Industry News

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.

Last month was a pretty busy month with Google announcing the launch of BERT, one of the most significant updates the company made to search ever - the company said. We have a lot on BERT below, including the possibility that the New York Times was hurt by it. Google released the speed report for Search Console and integrated Site Kit into WordPress.

Google is now rolling out the experimental and new "Speed" reports within Google Search Console. Google began testing this last May and we have seen more and more webmasters get this report since then but now Google announced it is rolling out as "experimental."