Earlier this month, Google made a change which sees the use of popups and interstitials on mobile sites receive a slight demotion in the search result rankings. Google has made some types of popups exempt from the change, but of course SEOs are looking for other use cases where Google might turn a blind […]
Archives for January 2017
Google Testing Price Trends for Local Hotel Listings
Google is testing a new feature that shows up in the local panel for a hotel listing. Below the sponsored hotel rates, it now also shows an additional price trends section. Here is what it looks like: You can see that it is in a carousel style, and you can select individual dates for more […]
Bing Testing “Send Directions to Phone” Test in Local Knowledge Panel
Bing has added a new directions feature in their Google Places local knowledge panel directly in the search results. The new feature shows a test for “send directions to phone”. Here it is when displayed in the main search results column. Here it is on the right sidebar. Bing has previously shown this when viewing […]
Google Crawl Budget: What SEOs Need to Know About Googlebot Crawling
Gary Illyes from Google has posted a blog entry on the Google Webmaster blog, touching on Googlebot and crawl budget issues that site owners might have. First, it is important to note that not all site owners will be impacted by crawl budget issues. For the most part, sites with 4,000 or fewer URLs generally […]
Google Local 4-Packs Showing 1 Ad & 3 Organic Local Listings
We have seen local 4-packs from Google where Google will show 4 paid local listings in a local 4-pack. But it seems Google is now testing a single map pack with a combination of both paid and organic listings. Sergey Alakov spotted this in action this morning, with one paid local listing followed by three […]
Google AdWords Testing Local Inventory Ads in Local Pack
Google appears to be testing a hybrid of a local pack listing with shopping ads, where it is highlighting products available locally, but within a local pack style, including map. Mike Blumenthal shared a screenshot showing it in action: It shows a thumbnail of the product, along with details such as price and ratings, but […]
How Google Ranks “Top Stories” News in Search Results
We don’t often hear about how Google ranks their news related results nor how the “Top Stories” are chosen for desktop and mobile users. Usually when someone from the search team comments on the news results, it is to say they use their own algorithm for news. But John Mueller in the Google Webmaster Office […]
Only 10% of Viewers Thought Last Year’s Super Bowl Ads Were Funny
Online engagement with Super Bowl 50 ads dropped nearly 20% from the previous year, according to new data launched yesterday by video ad tech company Unruly. Unruly’s Science of Sharing: Super Bowl 50 study shows that shares of Super Bowl 2016 ads across social media fell from 9.03M in 2015 to 7.84M last year – […]
Mobile First Index: Google to Notify Sites of Possible Issues via Search Console
In today’s Google Webmaster Office Hours, John Mueller said that they plan to send notices to webmasters via Google Search Console, alerting them that they would be likely to suffer issues when the mobile first index takes affect. While those who use responsive design likely won’t have many or any issues, those with other mobile […]
SEO Weather Reporting Tools & Google Ranking Experiments
SEO weather reports – the trackers that track a number of keywords in the search results, and report on the volatility in those searches – have become a pretty popular way for webmasters and SEOs to kind of gauge what is happening in the search results on a daily basis. The topic came up about […]