Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google Crawl Stats Report Can Handle Additional Types Of Crawls
Google has noted that it has updated the already updated Crawl Stats report to handle "additional types of crawls." Google wrote "the crawl stats report has increased its reporting coverage for additional types of crawls." - Google Tests Movie Carousel Film Ratings Label
We have seen movie results in Google for a long time, but now the movie carousel is testing showing the Motion Picture Association film rating system labels on those movie image covers. Here is a screen shot of this in action from Mordy Oberstein as posted on Twitter. - Google On Mobile-First Indexing For Separate Mobile URLs
To be clear, none of this is exactly new, but John Mueller of Google took the time to explain how mobile-first indexing works with mobile-first indexing. Most sites have been switched over to mobile-first indexing but if you have not, then here is what you need to know specific to m-dot or separate mobile URLs. - Dealing With "This Is The Way Our Old SEO Did It"
They say in business, one way to ensure your long-term failure, is to use the line "we've always done it this way." Maybe the same is true for SEO? Esben Rasmussen, an SEO, posted on Twitter "I am just in an uphill struggle with a global IT department of a big company "Our old SEO told us we could do it this way, so we are not changing this." - Google: There's No Timeframe For Out Of Stock Product Pages Soft 404ing
Google's John Mueller said that there is no specific timeframe for when an out of stock product page on your e-commerce site will end up resulting in a soft 404 in Google Search. A soft 404 is when Google thinks a page should return a 404 server status code but technically is not. - Google: Best To Put Structured Data On The Page, Not Using Google Tag Manager
Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that it is best to implement your structured data on the page itself and not use Google Tag Manager to implement your structured data. He said the reason is because it makes it "straight-forward & usually easier to monitor/maintain." - Joel Janovsky; One Of The First SEOs Fully Vaccinated
I have been on the hunt to find the first SEO or SEM in our industry who was vaccinated. Well, Joel Janovsky, from RankRanger based in Israel may have been that individual. He shared a photo of him r
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Accepted Health Insurance Feature on Google My Business, Local Search Forum
- We don't differentiate whether it's on a cloud storage service or not -- if it's publicly accessible, allowed to be crawled & indexed, and findable through crawling, we may index it., John Mueller on Twitter
- DuckDuckGo Reaches 100 Million searches/day, WebmasterWorld
- Not necessarily (they're essentially independent results just shown together), and sometimes it can be a bit confusing :-/. Using hrefla, John Mueller on Twitter
- Titles are a bit unique (also because we often do magic with the titles we show). FWIW we do render that page for search, so I think anything you see there is independent of rendering. It's an interesting, John Mueller on Twitter
- To be frank, most people don't read those outreach emails. Mark as spam and move on., John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
- 11 Valuable Data Points To Be Gleaned From Clients’ Google Analytics, Forbes
- Analytics Are Better Than Fraud Detection, Here’s Why, With Examples, Forbes
Industry & Business
- Google backs India’s Dunzo in $40 million funding round, TechCrunch
- U.S. asks Australia to scrap proposed laws to make Facebook, Google pay for news, Reuters
Local & Maps
- Google Confirms Google Maps Notification Problem Driving Android Users Insane, AutoEvolution
- Google Maps roll out accurate street details in London, NYC, SF, Tokyo, Android Community
- Google Review Summaries: What's New & Different, GatherUp
Mobile & Voice
- Google sends out Wear OS satisfaction survey, 9to5Google
- Microsoft Adds Voice Clip Privacy Controls, Voicebot
SEO
- Case Study - A Small Business Beats Big Brands in SEO on Shopify, Adam Riemer
- Domain splitting as a solution to core update hits?, Kevin Indig
- The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?, Moz
PPC
- Report: Q4 2020 Google trends for the manufacturing industry, Vertical Leap
- Report: Q4 2020 Google trends for the retail industry, Vertical Leap
- Local inventory ads - set up and best practice, Vertical Leap
Search Features
Other Search
- ToTTo: A Controlled Table-to-Text Generation Dataset, Google AI Blog
