Tests Movie Carousel Film Ratings Label We have seen movie results in Google for a long time, but now the movie carousel is testing showing [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Crawl Stats Report Can Handle Additional Types Of Crawls Google has noted that it has updated the already updated Crawl Stats report to handle [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 18 2021

Google: Paying Bloggers To Write For Dofollow Backlinks Is Against Our Guidelines John Mueller of Google was asked the following question, "if I dofollow backlinks due to [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Schema.org vs Google Structured Data Rich Results There is a difference between what you see at Schema.org and what Google publishes at its Google [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Tests Expandable Accordion Carousels Google seems to be testing a new feature in its search results. A way to expand a specific news [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Console Coverage Report Validate Fix, Fixed. Just a PSA, when Google rolled out the update for the coverage report last week, it also fixed the [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Daily Search Forum Recap: January 18, 2021 Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today... - Search Engine Roundtable
Martin Luther King Jr. Day Google Logo Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and to celebrate the day, Google and other search engines like [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Tin Trailer At GooglePlex - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 17 2021

DuckDuckGo Hits New Record: 100 Million Searches Per Day DuckDuckGo celebrates a milestone as it reaches 100 million searches in a single day. - Search Engine Journal
Google May Expand Roll Out of Web Stories if More Sites Use Them Google’s John Mueller says Web Stories may be rolled out to search results in additional [...] - Search Engine Journal

January, 15 2021

Google URL Inspection Tool Now Displays Multiple Referring Pages It seems like Google is now showing multiple referring pages for some URLs in the URL Inspection [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
ToTTo: A Controlled Table-to-Text Generation Dataset Posted by Ankur Parikh and Xuezhi Wang, Research Scientists, Google Research In the last few [...] - Google Research
Google Marketing Search Console Owners To Verify Via Domain Property Looks like the folks at Google are doing an email marketing push to Search Console properties that [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Microsoft Bing Search QR Code Generator If you search for [qr code] on Microsoft Bing Search you get a built in QR code generator tool. It [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Old Google Disavow Tool Going Away On January 19, 2021 Two months ago Google launched the new disavow link tool, a tool Google says you really do not [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
James Naismith Google Logo To Celebrate Inventor Of Basketball Today Google is celebrating the invention of my favorite sport, basketball. The inventor, James [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Tests Large & Small Images In Mobile Search Result Snippets Google seems to be testing displaying both large and smaller image thumbnails within a single [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 14 2021

Google Sends Notifications of HTTP/2 Googlebot Crawling Google is currently sending notification that Googlebot is crawling their sites with the new HTTP/2 [...] - Search Engine Journal
Award-winning tips from the 2020 Search Engine Land SEM and SEO agencies of the year Adam Heitzman from Higher Visibility and David Black with Wpromote give their best advice for [...] - Search Engine Land
A key milestone for privacy-centric measurement on YouTube In October of 2019, we announced that we are continuing to take action to limit the pixels we [...] - Inside Adwords
Google's Thoughts On Selling Domains Based On SEO Value A while back, John Mueller and Gary Illyes from Google reacted to a tweet around selling domain [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Tests New Design For Sitelinks On Mobile Google has tested countless designs and layouts for the sitelinks you see in both the desktop and [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Console Notification For Google Will Start Crawling Over HTTP/2 Last night Google began sending notifications via Google Search Console about HTTP/2 crawling. If [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Recognizing Pose Similarity in Images and Videos Posted by Jennifer J. Sun, Student Researcher and Ting Liu, Senior Software Engineer, Google [...] - Google Research
Google Counts Links On Noindexed Pages? It Depends. We previously covered John Mueller of Google say that "links are between indexed URLs, so if [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 13 2021

Google pauses all political ads through inauguration Amidst the volatile US political climate, Google has banned all ads mentioning political topics [...] - Search Engine Land
Search in 2021: Five must knows for advertisers and marketers 2021 is set to be one of the most interesting years for search yet. Adthena's VP of Marketing [...] - Search Engine Watch

