Industry News

Here is the first Google webmaster report of 2020, the January 2020 report is pretty packed. We had Google confirm in December that there was a local search update in November...

Changes have been made to Top Stories shown in Carousels in Google SERPs

Google made a recent announcement on its Keyword blog about top stories from non-news sites in search results. They told us about this change in the post Smarter...

There is some significant chatter in the SEO industry around a possible new years update that started late December 31, 2019 and throughout January 1, 2020. The chatter is high but similar to the Christmas update chatter, the tracking tools are not showing huge signs of an update. It leads me to believe the same as I did with the Christmas update, that I doubt there was a big update on New Years.

Over the past few days or so, I have been seeing chatter both at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World around ranking and traffic changes related to Google organic search. I got to say, I doubt Google pushed anything specific this week or even next week. Rankings do change by itself and new content is always being added to the index but an algorithm update - I doubt it.

I was on the podcast Webcology last week, with fellow guest David Harry, talking with hosts Dave Davies and Jim Hedger about search engine patents.

Both David and Dave also write about search engine patents from time to time, so it was a fun...

Note: The first 5:45 of the video is my trip there, you can skip to the interview at the 5:45 mark. I made sure this video was completely unedited outside of the b-roll stuff before and after. Matt Cutts loves doing "one-takes" and actually, so do I...

There is so much confusion and mixed signals right now, mostly because of a Google Analytics bug happening while there may be another Google search ranking algorithm update taking place. Some in the SEO community are adamant that there is a ranking update going on, despite what is going on with Google Analytics.