SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 15, 2022
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.
If you are not happy with the latest Google product reviews update, then you can let Google know with examples. Google has fixed the “validate fix” feature in Search Console. Google Discover now can show author names over site names. Microsoft’s IndexNow is growing a lot, in fact, 7% of the new URLs clicked on were via IndexNow. Bing Shopping added coupons, promotions, price history, and ethical annotations. Google spoke about what to do with old event pages. Finally, posted a vlog with Sarah Burke on GA4 and dashboards.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google Search Console Validate Fix Now Back
Google has reenabled the validate fix feature in Google Search Console just now. It was not there a couple of hours ago and has been not working since the beginning of this month but now it is back. - Bing Shopping Searches Gains Coupons, Promotions, Price History & More
Microsoft Bing Shopping has officially added a lot of the features we noticed early such as coupons and promotions, price history, and ethical choice annotations, the company announced. - Google: What To Do With Old Event Pages
What do you do if you run an event and the event is over, do you keep the webpage live, do you redirect it, do you just delete it and 404 the page? The answer is it depends, as you’d imagine. - IndexNow Is Growing But Should You Pay Attention?
Microsoft’s IndexNow protocol is growing and the search company keeps investing in it, despite Google not adopting it – yet. Microsoft said that more than 16 million websites are publishing over 1.2 billion URLs per day to the IndexNow API. - Google Discover With Author Names Instead Of Site Name
Google Discover can now show the author name of a specific story instead of showing the site name under the story. I personally do not use Google Discover much but a couple of savvy Google Discover users noticed this over the weekend. - Are Not Happy With The Last Google Product Reviews Update? Tell Google.
The last Google product reviews update, the July 2022 Google Product Reviews Update, was an interesting one. It felt, based on SEO and webmaster feedback, that it just didn’t hit the mark in terms of quality relative to past Product reviews updates. If you have examples of where and how Google got it wrong, you can let Google know about it. - Vlog #185: Sarah Burke On The Benefits Of Google Analytics 4 & Why Data Dashboards Are Important
In part one, we learned about Sarah Burke, the Data and Analytics Manager at Cypress North. We also spoke about some of the differences between Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics 3. Here we talk about the benefits of Google Analytics 4. - A Google Shadow
Here is a photo of a real Google shadow that I found on Instagram. Not much more to say about this.
Other Great Search Threads:
- Thanks for flagging this, Chris. We agree that’s not the expected experience, and good news is the team is already working to address it. It might take a little bit to upd, AdsLiaison on Twitter
- It’s hard to say, but it’s important to keep in mind that Google just doesn’t index every page on the web, even if it’s submitted directly. If there’s no error, it might, John Mueller on Twitter
- DA is a proxy metric to help you understand the strength of your link profile and your competitiveness with other sites. Google doesn’t use DA, Moz doesn’t give DA data to Google, and gaming DA is usele, Dr. Pete Meyers on Twitter
- Usually an XML sitemap file is for URLs that you want to have indexed., John Mueller on Twitter
- Google rewrites the title link for more than 50 percent of the search results according to a little test I’ve just made for 400 search results. Only a small percentage of search results is truncated., SEO Sudwest on Twitter
- I’m happy to take a look, but if you take something with few good results, a collection of things that just happens to also match those words is common., John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Industry & Business
Links & Content Marketing
Local & Maps
Mobile & Voice
SEO
PPC
Other Search
Feedback:
Have feedback on this daily recap; let me know on Twitter @rustybrick or @seroundtable, you can follow us on Facebook and make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or just contact us the old fashion way.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Won’t Change The 301 Signals For Ranking & SEO
Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that there is no way that Google would change how the 301 redirect signal works for SEO or search rankings. Gary added that it’s a very reliable signal.
Nikola Minkov quoted Gary Illyes as saying, “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal,” when asked if a 301 redirect not working is a myth. Honestly, I am not sure the context of this question, as it is not clear from the post on X, but here it is:
More from @methode:
– 301 redirect not working is a myth. “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal”.#SERPConf2024#SERPConf2024International— Nikola Minkov (@n_minkov) April 19, 2024
We’ve covered 301 redirects here countless times – but I never saw a myth that Google does not use 301 redirects as a signal for canonicalization or for passing signals from an old URL to the redirected URL.
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages
I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.
In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”
John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”
Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.
Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.
Here are those new posts in context:
I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024
Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:
I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024
And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important
Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”
Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.
Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.
Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.
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