Daily Search Forum Recap: March 1, 2021

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google Search February 26 & 27th Search Algorithm Volatility
This weekend there was another unconfirmed Google search ranking update, maybe starting around February 26th through the 27th and maybe the 28th. There was significant chatter in the SEO forums and some of the tools showed a spike around the 27th of February.

Google See Results That Mention Filter On Left Side Panel
We saw Google testing a search refinement feature named “see results that mention” on the right side bar. But now, as captured by Brian Freiesleben, Google is testing it on the left side. This seems to go with the side bar design Google has been slowly rolling out to more and more queries.

Google: Internal Linking Gives Google A Sense Of Page Level Importance
Google’s John Mueller was asked how someone can help Google understand which pages of a site it really wants Google to index. A webmaster said that Google was only indexing 10% or so of the site’s pages in the sitemap file. He asked how can they notate which pages are more important if Google doesn’t look at the priority field in XML Sitemaps.

Google On The Importance Of GTINs For Products In Search
Google posted a Friday blog post named “providing better product information for shoppers.” The blog post mentioned GTINs over 20 times, how is that for keyword density? GTINs, if you are not aware, is one of the more popular product identification numbers, it stands for Global Trade Item Number.

Steve Marin On Content & SEO With Measuring Digital Marketing Success With Data
Steve Marin runs Spark PPC, a marketing consulting firm based in New York City, he focuses on small to medium sized businesses. He has been doing SEM and SEO for over 8 years now. He said he loves both PPC and SEO, they are both children to him – he can’t pick one he loves more. He kind of fell into running his own company after helping a family member’s boss with SEO and PPC and that client has still been his main client for the past five years.

Google Partner Program Wooden Coffee Box
Google sent the Google Partner Program agencies in India these wooden coffee boxes in 2021. The wooden box is engraved and inside the box it has a lot of coffee materials.