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: Links From Lower Quality Sites To Your Site Doesn’t Necessarily Hurt
Let’s say your site has a DA of one billion and you get a link from a site that has a DA of 999,999,999, which is obviously less than one billion – can that hurt your Google rankings? In short, does getting links from pages that are lower quality than the place the link is directed to hurt your Google rankings?
Google Books Ngram Viewer Gets Fresh Data Through 2019
The Google Books Ngram Viewer, a tool that shows you how often phrases occur in books over time, now shows data through 2019. In short, this tool displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books. Previously, it showed data through 2012.
Google My Business Will Notify Business Of Listing Suspensions
Google will soon begin sending email notifications to businesses when their business listings or accounts are suspended with Google My Business. Until now, if your listing is suspended, you won’t know about it until you login to Google My Business to find out.
Google Shopping Actions Disallows Downloadable Software CDs & DVDs
Google at the end of this month, end of July, will start to disallow marketing of downloadable software CDs and DVDs through Google Shopping Ads. This does not include video game DVDs, those will still be allowed.
AdSense For Search To Display Google Shopping Ads
If you run AdSense ads on your site and you have AdSense for Search, where you use Google AdSense to monetize your search results – Google may start to show Shopping Ads in those search results. This requires no code changes on your part and will begin on August 20, 2020.
Google Doodle Station
Here is a photo I found the other day of a “Doodle Stations” with markers at the GooglePlex in California. I suspect this is a new photo, maybe someone setting up coloring on a day off but I am not su
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
MORE POLLS! Consider the robotstxt snippet below. How will this affect Googlebot crawling the index.html path? This is tricky, you might need your math skills for this one User-agent: * Disallow: /index.html [, Gary Illyes on Twitter
Google isn’t going to care about that – this kind of scraping happens, and in general, we deal with it reasonably. It is, however, something you might have thoughts on yourself (do I want to a, John Mueller on Twitter
I’d assume most people & search engines will take you by your word. "fine" = ok, "noindex" = don’t bother with this page. Sometimes more can happen ("are you really fin, John Mueller on Twitter
I’m not aware of any larger changes, but of course there are always some changes. In general, we never index all pages from any website, so it can be totally normal to not have everything indexed. I’d genera, John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
Google will now notify GMB account owners by email when local listings suspended
When AMP and other Google initiatives go to the grave, are your SEO efforts going with it? [Video]
Target Google Ads audiences based on new predicted purchase and churn metrics in Google Analytics
Video: Purna Virji of Microsoft on inclusion and accessibility in search
Next on Live with Search Engine Land: The ins and outs of Shopify SEO
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Google Optimize: Test and Monitor Website Changes Without Coding, Knapton Wright
What is Data Import?, The Coloring In Department
Industry & Business
A digital jobs program to help America’s economic recovery, Google Blog
How Google Search Changes Make it More Expensive to Win Traffic, Bloomberg
Google (GOOG) Seeks Investment in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms, Bloomberg
The "Wall Street Journal" Marketing Problem, SparkToro
Local & Maps
How to Improve Reviews for Multiple-Location Businesses, Go Fish Digital
Do Services in Google My Business Impact Ranking?, Sterling Sky Inc
Mobile & Voice
Make a WhatsApp voice or video call with Google Assistant, Zee News
SEO
Entity Seeking Queries and Semantic Dependency Trees, SEO By The Sea
Solved: Why Your Site Needs Structured Data, BrightEdge
From SEO to Conversion: How to Marry SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization for e-Commerce Sites, Outbrain Blog
Image SEO and Alt Tags: 7 Advanced Image Optimization Tips, SEM Rush
Tag Pages & SEO, Botify
What Goes Into Tracking Google’s Algorithm? – SEO Podcast, RankRanger
Why (almost) everything you knew about Google CTR is no longer valid, SISTRIX
PPC
Sunset of v2 for the Content API for Shopping, Google Ads Developer Blog
Other Search
Inside the Google team that dreams up colors, Google Blog
The Search Engine That Plants Trees With Every Search Has Just Planted its 100-Millionth Tree, Good News Network