Industry News

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

This is the eighth year that I’ve done a year in review piece. If this is your first time reading one you may need the context of prior years. I’ve dealt with a variety of issues leading up to this point. Here are easy links to 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

2019 was a successful year in one way but not in many others. As I closed out the year I realized that I’d taken the wrong learnings from...

A couple weeks ago, Google launched the mobile search interface design it had since May 2019 on desktop. It brought the favicons to the snippets and the black ad label for the desktop search ads. This design release, like the mobile released caused a huge number of complaints within the search community but more importantly, unlike with the mobile release, it caused a huge number of complaints outside of the search community.

This is going to be a hard one to judge because I see chatter within the SEO community and also many of the tracking tools are lighting up. These are all signs that there was a Google search ranking algorithm update. But truth is, this can be directly related to the featured snippet deduplication change on January 22nd.

In November 2019 we saw Google testing removing the normal snippet from the Google search results when Google shows a featured snippet for that site/URL. Well after numerous tests, Google has launched this yesterday and is no longer showing a featured snippet and at the same time the same URL in the main web search results.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. They can be fun to listen to while doing chores around the house, like watering plants, washing dishes, cooking meals, and cleaning up. There are podcasts on many different subjects that I am...

Google announced this morning that after April 6, 2020 it will no longer support the data-vocabulary markup for rich results. Google is going all in with Schema.org. Google said "with the increasing usage and popularity of schema.org we decided to focus our development on a single SD scheme."

Google has said that the January 2020 core update is "mostly done" when I and others asked if it was done rolling out. Google said "the update is mostly done, though as with any core update, it may take to two weeks to fully complete." But is it?

How might Google be trying to improve upon the information that they learn from sources such as knowledge bases to help them answer search queries?

The information they may use to enrich a knowledge base may be learned or inferred from...