Kat Fay says, “Videos, reviews or an author’s picture can drive clicks on search results, according to a study by Blue Nile Research. Many retailers believe that showing up first in organic search results on Google and Bing is a guarantee of success. But lower positions often generate more clicks than the top spot, especially when the links include videos, pictures and reviews, according to a study from Blue Nile Research. The study identifies the three most common forms of visual content that lead consumers to click: Star reviews of products, such as giving an item one to five stars An... [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “If you’re a webmaster, you probably received one of those infamous “Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on example.com” warning letters that Google sent out to seemingly every SEO and webmaster. This was a brand new alert from Google, although we have been hearing from the search engine about the need to ensure all resources are unblocked—including both JavaScript and CSS. There was definite confusion around these letters, supported by some of the reporting in Google Search Console. Here’s what you need to know about Google’s desire to see these... [...]

Mark Traphagen says, “Recently, Google Webmaster Trends analyst Gary Illyes surprised many of us with a remark he made during his keynote Q&A with Danny Sullivan at SMX East in New York City. Illyes said that herecommended webmasters not remove the rel=author tag from their site content. Google had used rel=author as part of its Google Authorship feature that (potentially) displayed a special author rich snippet in search results for content using the tag. Google ended support of this feature in August 2014. The phrase that made everyone sit up and say, “Did he just say that?”... [...]

David Nield says, “Both Facebook and Apple believe they’ve built a better home for news content on mobile devices—self-contained apps where load times are fast and ads are discreet—but Google isn’t going to lie down without a fight. The result is the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, a new open-source HTML standard available to all that uses existing web technologies to do exactly what Facebook and Apple are doing: Creating a structure where pages appear instantly and advertising is tastefully added (this being Google, of course, ads stay in the picture). AMP HTML, as the new... [...]

Damon Rutherford says, “How much do you really know about Google and how it ranks websites? You may have heard about the value of links to improving your rankings, but have you heard of Google penalties such as Panda and Penguin? If you have a website for your business it is more important than ever to understand how search engines work so you can improve your online visibility and, just as importantly, avoid being penalised for breaking Google’s webmaster guidelines. To the uninitiated Google can seem to move in strange and mysterious ways when it comes to ranking websites in search,... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “The Google landscape is constantly changing. Two years ago, I created the Mega-SERP, and within days it was already outdated. This time, we’ve set out to create a more permanent glossary of Google features – a reference that we’ll update as the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) change. If your focus is on organic SEO, why should you care about the wider world of Google features? Put simply, because rich SERP features are no longer the exception to the rule. Across 10,000 keywords tracked daily by the MozCast project, this is what we saw as of September... [...]

Jim Williams says, “As marketers, we have nearly 2,000 marketing technology products to choose from across 43 different categories. The staggering number of vendors available to us hasmore than doubled since last year. We can email, tweet, track, engage, predict, analyze, attribute, optimize and more. There is now a layer of technology (or even multiple technologies) between each and every interaction we have with the buyers we’re nurturing through the purchasing process. Yet despite the proliferation of these technologies, the marketing stack is still largely disconnected from critical... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “In a blog post today Google reported that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.” Google declined to provide more color or detail beyond this statement — other than that “mobile” here means smartphones only. While there have been many conference presentations, predictions, articles and discussions that have anticipated this moment, it has finally arrived. Simultaneously the company made a range of announcements about new mobile ad units/formats, new automation tools and improved... [...]

Patricio Robles says, “They can make or break a site, and many website operators and search marketers await their arrival with a certain level of anxiety. They have strange names like Panda and Penguin, and when they affect significant numbers of websites, they can be written about and analyzed for months. I’m referring, of course, to Google algorithm updates. But is it possible that the major Google algorithm updates that captivate us are largely a thing of the past? In a post on Search Engine Land, Nate Dame, the founder and CEO of search and content marketing firm Propecta, observes... [...]

Derek S. says, “To help search marketers in their quest to reach as many consumers as possible, Google Ads has introduced a new feature called dynamic structured snippets. Through the new feature, paid ads on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) are able to have additional text that automatically displays in search ads. The additional text “highlights industry-specific, structured information about your products and services.” In other words, dynamic search snippets help to give users more relevant information about a website before they click on its ad. At this time, the new feature... [...]