Industry News

Remember the Google local update we reported about earlier this month, well the local SEO folks are still tracking this update in detail. Joy Hawkins named it the Bedlam update because it is "a scene of uproar and confusion" and she hates the animal names (sorry, had to use a roaring lion image). But she also posted an update saying she things this is about "relevance, not proximity."

Google makes it easy for marketers to make bad decisions by hiding the performance of image search traffic.

Marketers have grown accustomed to not seeing image search traffic broken out in analytics packages. And Google persists in telling marketers to use Google Search Console to track image search traffic.

The problem? Google Search Console doesn’t tell marketers how image search traffic performs.

Here’s why Google’s decision to hide image search traffic performance is hurting...

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I appreciated this counter-cultural viewpoint from the folks at Feature Upvote, on avoiding the need to “grow at any cost”:

For us, we realised success means running a growing company (profitable with customers in 30+ countries) that we enjoy working for but doesn’t dominate our lives. We want to have time for...

As you know, we saw a huge amount of chatter around a big Google search ranking algorithm update starting November 7th and 8th through the weekend. There were mixed signals in that the chatter in the industry was very heavy but (a) Google did not pre-announce it and (b) the automated tracking tools didn't really pick up on the update.

Friday morning, November 8th, I saw a sprinkle of chatter across the industry about a Google search algorithm update. Some were claiming massive changes in traffic and rankings. But to be honest, the chatter was incredibly limited, that is until several hours later and now the chatter throughout the weekend is off the charts.

For the past couple of days I have been noticing changes to the local pack rankings in Google. The Google My Business local results are changing but the forums are pretty quiet about it. But Austin Holdsworth posted on Twitter about it and the Local RankFlux tracker is showing changes as well.

Bing announced last night a new set of search penalties for inorganic site structure.iInorganic site structure includes PBNs and link networks, doorways and duplicate content, subdomain or subfolder leasing and spammy web hosts and hacked sites.