Jeffrey Vocell says, “So, you’ve developed an amazing site. You’ve put together some seriously valuable content, iterated on the design, and gathered a ton of feedback. Now, you’re finally feeling ready to share it with the world. And as soon as you publish your new site for the world to see, all of your content will immediately start showing up in Google, right? Well, maybe. Although, it takes a little more than just hitting the publish button. To get your site listed, you’ll need to check a few boxes first. Let’s walk through it … How Google Finds Your... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google has announced they’ve upgraded the AMP reports within the Google Search Console to “clearly differentiate between the critical issues that would prevent your page from being shown in the search results, and the other non-critical issues that would be good to fix.” So those errors labeled as “critical” would mean Google cannot index that AMP content, and thus it won’t rank in the search results. The non-critical issues are more likely around richer results that do not prevent the content from being indexed but prevent it being enhanced in the search... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “As Google has come under fire for search suggestions like “are women evil” or actual results questioning whether the Holocaust happened, those who oversee its search engine aren’t ignoring the issue. They’re just taking time to figure out the best and most comprehensive response. This week, I met with several engineers and executives involved with Google’s search results, including Ben Gomes, vice president of core search. There’s no question that Google has heard the concerns. There’s no question that those within Google itself are disturbed by what’s... [...]

Diana Huff says, ““Our traffic is going down,” said a client in a recent email. Attached to the email was a chart showing this year’s traffic compared to last year’s traffic. Yep, traffic had indeed gone down. The reason for the downward trend was easy to diagnose: we had created a Filtered View in Google Analytics, which excluded traffic coming from the people within the client’s company who accessed the website daily. More important, we had excluded referral spam. The referral spam had become so bad, it had outpaced organic search and was skewing data in the worst way. I explained... [...]

Nikki Gilliland says, “Last year, Google announced that it was using a system called RankBrain to help guide the development of its search algorithm.  Essentially, the aim was to provide better and more relevant search results to users. According to a new study by Searchmetrics, the move has paid off. Here’s a bit more info on RankBrain and what’s happened since it was introduced. What is RankBrain? RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system that uses machine learning to better understand exactly what people are looking for when they type a search query into Google. If RankBrain... [...]

Glenn Gabe says, “This fall was packed with announcements about Google’s mobile-first index. First, Gary Illyes gave a keynote at Pubcon and dropped a bomb that Google intended to roll out a mobile-first index in the near future. Sure, Google had been hinting about the mobile-first index for a while, but now we had real information from a Googler that it was indeed coming. Then on November 4, 2016, Google published a blog post officially stating its intention to roll out a mobile-first index and explaining why it wanted to do that. It was huge news, since the new approach is a 180 from... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google My Business has added a new metric to the insights section of the Google My Business dashboard. The new metric is photos; you can see how often people view your photos and compare that to your competitors. The features page documented that “insights are now available for photos.” You can now “see how your photos perform compared to photos of businesses like yours,” Google added. The blue line represents your business photo views, and the red line represents views for businesses similar to you. It then summarizes how well or badly you have done at the bottom.... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google agreed to change its email scanning practice on Tuesday as part of a court settlement, The Verge first reported. The changes involve the way the company scans emails for ad serving purposes. With this agreement, Google will no longer scan emails to collect data used for ad targeting before emails hit users’ inboxes. In the class action suit — Matera v. Google, Case No. 5:15-cv-04062, filed in 2015 — plaintiffs argued that scanning emails before they are received by users violates the Wiretap Act and the California Information Privacy Act. The plaintiff represented... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “A new Google search rankings factors study released by Searchmetrics today shares that while content relevance is gaining in importance with Google, backlinks are a declining ranking signal. The full study can be downloaded over here, but here are the key takeaways from the study: The URLs with the highest content relevance are those on positions 3 to 6. Desktop content is around a third longer than mobile content. In 2016, just 53 percent of the top 20 URLs included the keyword in their title. The Time on Site for the top 10 URLs is 3 minutes and 10 seconds. The average... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “One of the biggest disadvantages for publishers in using AMP — the accelerated mobile pages format — is that Google will not show a publisher’s actual URL when displaying AMP pages. Google says this is so AMP pages load quickly. However, using a publisher’s URL might hardly slow a page down. In fact, using Google’s URL might actually cause AMP pages to load more slowly. The Google cache: why AMP at Google uses Google URLs To understand the issue, consider this search for “google tag manager amp” on Google. You’ll see a Marketing Land article that appears,... [...]