Industry News

Google is making some changes to its match types again, this time phrase match will expand to cover additional broad match modifier traffic. However, Google said this will continue "to respect word order when it's important to the meaning." This change will start rolling out over the next two weeks.

SEO A/B testing is limiting your search growth.



I know, that statement sounds backward and wrong. Shouldn’t A/B testing help SEO programs identify what does and doesn’t work? Shouldn’t SEO A/B testing allow sites to optimize based on statistical fact? You’d think so. But it often does the opposite.

That’s not to say that SEO A/B testing doesn’t work in some cases or can’t be used effectively. It can. But it’s rare and my experience is SEO A/B testing is both applied and interpreted...

So the first month of 2021 is now over and it has proven to be an important month. We had Google trickle out a few unconfirmed ranking algorithm updates this month, including confirming rolling out subtopics rankings last year. Google launched a new mobile redesign, did tons of various UI tests and feature launches.

There may have been a smaller and unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update that touched down around January 26th but mostly felt on January 27th. I was going to report on it yesterday but more important information came out, so I held this until today. Again, this seems like a smaller update but if you were hit by it, you probably felt it in a big way.

On Friday afternoon, Google announced the beginning of the rollout of its new mobile search results design. I now see this new design and I wanted to share some side by side comparisons of the old versus the new design for queries.

I know I just reported about an unconfirmed Google ranking algorithm update around January 7th and 8th but I think I am seeing signs of another one that started to get noticed January 12th or maybe the day before.

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that the search company launched the subtopics ranking feature or algorithm in November 2020, just weeks after announcing it at the Search On event in October 2020.

I am seeing some signals and signs of a Google search ranking algorithm update touching down in the past day or so. The chatter is limited but it is there and it is unusual. The tools, most of them, are showing big shifts in the Google organic search rankings.

Well, 2020 is over - phew, right? December was a wild wild month in terms of what SEOs and webmasters need to be concerned with around Google Search. We had the December 2020 core update and some unconfirmed updates. We learned more about the page experience update, passage indexing and more.

Since Google announced passage indexing (ranking) many assumed they would look different in the search results. But no, they won't look any different according to Danny Sullivan of Google. Danny told me on Twitter that passage indexing "doesn't change the look of results."