5 AUG 2022 · A lot of search news this week and with Dave on the road in meetings Kristine Shachinger from Sites Without Walls in Las Vegas sat in with Jim to cover it. We started talking about Google's well-named new multi-analytic tag, The Google Tag, and how to properly apply it.

28 JUL 2022

14 JUL 2022 · Most SEOs consider Google Search Console (GSC) their source of truth and trust the data to be accurate. What if I told you that GSC doesn’t tell you all of the keywords you’re getting traffic from? In fact, the tool doesn’t show a term for nearly half the clicks. These instances of hidden terms account for 46.08% of all clicks in our study. The study includes one month of data across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 billion total clicks. Google Updates Help Docs in wake of Stox’s Study. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-anonymizes-tons-of-queries-33735.html GA4 supports Urchin Tracking Parameters (UTM) UTM Term, UTM Content, Conversion and Bounce Rate metrics https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-4-gains-utm-term-utm-content-conversion-bounce-rate-33744.html Google My Business App has ceased functioning https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-app-no-longer-available-33743.html Google Maps App suggested as way to be able to message customer There is no such thing as a ratio of nofollow to follow links in Google Rankings. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ratio-of-follow-to-nofollow-links-33711.html Is the type of CMS used to build a site a ranking factor? https://www.searchenginejournal.com/does-the-cms-matter-for-search-rankings/457580/ Massive set of updates and bug fixes released with WordPress 6.0.1 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-6-0-1-maintenance-update-released-with-multiple-bug-fixes/457471/#close Google Data Studio and how to use it https://searchengineland.com/google-data-studio-258871 If you are interested in sponsoring Webcology please email brasco@wmr.fm

8 JUL 2022 · John Mueller Says Search Result pages are relatively similar to no to low effort category pages. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-query-pages-equivalent-to-low-effort-category-pages-33699.html FCC does not have the authority to force Apple or Google to remove TikTok from their stores however the US government continues to warn against it after US data was accessed by ByteDance Engineers from within China. FCC can fine TikTok and even force reforms on the company as reported in Axios earlier today https://www.axios.com/2022/07/07/congress-tiktok-china-privacy-data Google Search Console Insights now supports GA4 (only) https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-insights-google-analytics-4-33706.html From the what could go wrong file, Google testing Highly Rated By Users in Mobile Carousels. Google is testing a new carousel in the mobile search results named "Highly rated by users." This will show product results that have, um, high ratings from user reviews. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-highly-rated-by-users-carousel-33700.html Google Merchant Center adds autotagging for all free listings on Google. When auto-tagging is enabled, after someone clicks your free product listing and free local product listing, auto-tagging adds some additional information including a parameter called "result id" to the URL parameters that searchers click on. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-merchant-center-auto-tagging-all-33709.html

30 JUN 2022 · Several years of Mobile First. What’s changed? https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-mobile-first-index-guide/437472/ Google clarifies 15MB is really big https://www.seroundtable.com/google-clarifies-15mb-googlebot-limit-33670.html 8 Tips on Ecommerce from Googler, Alan Kent https://www.seroundtable.com/google-offers-8-tips-on-e-commerce-seo-33676.html FCC Commissioner asks Google and Apple to ban TikTok from their respective stores https://www.searchenginejournal.com/fcc-requests-tiktok-ban/456297/ Google Freshness Update explained by Roger https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/freshness-algorithm/ Google Updates structured data advice for products with multiple variants https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/freshness-algorithm/ Google rich results guidelines update now prohibits guns, https://searchengineland.com/google-rich-results-guidelines-now-prohibits-weapons-recreational-drugs-tobacco-vaping-products-and-gambling-related-products-386185 SEO : Would like to also mention http://wandb.me/seo-job