January, 12 2021

Google Research: Looking Back at 2020, and Forward to 2021 Posted by Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow and SVP of Google Research and Health, on behalf of the entire [...] - Google Research
Google News performance report added to Google Search Console Google Search Console now lets you dive in to how well your news site performs in Google News and [...] - Search Engine Land
Yelp launches “health and safety measures” community feedback feature Yelp launches new rating feature for community to leave feedback on local business social [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Explains Why Sites With Some SEO Bad Practices Rank Well We have seen John Mueller of Google respond to this question before, the question of why does my [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Introducing Google News performance report Today we are launching Google News performance reporting to help news publishers better understand [...] - Google Webmaster Central
Google: You Don't Need To Link To All Your Pages From Your Home Page Here is a SEO new question I don't think I've seen before. Someone asked if you need to link to all [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Copied Content Mirror Site Canonical Bug We've heard of Google ranking copied scrapped content before and even getting the canonical wrong. [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Five reasons why clients are leaving your agency Service Provider Pro uses its expertise in helping 1000+ agencies with their systems and processes [...] - Search Engine Watch

January, 11 2021

Index Coverage Data Improvements Based on the feedback we got from the community, today we are rolling out significant improvements [...] - Google Webmaster Central
Google Ads Begins Identity Verification Since last March, March 2020, Google has been giving us a heads up about the Google Ads team doing [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google updates the Search Console coverage report The updated report now gives you very specific categories and labels for errors and responses. - Search Engine Land
How to use schema markup to make an impression in search Every business is unique in its own way and schema markup can help convey that in Google search. - Search Engine Land
How to Remove Date Snippets from Search Results? Google's John Mueller offers ideas on what to do about unwanted date snippets in the search results - Search Engine Journal
Does Using Disavow Signal that a Site is Shady? Google's John Mueller answers if filing a link disavow sends a negative signal about the site [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Confirmed Launching Subtopics Ranking In Mid-November 2020 Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that the search company launched the subtopics [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Index Coverage Report Updated With More Specific Categories Google has updated the index coverage report in Google Search Console with more "more [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google: 410 Status Code or 404 Status Code Are Both Fine Google's John Mueller responded to a concern in the Reddit forums that when it comes to the [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 10 2021

Google launched subtopics ranking in mid-November Google subtopics ranking helps deliver search results with a greater diversity of content when you [...] - Search Engine Land

January, 8 2021

Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update Signals - January 7th & 8th 2021 I am seeing some signals and signs of a Google search ranking algorithm update touching down in the [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google My Business launches new performance reporting You can access these new reports within Google My Business under the insights section. - Search Engine Land
Google on Improving Core Web Vitals Score by Blocking Countries Can blocking visitors from countries with slow Internet connections improve Core Web Vitals Score? [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Ads and SMBs: How to drive results on a low budget A low ad budget doesn't have to mean minimal results. SMBs with spend under $5000 can use these [...] - Search Engine Land
SEO takeaways from 2020: A review of the most unusual year for search A review of SEO and search engine updates in 2020 right from Google, Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, [...] - Search Engine Watch
Google My Business Begins Rolling Out New Performance Metrics / Insights Google has been teasing us for some time about new performance metrics to replace or add-on to the [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
How brands should meet customers in their new (virtual) reality Brands are increasingly providing online shoppers with great virtual interactions. Here's how to [...] - Search Engine Watch
Google Search Knowledge Graph For 25th Amendment and US Constitution Google has a neat interactive knowledge graph box or panel for searches done on various amendments [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 7 2021

Google’s Smith Algorithm Outperforms BERT Google's new SMITH algorithm claims to process passages and long-form content better than BERT - Search Engine Journal
Selecting better KPIs for your business: What to consider and how to bolster your most important metric It all comes down to what stage your business is at, its goals, and identifying the supporting [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Working On Improving Robots.txt Tester Tool Gary Illyes from Google confirmed he is slowly working on improving the robots.txt tester tool, [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Interesting Finds List Adds Related Tags Google has been adding "interesting finds" to the search results since 2018. But now, if [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Carolyn Lyden Joins The Search Engine Land & SMX: Reaction As you all know, I have been with Search Engine Land and SMX since the company was founded and the [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Data Studio Can Pull Search Console News Queries The folks at the Google Analytics posted on Twitter yesterday that if you are using Google Data [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Algorithms of Oppression: Do search engines reinforce racism? Algorithms of Oppression: Do search engines reinforce racism? [CW: this report includes examples [...] - DeepCrawl Blog

