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 March 2021 Search Ranking Algorithm Update
I have yet another unconfirmed Google search ranking update to report on. This was started around March 2nd towards the evening and continues through March 3rd. There was a nice amount of chatter over a 24-hour period and then it seems to have died down a bit. Many of the tools also picked up on this update. - Google FAQ Rich Results Issue With Yoast Resolved
Yesterday reports came in that there was a spike in errors around Google FAQ schema powered through Yoast. The issue is being resolved and should be fixed today but supposedly Google changed how it parses FAQ schema and it caused FAQ rich result to drop from sites that use Yoast. - Google My Business New Available Performance Metrics Help Doc
Google has updated the Google My Business "available performance metrics" help document to talk more about the new performance reports. Google added a section for "users who viewed your profile" and added more details to the other section. - Video: Google On Crawl Budget & Search Console Crawl Stats Report
Daniel Waisberg of Google released a really nice explanatory video on how crawl budget works with crawl demand and crawl rates. He also spent most of the video doing a deep dive into the new crawl stats report in Search Console. - Rich Results Disappear? Google Says It Might Be A Site Wide Quality Issue.
Google's John Mueller listed a few reasons why your site may not show rich results in the Google Search Results. One of the three reasons is that sometimes Google does not trust the site enough, on the site level, for Google to warrant that the site shows rich results. - Google Jakarta Office Cafe Food
Here is a video from 2017 of the Google office in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, of the cafe in that office. Look at the tile floors and look at the food. Also, look at all the people without face
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google doesn't care about the number of URLs in your sitemap files -- but it can make it easier for you to maintain & track. Put 50k in a sitemap, put 20k in, put 5 in there -- totally up to you. You can make a, John Mueller on Twitter
- Google My Business Opening Date - What Date Should You Use?, Local Search Forum
- More from @JohnMu: Also, the Page Experience Signal will NOT destroy your site if you're struggling there. And on the flip side, it won't catapult your site from page 10 to the #1 position if you get it right... Relevance and, Glenn Gabe on Twitter
- My recommendation is always to try to be stable for the long run, but that not always the SEO's call :-). There's no cooling-off period, but you may need to cancel the old move setting before adding the new one, John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
- How Gootkit trojan distributes ransomware via Google SERPs
- Google will not build or use alternate identifiers to track users across the web
- Google adds familiar face as Ads Product Liaison; Wednesday’s daily brief
- The 8 best digital marketing courses in the US
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
- How to build a fraud detection solution, Google Cloud Blog
- What are Realtime Reports?, InfoTrust
- Write To Google BigQuery From A GTM Server Container, Simo Ahava's blog
Industry & Business
- Google Working With Allianz and Munich Re on Cyber Insurance, Wall Street Journal
- Google backs three Bay Area affordable housing projects, Mercury News
Links & Content Marketing
Local & Maps
- Google Maps now shows railroad crossing alerts, 9to5Google
Mobile & Voice
- Announcing Flutter 2, Google Developers Blog
- Apple re-enables the option to change default music player for Siri requests with iOS 14.5 beta 3, 9to5Mac
SEO
- 7 Easy Ways to Get More Traffic from Evergreen Content, WordStream
- Core Web Vitals: 7 tools & techniques to identify performance bottlenecks, Hallam
- How To Implement and Validate FAQ Structured Data, Koozai
- Robots API and max-image-preview directive in WordPress 5.7, Make WordPress Core
PPC
- Google charts a course towards a more privacy-first web, Google Blog
- Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Other Search
