Industry News

I see a ton, absolutely a ton, of confusion in the SEO industry around the Google launch of passage based ranking. A reminder, according to Google, passage based ranking launched in the US English results in the afternoon of February 10th PST time. But honestly, I do not see any signs of any update rolling out after that time, not until much later.

This patent is about presenting data with search results and deciding when to show that data in a knowledge panel with those search results. The Web provides access to a wide variety of resources, such as image files, audio files, video files,...

I am seeing some early signs of yet another Google Search ranking algorithm update this morning. The SEO community is starting to buzz about ranking fluctuations this morning and some of the tracking tools are already picking up on the changes to the Google Search rankings.

Google's John Mueller posted one of the more detailed responses I've seen from him on the topic of overall search spam, penalties, quality algorithms and more. I am not sure if the comment is showing up anymore on Reddit, so here is a screenshot of it.

With the launch of passage ranking this past week, there has been a lot of confusion about if you can "see" these in the Google search results. The answer is no, you cannot see them in the search results as we covered last week and December 2020.

The day we have been waiting for has come on Wednesday, February 10th - passage ranking (formerly known as passage indexing) is live in the US English search results. Google confirmed this after I pinged Danny Sullivan of Google about the status the other day.

More are seeing dark mode in Google Search, what is hard to see are the search ads or at least see what are organic listings versus paid listings. It is just harder to distinguish the search ads in dark mode than it is in light mode. If Google made the ad label in white text in dark mode, that would work better than the gray colored font.

There are some early signs from both the SEO community and the tracker tools that there is a big Google search ranking algorithm update going on. This has not been confirmed by Google, but that is not uncommon. There is some early chatter from within the community and some, not all, of the tracking tools are showing big changes.

Yesterday we reported that Google launched a whole set of new manual actions for Google News and Google Discover. The good news is that Google said a manual action for Google News or Google Discover will not impact how you do in Google Search.

(This is a personal post so if that isn’t your thing then you should move on.)

This is the ninth year that I’ve done a year in review piece. I’m at a different stage of my journey so you might benefit from and find yourself in prior year versions. Here are easy links to 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019

In 2020, the world shifted beneath our feet but my business kept growing. The anxiety I had about certain facets of my business disappeared, replaced by anxiety about...