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 Search Ranking Update On March 26th?
There is some early chatter of a possible Google search algorithm update touching down last night and this morning, March 26th and March 27th. It might be too early for some people to notice or it might just be a blip. It also might be tweaks and tremors from the March 12th Google core update.
Google: Premier Partners Get No Special Treatment To Core Search
This may or may not be obvious but Google Partners have no special access to organic search in Google. They don’t get special treatment, they don’t simply rank better because they are a Google partner. In fact, there is no Google Partner status for organic search. Google Partners are for Google Ads, Analytics, Google Apps, etc but not for search.
Bing Search Makes Improvements To Their Intelligent Answers, Text-To-Speech & Visual Search
Bing published some upgrades they made to Bing search the other day. In short, they upgraded their intelligent answers system, their text-to-speech capabilities and their visual search engine.
Google Ads Keyword Planner Adds Features
Google Ads is adding a bunch of new features to their keyword planner tool. Ginny Marvin dug into the features in detail at Search Engine Land, but here is a summary from the announcement screen provided to me by Ross Barefoot on Twitter.
Google Drops Info: Command But Has Added Canonical Info To URL Inspection Tool
Google has announced they are dropping the info: command, primarily used to tell webmasters which URL Google considers the canonical URL in their index. At least that is what Google has been telling webmasters to use for this purpose for years. Now, you need to have verified access to the site to see such details in the URL Inspection tool.
Google Team Hires Mariachi Group After Unlocking Work Achievement
Here is a video from Adam Lasnik (former mini-Matt) on Instagram who shared that his team was celebrating a team achievement and hired a Mariachi group to do so. How funny!
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
Whew :). Saved me some digging around :). I’d be surprised if any search engine had issues with non-7-bit ASCII nowadays.… https://t.co/j1bWHqaBxY, John Mueller on Twitter
Noticed a pretty big bump in the % of GB-en SERPs with a featured snippet on them at the end of last week. Went deeper and found a whole bunch of shifts in featured snippets across Europe and beyond. Every market other than US-en, Eric Hedekar on Twitter
I’d recommend picking one setup and using that consistently. The more you rely on search engines to guess what you want, the less likely it’ll be the way you want it.… https://t.co/hKnYhbdRBy, John Mueller on Twitter
It’s much easier to learn how parameters work, and how they can be simplified, than to do the same with "pseudo-directories". There’s no value in URL rewriting to that extreme, just use parameters where they make sense. Keep it, John Mueller on Twitter
URLs can be indexed without being crawled, if they’re blocked by robots.txt – that’s by design. Usually that comes from links from somewhere, judging from that number, I’d imagine from within your site somewhere.… https://t., John Mueller on Twitter
We index a lot of forms of JavaScript-generated content.…, John Mueller on Twitter
E.U. Parliament Approves the Copyright Directive, WebmasterWorld
robots.txt is not a suggestion…, John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
5 additional data blending examples for smarter SEO insights
SMX Overtime: How to use customer segmentation to test new value propositions
Google adds vacation rentals to Hotel Search
SMX Overtime: 3 tips to maximizing visual search potential
Google Ads Keyword Planner gets new (and old) features
Take your search marketing skills to the next level
Google to retire the info: command, adds canonical information to URL Inspection Tool
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Top 4 Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking Goals To Measure, Kevin T Payne
Trigger Groups In Google Tag Manager, Simo Ahava’s blog
Industry & Business
Celebrating the Apache Software Foundation’s 20th anniversary, Google Open Source Blog
Inside Google’s Rebooted Robotics Program, New York Times
Pentagon Chief: Google Needs a Lesson in Patriotism, Bloomberg
More growth ahead in Taiwan, Google Blog
Links & Promotion Building
What Is a Nofollow Link? Everything You Need to Know (No Jargon!), ahrefs.com
How Google warped the hyperlink, WIRED UK
Local & Maps
4 Ways to Fight Spam on Google My Business, DAC
Find and book vacation rentals on Google, Google Blog
Mobile & Voice
Adobe and Microsoft are using voice AI to search and query contracts, VentureBeat
Creating a voice search experience for your brand, ClickZ
Google Podcasts in-episode search is coming, shows now being fully transcribed, Android Police
SEO
An SEO’s Perspective: How to Scale Quality Content Production, Go Inflow
March 2019 Google Core Update – Full Breakdown, Traffic Research
SEO This Week Episode 112 – Killed Features and EComm SEO, Digitaleer
The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End, Moz
Google’s AMP Project: Insider SEO optimization tips, Search Metrics
PPC
7 Prospecting Strategies for PPC Agencies, WordStream
Ensure Brand Coverage With Google’s Target Impression Share Bid Strategy, Metric Theory
What Should Keyword Research Look Like in 2019?, RankRanger
