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:
- Most SEOs Use Few SEO Tools & Don't Spend Much On Them
Aleyda Solis posted a set of polls on Twitter asking SEOs about their SEO software and tools usage. In short, it seems like most SEOs use two to four tools and spend under $13,000 annually on those tools. I suspect most of those spend a heck of a lot less than $13,000. - DeepRank Is Google's Codename For BERT
Last night I had to get clarification from Google about their internal project name DeepRank. In short, and as that amazing video said at the 44:10 mark "they named their project DeepRank after the deep learning methods used by BERT and the ranking aspect of Search." DeepRank is BERT, at least the name of the project used internally to get BERT implemented into Google Search. - November 2020 Google Webmaster Report
Last month was pretty busy, we had Google's big Search On 2020 event with BERT going 100%, passage indexing (and all the confusion around it)... - Google Goes Deep On Dupe Detection & Canonicalization
This morning our Google friends, John Mueller, Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes and also Lizzi Harvey (Google's technical writer) posted a new podcast. It was obviously fun to listen to but in it, Gary Illyes went super deep on how Google handles duplicate content detection, i.e. dupe detection and then the canonicalization. They are not the same thing. - Behind The Scenes: Google Product Expert Virtual Summit 2020
Mihai Aperghis, an SEO we reference here from time to time, is also a Google Product Expert and attended the Google Product Expert Virtual Summit the other week. He has written this blog post and I am posting it here as a super rare guest post on this site. Why? (1) Mihai rocks and (2) this site is about community and Product Experts are the essence of the Google community. - When SEOs Use To Meet Up
I was scrolling through my search photos archive that I did not post here yet and spotted this one from June 2019. This was at SMX Advanced in Seattle where we had an evening SEO meet up. Yea, back in
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- If you duplicate text across pages then that's duplicate text. It doesn't mean the pages are bad, it's just that the text is duplicated, and we'd have to pick one of those pages to show if someone searches f, John Mueller on Twitter
- If you want to make use of the Google Podcasts setup, you'd need to use one of the supported & documented configurations., John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
- CDPs “very important” for getting value out of customer data, say 58% of marketers surveyed
- California’s ‘CCPA 2.0’ is probably going to pass, here’s what changes
- Google launched DeepRank in October 2019: DeepRank is BERT
- Microsoft Advertising promotion extensions available in time for the holidays
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
- How to Use Search Data to Solve Business & Marketing Problems, Seer Interactive
Industry & Business
- The Future of SEO w/ Barry Schwartz, Content King App
- Google to Employees: Don’t ‘Get Distracted’ by Antitrust Case, Bloomberg
- Judge sets November deadline for Google's initial response to U.S. antitrust case, Reuters
Links & Content Marketing
- Stop Listening to Google’s Advice on Link Building, Search Engine Journal
Local & Maps
- Google Local Services Ads Expanding Bid Mode in Home Services Categories, Local University
- Top 10 Changes That Impacted Google My Business in 2020, Moz
- Why Your Local Pages Might be Happier on a Subdomain, Street Fight
Mobile & Voice
- Siri gets Election Day date wrong, Apple fixes issue, Appleinsider
- How Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant Are Reporting on Election Day: Updated, Voicebot
SEO
- How To Create an SEO Optimized Content Outline, Go Fish Digital
- October Winners & Losers, Searchmetrics
- SERP Trends Universal Listings, BrightEdge
- eCommerce SEO strategies for Black Friday (and beyond), DeepCrawl
- How One Hacker Artist Tricked Google Into Showcasing Her Art When You Search This Election-Related Term, artnet News
PPC
- Understanding Google's Smart Shopping Campaigns, Practical Ecommerce
- What Google's Missing Search Queries Mean for PPC, JumpFly
