SEARCHENGINES
Google On Making Mastodon More Search Engine Friendly

There is an interesting thread on Mastodon where Danny Sullivan and John Mueller, both of who work at Google, talk about making Mastodon more search-engine friendly. The thread was started by Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, when he wanted a way to search Mastodon.
Here is a link to part of the thread on Mastodon, where Danny Sullivan explains that Google can pick up anything on the web that is not blocked. He said, “will pick up anything on the web including Mastodon pages that aren’t blocked to search engines.” You can of course block your Mastodon posts from being indexed, Danny said “and any individual who doesn’t want their posts indexed can use Preferences > Opt-out of search engine indexing.”
Google will learn how to detect good content on this social network. Danny added, “Over time, if our systems learn there’s a lot of helpful, fresh content from a source, they tend to speed up the indexing of it. But there can be things site owners (or instance owners!) can do.”
John Mueller of Google added, “I haven’t looked into the details, but content from these servers does get indexed in Google.” “AFAIK there are RSS feeds for people & hashtags, which make discovery of public content fairly straightforward,” he added.
John then said the JavaScript-based public user interface is indexable by Google. “I’m sure someone with SEO knowledge could help improve that significantly too (it’s open-source, you don’t have that chance with closed platforms),” he added.
Since Mastodon is on multiple, many many, servers, that can be a challenge with all the different domains hosting the content. John said, “One difficulty is definitely that content is hosted on a variety of servers, individually they may choose to lock things down more. Also, since server speed affects crawl rate / crawl budget, faster servers could have it easier to get fresh content indexed.”
But “The underlying protocol (ActivityPub) is open-source, and there are lots of APIs. This makes it possible to integrate with websites (from here to there, and back), you can integrate it into your internal tools, you can create your own tracking of trending topics or sentiment analysis, etc. The problem with “you can” is also that a lot of this is not turn-key ready (and the AGPL license can make it harder for commercial projects),” he added.
Now, maybe the best way to get this content discovered by Google is to write about it on third-party sites (like this) and link to the content.
Here is a screenshot of this thread:
Forum discussion at Mastodon.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Hanukkah Decorations Are Live For 2023

Hanukkah (aka Chanukah) starts this coming Thursday night, December 7th. Google has added its Hanukkah decorations to the Google Search results interface to celebrate. Google does this every year and I expect to see the same rollout in the coming weeks for Christmas and Kawanzaa but for now, since Chanukah is in the coming days, we have the Hanukkah decorations live at Google Search.
Here is a screenshot of the Chanukah decorations as they look like on the mobile search results.
You can see it yourself by searching on Google for [chanukah], [hanukkah], but not yet [חֲנוּכָּה] or other spelling variations yet but it should soon. It looks better on mobile than it does on desktop results.
To see the past, the 2023 decorations, 2021 decorations, 2020 Chanukah decorations, 2019 Google holiday decorations, the 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 and so on.
Happy Chanukah, everyone!
Forum discussion at X.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Pay Accepted Icons In Google Search Results

Google seems to be testing a Google Pay Accepted label or icon in the Google search results. This label has the super G logo followed by the words “Pay accepted” words next to search result snippets that support Google Pay and notate such in their structured data.
This was first spotted by Khushal Bherwani who shared some screenshots of this on X – here is one:
Here are some more screenshots:
Here is test and without test window for same query. pic.twitter.com/n9cYWBOsro
— Khushal Bherwani (@b4k_khushal) October 20, 2023
Brodie Clark also posted some screenshots after on X:
In continuation from the test from October, Google is now testing out a new Google Pay label associated with organic results. Last month, Google was testing Pay Accepted text, with this month changing it to Pay encrypted checkout. More details: https://t.co/MvFNoPmMDR pic.twitter.com/WDVVc4RbTO
— SERPs Up 🌊 (@SERPalerts) November 30, 2023
I tried to replicate this but I came up short.
This is not the first time Google had similar icons like this in its search results.
Forum discussion at X.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Discover Showing Older Content Since Follow Feature Arrived

Typically, Google Discover shows content that is less than a day old, but it can show content that is weeks, months, or even years old. However, typically, Google will show more recent content in the Discover feed. Well, that may have changed with the new Google follow feature.
Glenn Gabe, who is a very active Google Discover user, noticed that since the Follow feature rolled out, he has been seeing content that is weeks and months old way more often than before the follow feature rolled out. Glenn wrote on X that “this could also be playing a role. i.e. Google isn’t providing as much recent content, but instead, focusing on providing targeted content based on the topics you are following.”
It makes sense that if you follow a specific topic and if Google Discover only shows the most authoritative types of content, it might be hard for Google to find new content on that topic. So it does make sense that Google may show older content more often for that specific topic you follow.
Here are screenshots Glenn shared:
Have you noticed this in your Discover feed?
Forum discussion at X.
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