Search Engine Journal: A Simple Guide to Perform a Comprehensive Content Audit. “If you’re wondering if your content is performing well, there’s a good chance it’s time for a content audit to check for sure. By following the right steps, knowing what to look for, and what you’re hoping to get out of your content audit, you can look forward to creating a better website.”
SEO
How Search Engine Algorithms Work: Everything You Need to Know (Search Engine Journal)
Search Engine Journal: How Search Engine Algorithms Work: Everything You Need to Know. “Often I find myself focusing on specific strategies to perform specific functions. How do I write compelling copy to rank on voice search? What structured data produces easy wins? Things like that. These important questions are often covered here on Search Engine Journal in very useful articles. But it’s important to not just understand what tactics might be working to help you rank. You need to understand how it works.”
Search Engine Journal: Google Finds Over 25 Billion Spammy Pages Every Day
Search Engine Journal: Google Finds Over 25 Billion Spammy Pages Every Day. “Google’s efforts to keep spam out of search results are detailed in the company’s annual webspam report, published today. According to the report, over 99% of Google’s search results are spam-free, and the company goes to great lengths to keep it that way.”
Search Engine Journal: Bing ‘Site Scan’ Tool Audits Sites For Technical SEO Issues
Search Engine Journal: Bing ‘Site Scan’ Tool Audits Sites For Technical SEO Issues. “Bing’s new Site Scan tool gives site owners an easy way to check for technical issues that may be negatively impacting performance in search engines. Bing is launching Site Scan as an upgrade to Bing Webmaster Tools, making it convenient to access the tool alongside other data that can assist with improving site performance.”
Google SEO 101: Image Search Best Practices & Changes Over the Years (Search Engine Journal)
Search Engine Journal: Google SEO 101: Image Search Best Practices & Changes Over the Years. “Changes to Google’s image search results over the years, and current best practices, are discussed in a newly uploaded presentation. The presentation was given by Francois Spies, Product Manager for Google Images, at Google’s Webmaster Conference in November. Google just published a batch of videos from the conference so, for most people, this is their first time seeing it. Here’s a recap of Spies’ presentation on Google Images.”
The Register: Google warns against disabling websites during Coronavirus pandemic
The Register: Google warns against disabling websites during Coronavirus pandemic. “As companies shut their doors against the coronavirus outbreak, Google has released a set of guidelines to website owners on how to minimise the long-terms effects on their business’s search ranking.”
Google Warns About Assumptions Based on Site: Search (Search Engine Journal)
Search Engine Journal: Google Warns About Assumptions Based on Site: Search. “Advanced search operators can be useful. Many people use them for diagnostic purposes, particularly the site: search. There are however solid reasons to not depend on Google’s site: search to gain insights into site rankings, indexing or Google’s algorithm itself.” It’s probably best to assume ALL of Google’s search operators can be random or incomplete.
Search Engine Journal: Data suggests there’s still no corporate or brand bias in Google results
Search Engine Journal: Data suggests there’s still no corporate or brand bias in Google results. “You may have an opinion that yes, Google is clearly biased toward big brands, or no, Google is just trying to give the users what they’re looking for and no one’s looking for someone’s dumb blog. But we don’t need opinions here because this is a claim about what sites show up in search, and we have a lot of data on that from SEMRush and other sites that rank the web according to how much organic traffic they likely get.”
Google SEO 101: Here’s How to Update Your Search Results Snippets (Search Engine Journal)
Search Engine Journal: Google SEO 101: Here’s How to Update Your Search Results Snippets. “Google‘s latest ‘Search for Beginners’ video is a crash course on how to create effective snippets for search results. Given that the information is geared toward beginners, what’s covered in the video may already be known to experienced SEOs. If you’re new to SEO, or want to refresh your knowledge of search snippets, here is a quick recap of the video.”
E&T: Google faces challenge of ‘brittle’ and opaque AI, says internet pioneer
E&T: Google faces challenge of ‘brittle’ and opaque AI, says internet pioneer. “Internet pioneer and Google vice-president Vint Cerf has appeared before a House of Lords committee, defending the approach Google takes towards search ranking and content moderation.”
Engadget: Google will start ranking sites by their mobile version in September
Engadget: Google will start ranking sites by their mobile version in September. “Google will start indexing all websites by their mobile versions beginning in September. Google was already using mobile-first indexing for new domains, but this change will apply the phone-friendly indexing to all domains.”
Search Engine Land: Several WordPress SEO plugins are on the fritz
Search Engine Land: Several WordPress SEO plugins are on the fritz. “It’s been a challenging week for many SEO plugin users. Numerous users of the Google Analytics Dashboard for WP plugin by ExactMetrics are claiming that they’ve lost traffic data after updating to version 6.0. Meanwhile, the Yoast SEO and Rank Math plugins are producing incorrect canonical URLs when those URLs contain Unicode characters.”
Search Engine Journal: Zero-Click Searches: How to Get Back Your Lost Google Traffic
Search Engine Journal: Zero-Click Searches: How to Get Back Your Lost Google Traffic. “More than 50% of Google searches end without an organic click – and that’s a huge threat to our websites. These zero-click searches are resulting in growing losses in both revenue and leads, making Google everyone’s competitor.”
Google Featured Snippets: A 2020 SEO Guide (Search Engine Journal)
Search Engine Journal: Google Featured Snippets: A 2020 SEO Guide. “For several years now, SEO professionals have shared common best practices used to earn these coveted paragraph, list, or table results. But Google has unveiled a handful of new updates to featured snippets in the past couple of years, which affect which content is selected and how the snippets appear in the search results.”
Search Engine Journal: Introduction to GIF Engine Optimization (GEO)
Search Engine Journal: Introduction to GIF Engine Optimization (GEO). “If you’re reading this, you probably know about SEO. You may even be an SEO professional that spends a significant portion of your time reading, talking, and implementing the latest SEO strategies and tactics. I’m here to introduce you to a new kind of search engine. I’m talking about GIF search engines like GIPHY and Tenor.”
