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:
- Mid-November Google Search Algorithm Update Reversals?
Friday we reported about a possible Google update, which is unconfirmed, but where a nice amount of the search community noticed some ranking changes and traffic changes. It seems like maybe yesterday there were some reversals or tweaks to whatever happened on November 15th. - Limited Time Google Ads Black Friday & Cyber Monday Ad Units
Google has a new special ad unit for a limited time for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping season. Ginny Marvin at Search Engine Land said this limited time ad unit is running for some advertisers now through November 27th. - Google Does Not Index Redirected Pages
This is probably obvious to most of you but Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that Google does not index redirects. Meaning, if you redirect page A to page B, any content that might be on page A is not indexed, instead GoogleBot just does a hop, skip and a jump over from page A to page B. - Google Showing Fewer Videos In Their Search Results
According to STAT Search Analytics and RankRanger, Google is showing significantly fewer video boxes or carousels in the search results then it did just a week or so ago. It seems Google is showing about 30% fewer videos or so. - Google Search Adds Hijri & Hebrew Date Conversions
You can now go to Google and ask it to tell you the current Hijri and/or Hebrew date, as well as ask it to convert the dates for you. I tested some examples and for the most part is works pretty well. - Gooogle Cars Shop Rebranded A Bit
In 2012 we found a picture of a Gooogle (three O's) car taxi service store in England somewhere. The store still seems to be around but has been rebranded by coloring the Os black and sticking in a s
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Looks like there is now a threshold for Google to show your review stars in Maps. Only businesses with 3 or more reviews have their stars showing @JoyanneHawkins @mblumenthal… https://t.co/2PYTZNdTTZ, Dave DiGregorio on Twitter
- Apple Starts Collecting Map Data On Foot, WebmasterWorld
- Calls Made for Mark Zuckerberg to Step Down as Chairman at Facebook, WebmasterWorld
- Instagram Fights Back at Fake Followers With Automation of its Own, WebmasterWorld
- Office 365 multifactor authentication (MFA) outage, WebmasterWorld
- They're subtly different: alt attributes are used as an alternative to the image, title attributes are used to supplement the image. We mostly use alt text for image ranking, but should pick up the title too, if there's somethi, John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
- State of the Google Shopping auction heading into the 2018 holiday season
- Product listing ads, digital co-op and the $13 billion opportunity
- A closer look at Bing’s box and whisker plots to analyze CPC data
- Google Ads showing Black Friday click, impression share trends in Overviews
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
- Annelieke's Analytics: 5 Google Analytics segments for your blog, Yoast
- How to Do A/B Split Testing in WordPress using Google Optimize, WP Beginner
- How to Setup Google Analytics Offline Tracking, Jeffalytics
- OnCrawl now integrates with Splunk and Adobe Analytics (Omniture), Cogniteev
Industry & Business
- Breaking ground for Google’s first data center in Denmark, Google Blog
- Google News Initiative kicks off Asia-Pacific Innovation Challenge, Google Blog
- It's Official: All Five FAANG Stocks Are in a Bear Market, Fortune
- The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy, Monday Note
Links & Promotion Building
Local & Maps
- Apple confirms pedestrian-level Maps data collection, initially limited to California, Apple Insider
Mobile & Voice
SEO
- Algorithm Analysis In The Age of Embeddings, Blind Five Year Old
- Structured Entity Information in Search Results, Go Fish Digital
- 7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them), BruceClay
- Google Webmaster Hangout Notes: November 16th 2018, DeepCrawl
- How to rank for head terms, Distilled
- In Search SEO Podcast 03: When a Link is a Must & Do Users Trust Voice Devices?, RankRanger
- November 16, 2018 Google Help Hangout Notes, Marie Haynes Consulting
- What Causes Google Rankings to Be Highly Volatile?, Search Engine Journal
PPC
