It seems that it isn’t just users who are annoyed at the prevalence of fake news in search results and social media these days. Google has made some new and very specific changes to their Quality Rater Guidelines to target fake news, as well as other types of sites including hate sites, “monstrously inaccurate” information […]
Archives for 2017
Near Duplicate Content Can Cause Google to Choose Wrong Snippet
There is yet another reason why site owners should take care about internal duplicate content on their site – according to John Mueller, near duplicate content can result in Google using the snippet for a similar page in the search results, rather than the snippet for the actual page being served in the search results. […]
Internal Links to About Us, Contact Us & TOS Pages for SEO
For those who optimize their internal linking structure, pages with more links pointing to it tend to be the most important pages on the site. But what about other less important pages that also tend to have a lot of links to them, specifically pages such as about us, contact us and TOS pages. For […]
Weight of Google Ranking Signals Changes Based on Search & More
Many SEOs have a fairly good idea of the top ranking signals in the Google search results. Google has confirmed that content and links are two of the most important ranking signals, RankBrain is among the top ranking signals, although it is debated whether it is number three or not. But the weight of Google’s […]
Google: Font Choices Do Not Directly Impact SEO
If you ever wondered if Google looks down upon websites that use questionable font choices, such as if a website decides to use Comic Sans, the question came up in the latest Google Webmaster Office Hours. More specifically, whether Google takes font choices into account when judging quality, such as whether hand written dont type […]
Google: New Pages Can Rank for Competitive Keywords, With Caveats
Can a new page rank well for a competitive keyword in Google? The question came up about whether new pages could rank for competitive keywords or not in Google or if Google does something that makes it difficult for these newer pages to rank well for more competitive keywords. John Mueller from Google discussed this, […]
Bing Adds “Pokestop Nearby” to Restaurant Filtering Options
If you are a Pokemon Go player, you will be happy to know that Bing has added a new sorting option for their restaurant filtering – filtering by nearby Pokestops. When you search for a nearby restaurant, either by location or by restaurant type, they have added a new filter from the drop down menu […]
Google: How Bounce Rate Increases With Longer Mobile Load Times
Google released some new stats related to mobile page speed and how it impacts bounce rate as the time to load the page increases. We have heard many Googlers talk over the years about how an increased load time leads to increased bounce rate, and this new data is based on a January 2017 analysis […]
Bing Adds Larger Coupon Codes to Brand Knowledge Panels
Bing has decided to step up their coupon code game by introducing new larger coupon codes in brand knowledge panels in their search results. Bing first began testing these coupon codes on a limited basis back in April 2016. The new version is much more prominently placed and noticeable than their previous version. These are […]
Google AMP Drives 7% of Top Publisher’s Traffic
Ever since Google launched AMP, as their answer to a lightweight and fast way for searchers to view webpages, many publishers have been slowly adopting it. And when Google announced that it would be coming to the “ten blue links”, even more websites decided to adopt it. But many weren’t sure just how popular it […]