Microsoft Bing, Google Algorithm Shifts & More SEO Topics
um so i made a stormy background with a big storm behind me we had a hurricane isaiah i think they're pronouncing it that way
um and the lights might go on and off as the generator
revs up and down
so the search needs news we covered over at the search engine roundtable i've seen reliable.com over the past week um this morning well actually this weekend this past weekend
so a week ago i guess today and saturday this seemed to be a google ranking update
and also as of yesterday august 6th and 7th so
july 31st and august 1st and august 6th and 7th which is today there's lots of fluctuations lots of chatter in the seo community around a possible google algorithm update none of these were confirmed
there's both significant increase in seo community chatter
around this with people saying my rankings have increased or decreased and there's also a the tools the fluctuation
tools the ranking checking tools that actually went ahead and noticed these changes as well so definitely take a look at that if you were impacted if your rankings have changed if your search traffic has changed
you are not alone also um this week yesterday or the day before i posted uh the big google webmaster report which i post monthly so if you want to catch up on the biggest things that happened over the past month
definitely take a look at that report i do one every single month i think i mix miss one month by accident sometime years ago
but every every month i do a recap of what the most important things around google webmaster related seo topics were so definitely take a look at that bing is testing renaming their search engine
to a microsoft
bing with the windows logo so here's some examples of different screenshots of what people saw this week i even saw the new logo
which is unusual bing also announced that they will be expanding big webmaster tools search performance reports and reporting tools to include ability to see and filter out image
search related stuff as well as video search related stuff google already has that but bing does not let you filter and slice and dice based off of the search verticals
google's john mueller followed up last week i said had
like negative reviews cannot hurt your site which i thought was weird because in 2010 to core my eyes had a whole thing and then google said oh we're gonna have an algorithm come out that if you have lots of negative reviews it could hurt your site well john mueller said yeah
i'm not sure if that specific algorithm is out still but technically if people don't like your site or if you have a negative review that could go and trickle down
asked him about that on his video this week
and i included a recap of that including the embed
so definitely listen to how he answered that do not go ahead and use as a strategy negative reviews
and upsetting your customers to go get a lot of links that might go ahead and actually
end up hurting you so don't go ahead and do that gary from google
said in a podcast this week what are the cases where having
comments actually comments can actually hurt your rankings
now google's pretty good as he said understanding the comments section and the from the main section assuming you don't just blend the comments into the main section
but if you have lots of f-bombs you said or a lot of x-rated content in your comments that could go ahead and get your site filtered for adult related stuff so you want to be careful there he said with that um
google also said i think john said this that
many of the manual actions are now algorithmic
basically saying that it's some of them that the manufacturers are listed for that they
manually penalize for they haven't manually penalized for in a long long time
and because of that many of those are are now
based on google's algorithmically google's algorithms can handle that automatically and there's no need for google to manually
penalize the site i asked them to give us a list of which manual actions are now automated
and he said no thank you moving on john also said that headings and the order of those headings so you have an h1 h2h3 if you do h5843 in that order it's not going to end up hurting your website
probably should not do that but if you do it it's not going to hurt your site john mueller also said you do not need a good distribution
of followed to unfollowed or not followed
no follow links just get links and don't worry about your distribution between followed and nofollow links and google for the umpteen time said that search quality raters
do not directly influence the search rankings they give google feedback on how their algorithms are working test algorithms and live algorithms and google might go ahead and use that to go ahead and prove their algorithms going forward
but you uh search quality rater dinging or saying i don't like this website or this website shouldn't rank it's not going to go and immediately funnel back into the algorithm and say demote this website it doesn't work that way and they said this million i can't tell you how many times
there was a poll um by izzy izzy smith asking you know do does knowing the google ranking factors actually help you you know is that going to help you with your seo is that going to help you
knowing those factors going to help and 42 percent of the seos who fill out the poll we only have about 500 responses said yes it probably will help the rest said no and then i wrote a nice uh interesting story at search engine land about
what is not a google ranking factor so i basically went through all the years of where google said that's not a ranking factor that's not a ranking factor that doesn't influence our
algorithms and i put a list together i think there's about 30 or 40 different things that google said over the years so definitely take a look at that it is a fun post of course
many seos don't believe google when they say certain things are not ranking factors like click through rate wall time pogo sticking but google says they are not ranking factors google updated the search console api infrastructure it shouldn't really impact much
outside of if you're you need to make any changes to your
api calls and stuff like that so if you are using the api
for search console definitely take a look at those changes they announced it yesterday
i asked seos if they're using if they've worked with href lang over the past 12 months
and interesting poll we had over almost 2 000 results
um where 55 of those seo said yes they work with hr flank in some level in the past year or so right so we had about
1700 responses and about 55 percent of the seos who respond to 55.5 percent of the seos who responded said they have worked with href lang in the past year or so which is interesting because
i would say probably less than five percent of websites probably less than one percent of websites
actually deploy href link um according to the whole web which is
big but still um google will not be adding again i covered this before um a label or a filter to filter out paywall content
um big debate about why they won't and why they shouldn't i'm not going to get into it but if you want to learn about that definitely take a look at that google is asking searchers to not just say if they like the results that we've seen this before when google has asked you do you think the results are good and have you rate the results for a specific snippet google say was that paid fast
or no or are you unsure so that's interesting it's kind of google verifying their page speed metrics are actually working properly
google google's asking some searchers who are in earthquake areas if they search for earthquake now or related searches
if they felt an earthquake or not which is pretty interesting google's also adding games to the search results from the arts and culture
area where you actually answer questions and score yourself on those games google's also testing it also in the news box under the top stories so we saw for context last week where was the snippet under the snippet on the in the actual feature snippet there's another box under it now where google's testing which you can see a picture over here
google actually showed this is very very rare
not just two featured snippets for a single query but two feature snippets from the same domain name
for the same query here's a screenshot i can't replicate it but glenn gabe was able to
google has added a call button to the desktop local panel so now i guess because of all the
um work at home video calling that's done these days the call button now works
not just from your phone which always worked forever
but now also for from desktop so you could call
and it'll activate facetime from your computer or whatever native um calling feature you have directly from your computer and there's a cool easter egg
um the cha-cha slide so search for cha cha slide and you will
have to turn on your speakers and you click on that little um
microphone sparkly icon and have fun with that
um hope you guys are all safe during this storm especially in the new york area i hope everybody's safe with kovid and coronavirus my name again is barry schwartz today is friday
august 7th this is the search news we covered over at the search engine
