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
Apple Maps Street View Camera Backpack

Here is a photo of some guy walking around Israel with an Apple Maps street view backpack. It was captured by Hillel Fuld the other day and posted on Twitter.
Google has its own street view backpack, which is more impressive to look at.
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
SEARCHENGINES
Google’s Internal Menu System Tracks Googlers Food Preferences

A Googler shared screenshots of the output from the Google internal menu system where it told her that one day she avoids salades and then she must have had some salads to correct that and the next day it say she enjoys salad. I am just amazed Google tracks the food Googlers eat and offers suggestions.
Here are those tweets embedded:
Important update.
As much as I would like to be a conspiracy theorist and assume that my tweets are being monitored, seems the initial warning was just a bug. pic.twitter.com/FRbkw6QE0g
— Lara Levin (@TheLaraxSF) March 23, 2022
So… I think I have two preferences set on the menu… that I like soups and salads. I think the system inverted that to things I avoid. It is now fixed. Inadvertent shaming is over.
— Lara Levin (@TheLaraxSF) March 24, 2022
Haha, I think it’s just “here are the menus for the day”, and it’ll show you things you might like most at the top. It’s not that fancy 🙂
— Lara Levin (@TheLaraxSF) March 24, 2022
To be clear, it doesn’t track you! You can set favorites. And there was a bug 🙂
— Lara Levin (@TheLaraxSF) February 2, 2023
This is really not a photo of the day but close enough…
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
SEARCHENGINES
Daniel Waisberg Hosts Lizzi Sassman & Martin Splitt At Google Tel Aviv

A couple of months before John Mueller visited Daniel Waisberg at the Google Tel Aviv office, Lizzi Sassman and Martin Splitt of Google did as well. Here are the three smiling on the streets of Tel Aviv.
This was shared a while back on Twitter.
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
-
PPC7 days ago
9 Non-PPC Questions Your PPC Clients Will Ask (& How to Answer Them)
-
NEWS5 days ago
OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT Plus with Monthly Subscription of $20
-
SEARCHENGINES4 days ago
Helpful Content & Link Spam Update Done, SEO, Search Console & More
-
MARKETING6 days ago
(Re)Introducing your favorite Optimizely products!
-
PPC6 days ago
Why (& How) to Set Up Conversion Paths in Google Analytics (Successfully!)
-
MARKETING7 days ago
5 Simple Things You Can Do To Improve the Content Experience for Readers
-
SOCIAL4 days ago
Twitter’s Cancelling Free Access to its API, Which Will Shut Down Hundreds of Apps
-
SEO6 days ago
11 Disadvantages Of ChatGPT Content