SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: February 24, 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.
Google Ads said it fixed the high latency issues and weird error messages that were frustrating advertisers for days. Google Ads launched enhanced conversions for leads. Google image search is testing rounded corners. Google’s John Mueller explained when you should make a blog. Google AdSense for YouTube section is coming to the YouTube studio.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google Ads Fixed The Latency Issues & Weird Error Messages In Ad Console
It seems like for the past few days advertisers have been complaining about the Google Ads console being slow with some latency issues and sometimes that weird error messages were coming up. This lead to a lot of frustration and slowed down some PPC marketers day-to-day jobs. Well, as of last night at 9pm ET, Google said they fixed those issues. - Google To Add AdSense For YouTube Section To AdSense Console & YouTube Studio
A month ago we reported how Google has changed the AdSense earnings thresholds to be distinct between normal AdSense earnings and YouTube AdSense earnings. Well, Google announced related to that in March, Google will roll out the new AdSense for YouTube homepage by navigating to AdSense from within YouTube Studio. - Google Ads Rolls Out Enhanced Conversions For Leads
As reported by George Nguyen, Google is now officially launching enhanced conversions for leads. Google has enhanced conversion for web for about a year, but recently added this for leads. - Google’s John Mueller On When You Should Make A Blog
Google’s John Mueller posted on Reddit about when he thinks one should pursue starting down the journey of a blog. Of course, I know something about blogging and I have to say, his advice is dead on with something I’d agree with. - Google Image Search Tests Rounded Corners On Images
Google Image Search is testing rounding the corners on the images it displays in the search results. This is instead of showing squared off corners, Google is rounding the corners to give it a little more – um – pizzaz? - A Google S2 Infra Fleece, Is That Search Infrastructure?
Here is a new Google fleece I spotted on Twitter with a Google Cloud like logo that says S2 Infra on it. Does that stand for search infrastructure? The guy who shared it does work at Google in the
Other Great Search Threads:
- Google changed the look of the government help info section at the top of addiction treatment search results. Original article with old design: https://t.co/AbSsbvsKMv New design screenshot:, Michelle Kubot Segovia on Twitter
- SEO Experiment: Will Google find URLs which have no normal links pointing to them, but via hreflang meta tags only? Initial result: No Test details: On 2/11 I created an Italian version of my personal website homepage and used hr, Stephen on Twitter
- Topics: The new Privacy Sandbox proposal for interest-based advertising, Google Ads Help
- “Does migrating a website’s hosting location to another country affect SEO?” is a question @JohnMu often hears. Watch our latest episode of #AskGooglebot for the answer, Google Search Central on Twitter
- Are policies a type of documentation, or do you see them as separate things? currently thinking about how case studies seem to be different type of thing, but policies are more mysterious (are they or aren’t they documentation), Lizzi on Twitter
- Cute one… “Page indexed without content”, Barry Schwartz on Twitter
- Fixed indented parsing in MozCast. Here’s the current prevalence of page-one indented result counts in our data set (as of this morning): 1 = 27.6% 2 = 7.6% 3 = 2.0% 4 = 0.4% 5 = 0.1%, Dr. Pete Meyers on Twitter
- It’s easy to fret too much over headings — use them as headings, and don’t worry too much about the rest. With HTML5 it’s common to have multiple sets of headings too, that’s also fine., John Mueller on Twitter
- Off hand, this reminds me a bit of the cloaking, redirecting ads that used to make it through ad networks (check for users in locales or on certain mobile providers, redirect to spam / malware). It wouldn’t, John Mueller on Twitter
- Sounds like DuckDuckGo (& really Bing) might need to focus more on E-A-T -> Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo (results provided by Bing) “For many terms, Bing & DuckDuckGo surfaced more untrustworthy, Glenn Gabe on Twitter
- lM How do you mean? (It’s good to take a critical view of your own content, sometimes that’s the first step towards improvement.), John Mueller on Twitter
- We don’t differentiate. If something has useful & relevant content, if users find it helpful, we’ll try to show it for relevant queries. For example, most sites use CMSs – and CMSs are essentially just web apps, John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Industry & Business
Links & Content Marketing
Local & Maps
Mobile & Voice
SEO
PPC
Search Features
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.
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.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Core Update Flux, AdSense Ad Intent, California Link Tax & More
For the original iTunes version, click here.
The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google’s Danny Sullivan went on the defensive on search quality and forum listings in the search results. Google’s site reputation abuse spam policy will be fought both algorithmically and through manual actions. Google responded to The Verge mocking its search rankings over best printer. Google Search Console has a new unused ownership tokens page. Some sites may see the Google Indexing API work for a limited time on unsupported content types. And having two sites won’t result in your sites search ranking decline. BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will test Zstd compression soon. Google Search is testing thumbs-up and down buttons for product carousels. Google is testing new sitelinks designs. Google Notes on Search may not go away in May. Google Maps no longer supports draft reviews. Google Maps released a bunch of new maps, directions, travel and EV features. Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns now support AI image generation. Google Ads is testing a similar product carousel. Google Ads reminds advertisers that ad customizers are going away. Google Ads is testing a new horizontal ad card format. Google AdSense has these new ad intent formats. Google AdSense publishers are reporting lower RPM earnings since mid-February. Google threatens to drop links to California news publishers amongst link tax bill. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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