23 JUN 2022 · Greg’s Guide to Social Media Algorithms https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-algorithms/453220/ Roger Montti on LaMDA https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-lamda-sentient/454820/ Google updates its notes on HTTP status codes https://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-http-status-codes-googlebot-job-posting-docs-33638.html Google: Hypens over underscores in URLs https://www.seroundtable.com/google-underscores-hyhens-in-urls-seo-33631.html Content that’s not visible isn’t as critically bad as it once was says Gary surprising Martin https://www.seroundtable.com/google-not-visible-content-33630.html Office Hours Cut to one per Month https://www.seroundtable.com/google-seo-office-hours-now-down-to-once-per-month-33621.html

16 JUN 2022 · Google Researcher Punished Saying " Google’s Artificial Intelligence Had Achieved Sentience" as Google placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system. Is AI sentient? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine Google Business Profile – Profile Strength Widget produces a box showing a representation of your profile’s health, along with prompts for creating offers, reviews, and new content or updates. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-business-profile-strength-widget-33596.html Google Search Console Changes https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-invalid-or-valid-classifications-33594.html Why Google Analytics and Google Search Console data differ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-analytics-gsc-data-mismatch/438508/ Complete Guide to GSC https://www.searchenginejournal.com/guide-google-search-console/452534/ Google experimenting with more featured snippets in SERPs https://searchengineland.com/google-testing-new-featured-snippet-layouts-385861 Internet Explorer’s dead Compare feature in GSC performance reports https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-testing-compare-feature-in-performance-reports-385855

9 JUN 2022 · Google Core Update finished rolling out https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2022-core-update-done-rolling-out-33562.html EU Publishers and Webmasters can’t block US traffic without also blocking Google and Googlebot https://www.seroundtable.com/eu-publishers-block-us-users-google-33557.html Don’t add your company name to image alt-text. It’s redundant, undescriptive, and not helpful https://www.seroundtable.com/google-company-name-in-blank-image-alt-text-33538.html Yoast and IndexNow “They changed how it worked a bit (or explained it better) where we only have to ping one endpoint. With that, we basically replace the xml sitemap ping with a call to IndexNow and it’s done.”” https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yoast-on-why-its-adopting-indexnow-protocol/453516/

2 JUN 2022 · Reports say Apple is likely to announce a new user-centric web search. However, for the search engine to become functional, Apple wants to wait till January 2023 to do so. Apple published a list of things that might affect rankings back in 2020 • Aggregated user engagement with search results • Relevancy and matching of search terms to webpage topics and content • Number and quality of links from other pages on the web • User location based signals (approximate data) • Webpage design characteristics https://www.seroundtable.com/apple-search-ranking-factors-29821.html John Giannandrea – was head of search at Google, left for Apple in March 2018 to lead Apple machine learning and AI division. https://www.seroundtable.com/john-giannandrea-from-google-heads-to-apple-25517.html Core Updates use data from before the update starts. They might update data between Core Update events. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-core-update-data-refresh-33509.html This Core Update... https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2022-broad-core-update-seo-impact-33512.html New Google author markup for article structured data https://www.seroundtable.com/google-author-markup-best-practices-33530.html "To help Google best understand and represent the author of the content, we recommend following these best practices when specifying authors in markup." • Include all authors in the markup • Specify multiple authors when applicable • Use the additional fields that is available to you • Only specify the author’s name in the author.name property • Use the appropriate author type Wix Structured Data guide https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wix-structured-data/451282/

27 MAY 2022 · Jim and Kristine comment on the sudden passing of the great Bill Slawski, the Dean of SEO https://www.seroundtable.com/rip-bill-slawski-33446.html May 2022 Broad Core Update https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/05/may-2022-core-update More FAQs being promoted in Rich Results? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-showing-more-search-results-with-faq-rich-results-33479.html Don’t get hung up on Toxic Links https://www.seroundtable.com/google-on-toxic-links-tool-marketing-33435.html Suing for Social Media addiction, California law allows parents https://www.searchenginejournal.com/california-bill-allows-parents-to-sue-for-childs-social-media-addiction/451807/ WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-6-0-is-released/451366/ Meta changes how it does political ads, or does it? https://www.searchenginejournal.com/meta-brings-transparency-to-electoral-political-ads/451616/