Daily Search Forum Recap: December 12, 2018

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: We Don’t Need To Notify You Of Bad Links Because We Just Ignore Them
Since the Penguin 4.0 update Google devalues bad links versus demoting the pages they link to. So when John was asked why Google Search Console doesn’t have a way to notify webmasters of bad links pointing to their site, John said “If we recognize them, we can just ignore them – no need to have you do anything in most cases.”

Bing: Machine Learning Leads To More Human Like Ranking In Search
Bing’s Frédéric Dubut said on Twitter and in a quote at Search Engine Journal that machine learning helps with scaling generalizing, which is how humans would manually rank search results. So using machine learning to rank search results is a good way to get Bing’s search results to look more human tailored and thus better.

Google News Publishers Continue To Have Indexing/Ranking Issues
Since before October we have been covering issues uncovered by news publishers that their content is not being properly indexed and ranked in both Google News and Google web search. Well, after Google said they fixed it numerous times, there are still publishers who claim the issue is not resolved.

Example: When Google’s Search Results Are Not Diverse Enough
We’ve all seen examples of Google showing too many search results from a single domain name for one query. But here is one where the search results are simply really not that diverse. And the query itself is not that incredibly obscure.

Google: The Year in Search 2018
Google has published their annual “Year in Search” – their old Google digest, which sums up the most searched for keyword phrases over 2018. To be clear, these are top trending searches, which takes into account an increase in interest from 2017 to 2018 around a specific topic.

Google China’s Beijing Office Fire Video & Photos
Google China’s Beijing office is in the Tower B of Raycom Info Tech Park in Haidian District, Beijing. Here are photos and video from the Global Times of the fire that broke out at that building.