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 Getting Your Canonical URLs Wrong?
A webmaster posted in the Google webmaster help forums after noticing that one of his sites saw hundreds of pages wiped out of the Google index a week or so ago. He noticed that Google is associated one URL to a completely irrelevant canonical URL and suspects that is the issue.
Google Image Search Needs Image & Associated Landing Page Both Indexed
For your images to show up in Google Image Search, you don’t just need to make sure your images are on the web somewhere, you need to make sure that the image itself is on a web page that can also be indexed. If either the image itself or the associated page the image is viewable on is not able to be crawled or indexed, then Google won’t show it in image search.
Happy Holidays & Christmas Day Logos From Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Sogou & More
The search engine industry is all decked out to celebrate the holidays and Christmas with their happy holiday and Christmas logo and themes. This year we have special logos and designs from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Sogou and our own site.
Google’s John Mueller Helping Webmasters On Christmas Eve Again
John Mueller to me seems like a real genuine person and someone who is in a tough position every day trying to balance the line of defending the Google search results while helping some people who try to manipulate those same results. Each Christmas eve for over 12 years, John Mueller has been helping webmasters with their problems.
Google Tea Pot
Google may have given Google branded tea pots to some of their partners for the holidays. Here is a photo from Angora Media on Instagram of the gift they got from Google. It is a tea pot, I think.
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
I’d match the date in the sitemap file to the content that can be crawled & indexed, since it helps us to discover new & updated pages.… https://t.co/o77HjHxCp1, John Mueller on Twitter
One is based on any/random URLs we happened to crawl, the other is based on URLs we actually wanted to show (index) in the search results.… https://t.co/hwx8VBs4wN, John Mueller on Twitter
warning from robot file, Google Webmaster Help
11,000 Pages With Failed: Crawl anomaly – Test Live Site Fine – No Server Log Errors, Google Webmaster Help
Ranking first boost and Then suddenly drop, WebmasterWorld
Sounds like it might have moved over recently :)…, John Mueller on Twitter
That doesn’t sound very trustworthy.…, John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
Year in Review: Top 10 SEO expert columns of 2018
PPC 2018: These changes will have the biggest impact on advertisers in 2019
Ask an SMXpert: Link prospecting and helpful tools to manage outreach
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Fine-tune Google Analytics for a More Profitable 2019, Practical Ecommerce
Industry & Business
How Google took on China—and lost, MIT Technology Review
2018, celebrating our global Webmaster community, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
Google slammed in federal complaint for ‘disturbing’ children’s games, MarketWatch
The Verge 2018 tech report card: Google, The Verge
Links & Promotion Building
Pushed Even Further: US Newsrooms View Mobile Alerts as a Standalone Platform, Columbia Journalism Review
Local & Maps
Improving the Local SEO Toolkit: A 2018 Holiday Wish List, Street Fight
Mobile & Voice
Amazon Alexa suffers Christmas outage in Europe, Engadget
SEO
Top 25 Local Search Ranking Signals You Need to Know, Search Engine Journal
PPC
It Costs 23% More to Advertise in Google Search Than Four Years Ago, Martech Series
Other Search
Android TV Now Claiming Over 100 Pay TV Operator Partners Worldwide, Multichannel
