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 Patent Related To Medic Update? Website Representation Vector For Classifying Web Sites.
Bill Slawski posted about a new Google patent application filed in August of 2018 that was just revealed last week named Website Representation Vector to Generate Search Results and Classify Website. This patent can explain a lot around the August 2018 Medic update theories out there. - Google Penalties Can Reoccur - You're Site Is Not Immune
John Mueller from Google said just because a web site was once penalized, it does not mean it cannot be penalized again for the same issue. It is not like when you get a specific virus, that if you survive it, you become immune to getting that specific virus again. You can be penalized by Google for the same issue more than once. - Vlog #48: Dixon Jones - SEO Legend Mastering Links Tools & Now Semantic Tools
Dixon Jones has been doing SEO since 1998, you may know him mostly from his work at Majestic.com but he has been in the SEO industry since before there was an industry... - Google: Quality Raters Help Us Understand If Our Signals Produce Good Results
Danny Sullivan at Google again explained what the role of the search quality raters are. Again, for those who do not know, Google search quality raters are not Google employees, they are third-party contractors. They grade search results and the sites ranked. Those grades and scores do not get fed back into the algorithm, but are shared with Google's ranking engineers. - Google Image Search Adds New Image License Metadata
Google announced that you can now use markup and metadata to tell Google about the image licensing rights and details. When you add this metadata and when Google decides to show the results in image search, Google may show a new Licensable badge for the image. - Google In Europe Now Shows Other Local Search Providers
This comes as no surprise, Google has been testing it for a while after the EU has required them to do something for anti-competitive reasons. Now Google is showing other search providers for local results. They did this for other verticals as well in the past, at least testing, but now this is live. - Google Welcomes Super Heros
Here is a photo from the Google Germany office that has slides up welcoming superheros. It says "Welcome Superheros." I am not sure which super heros were invited or expected to show up. Batman, Won
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- My 2c: doing the same thing as back then probably won't be that useful. Instead, find a large-enough audience where your experience is new & valuable. Also, to prevent copy & paste, use a medium that's not as c, John Mueller on Twitter
- Would you only make clients happy if it were a ranking factor?, John Mueller on Twitter
- Google Resists Document Requests in Multi-State Probe, WebmasterWorld
- How Many Sites Are Run By Single Webmasters?, WebmasterWorld
- Internal linking to pages blocking Google with robots.txt?, WebmasterWorld
- We don't always keep all cached pages, so that can be totally normal., John Mueller on Twitter
- Apple Safari To Stop Allowing HTTPS Certificates Beyond 398 Days of Validity, WebmasterWorld
- Evergreen Googlebot has been updated to Chrome 80; I saw the first requests on ~15/02 and as of this weekend the majority of requests is now being made with v80. The UA string has been updated respectively. FYI: test crawl volum, Bastian Grimm on Twitter
- I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's still the case. The ways people search continue to evolve., John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
- New local SERP live in Europe
- How to tackle rising Facebook CPAs
- Stop phrase and broad match modifier keywords from unnecessarily spending on close variants with this script
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
- How to create a Google Analytics PPC dashboard in Google Data Studio, Super Metrics
- How to Run Experiments On Your Site Using Google Optimize, WP Newsify
- Six Ways to Clean Up Data In Google Analytics, DELVE
Industry & Business
- Google Resists Demand From States in Digital-Ad Probe, Wall Street Journal
- Google reaches a settlement with state attorneys general, CNBC
- Big Google lease widens tech titan's Mountain View footprint, Mercury News
Links & Promotion Building
- 3 Alternative Link Building Tactics to Use Now, Search Engine Journal
Local & Maps
- Apple Maps' Look Around feature works in three more U.S. cities, Apple Insider
- Google has already updated its brand new Google Maps redesign, BGR
- Interview: The (real) art of faking Google Maps traffic, Android Authority
Mobile & Voice
- Google Assistant 'Updates' revamp appearing for more users, 9to5Google
- Pixel 4's new Google Assistant rolling out for G Suite users, 9to5Google
- Smart Speakers Study, Mon(IoT)r Research Group
- Understanding the Secret Sauce of Conversational Voice Experience, Voicebot
- In-Car Voice Assistant Users Show Different Patterns Than on Smart Speakers with Making a Phone Call the Top Request, Voicebot
SEO
- Ecommerce SEO: Optimizing and Ranking Category Pages, PPC Hero
- Google Using Website Representation Vectors to Classify with Expertise and Authority, Go Fish Digital
- How to Create Rich Snippets Results for Search Pages, iPullRank
- Publishing Web Content: What you need to know, Dixon Jones
- Schema Markup for SEO - The Complete Guide, Cognitive SEO
- Which of My Competitor's Keywords Should (& Shouldn't) I Target? - Best of Whiteboard Friday, Moz
PPC
- Five Ways to Do Incrementality Testing with Digital Ads, Metric Theory
- Resources for small and medium-sized businesses, Microsoft Advertising
Other Search
- Google is indexing WhatsApp group chat links, making private groups discoverable, The Verge
- Search Marketing: A Decade in Review, Seer Interactive