January, 6 2021

Google Explains What URL Removals Tool Does Google's John Mueller answers a question about what the Search Console URL Removals Tool does - Search Engine Journal
No, A Google My Business Profile Not Required To Show In Google Web Search Google's John Mueller had to confirm that you do not need to have a Google My Business verified [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Should you use Google’s updated Disavow Links tool? Edward Coram-James looks into whether the recent changes Google has made to its Disavow Links tool [...] - Search Engine Watch
Reminder: Google Search Console Coverage Report Silently Follows Redirects Google Search Console Coverage report and URL inspection tool silently follow redirects, as John [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 5 2021

Google’s Lighthouse is now recommending JavaScript library alternates Lighthouse now serves as a beacon for warning you when your project includes old libraries that [...] - Search Engine Land
Google confirms showing homework practice problems in search results Google said this is currently an experiment but will share more details on how publishers can [...] - Search Engine Land
The Auction Insights Visualizer can turn your data tables into useful charts The free, third-party tool can help you better understand how competitor behavior has changed over [...] - Search Engine Land
2021 resolutions: 5 tips for your Google Ads campaigns What if your 2021 resolution was to stop wasting your budget on Adwords and start improving the [...] - Search Engine Land
January 2021 Google Webmaster Report Well, 2020 is over - phew, right? December was a wild wild month in terms of what SEOs and [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google My Business Insights Missing Year-End Data It looks like Google My Business insights, the area you go to see how much traffic, calls, [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Employees Start A Union: The Alphabet Workers Union A couple hundred Googlers got together to start a rare union in the tech industry. It is called [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Five email marketing predictions: Continuing trends and new opportunities Email marketing 2021 and how 2020 impacted the Industry’s most valuable channels. Validity's [...] - Search Engine Watch

January, 4 2021

Google launches Question Hub for US publishers After a few years of testing Google Question Hub India, Indonesia and Nigeria - it is now available [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Question Hub Is Open & It's A Great Way To Find Content Ideas For years, Google has had a feature called Google Question Hub. It is basically a way for [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Page Experience update is all set to launch in May 2021 – Webmasters, hang in there! Here’s how Google’s new algorithm changes can affect your page rankings, as well as the [...] - Search Engine Watch
Bing Webmaster Tools adds crawl requests, crawl errors & indexed pages to performance report You can now see crawling and indexing data directly in the search performance report. - Search Engine Land
Google Search Traffic to Pirate Sites Down After Algorithm Updates Google’s recent algorithm updates are reportedly reducing traffic to piracy websites, [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Search Showing Fewer FAQ Rich Results It seems like Google has once again pruned which sites are eligible to show FAQ/How To rich results [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Bing Webmaster Tools Performance Report Adds Crawl & Index Data Microsoft has quietly added new metrics to the Bing Webmaster Tools performance reports. The new [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Tests Dynamic Customized Tabs In Local Panel Amy Toman spotted yet another local panel user interface change in the Google search results. This [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Spotted: Google Note From Your Reviewer For Reconsideration Requests No, this is not new, Google has been sending out these "note from your reviewer" [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Eight ways to align your customer acquisition strategy in 2021 Customer acquisition has drastically changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. How will businesses [...] - Search Engine Watch
Vlog #101: Anthony Church On Conversion Tracking & SEO Strategy Anthony Church is the VP of client services at Interact Marketing and he and his boss came out to [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Daily Search Forum Recap: January 4, 2021 Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Head Bust At The GooglePlex - Search Engine Roundtable

January, 1 2021

John Mueller Of Google Helping Webmasters On New Years 2021 New Years Day is not over yet and John Mueller of Google has been out helping webmasters both in [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
January 1 New Year's Day Google Logo / Doodle New Year's Day is here for some folks and with that the January 1 New Year's Day Google logo or [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Search Buzz Video Recap: Christmas Google Update, Passage Indexing Interface & Search Interfaces It has been a slow week or so in the search news space because of the holidays but hey - things are [...] - Search Engine Roundtable