Originally written for Brand Labs Insights. Here’s a short snippet.
In some ways, a core update might just be routine improvement and maintenance. Google is constantly working to produce more accurate search results that better fit the needs, wants and realities of users. For example, in the autumn of 2016, Google noticed that over 50% of all search queries were coming from mobile devices. In March 2017, Google announced a Mobile First strategy in which it would change the way it scores web documents to include how sites, and documents in it, perform on mobile devices. This necessitated a restructuring of server farms around the globe. This restructuring, along with a number of factors relating to the user experience of mobile device users, became the likely suspect responsible for subsequent core updates that lasted until the spring of 2019.
It is difficult to say whether any one of those individual updates had wide or sweeping effects on search results. Cumulatively, however, these mobile-speed-related core updates have profoundly affected which websites rank higher than others and how mobile search users receive and graphically view information on their devices.
Read more at Brand Labs Insights – How to Cope with a Google Core Update
Air Date: June 13, 2019
SEOs agreeing to be disagreeable… A question from a Google forum about negative SEO gets extremely negative for the person who asked the question and the people trying to answer it. The matter gets more complicated when John Mueller jumps in suggesting most negative links are spam links and thus easily detectable by Google (but use disavow if it makes you feel better). That statement alone set off a fine set of SEO controversy. Also, as it turns out links are important and titles are too.
Ben Fisher joins us for the second segment. Ben is a product expert at Google My Business Help and is the founder of local search expert firm Steady Demand. We have a wide ranging talk about GMB and the future of local search.
Jun 19
6
Air Date: June 6, 2019
Today was the 75th anniversary of D-Day. We started the show remembering the effort it took to defeat the Nazis and bring generations the benefits of freedom and stability.
Monday June 2 was Catfish Comstock’s birthday. Catfish has been an SEO who has been a contributor to the community and knowledge-base as long as I can remember. As it turns out, it’s also Carolyn Shelby’s birthday. She too has dedicated her life to improving SEO and SEM. She has gone by the name Cshel forever. Google dropped a core update that day that they’re going to insist on calling the June 2019 core-update. Let’s informally rename it in honor of some people who have given a good part of their lives to our industry. I want to call the update the June 2019 CshelFish core update. I actually support the use of date-month-year naming for core updates. In the long run its the best way to track their implementation and effect. That said, each should have informal names crafted by the community that obsesses over them most because they’re puzzles with solutions that belong to those who solve them or make use of the solutions.
Also:
Air Date: May 30, 2019
Though CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself appeared before a congressional committee looking into the role Facebook played in the 2016 US election, Facebook has declined to appear at an interparliamentary committee made up of representatives from the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other parliamentary governments, which held its most recent meeting in Ottawa, Canada. When the corporation did not appear at a interparliamentary committee hearing held in Ottawa, Canada’s parliament took the rare step of issuing a judicial summons in Zuckerberg’s and COO Sheryl Sandberg’s names. The summons requires both to appear before Parliament for questioning should the ever enter Canada in the future.
Also, Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist has donated 2.25million to the Trust Project, a consortium of news gathering organizations dedicated to fact-checking news items.
Wix, the much maligned website builder platform, has gotten tired of hearing SEOs kick it around. It’s putting its money where its mouth is and sponsoring a SEO challenge pitting a pro-Wix SEO team against an anti-Wix team. There’s a good deal of prize money and prestige up for grabs.
Air Date: May 16, 2019
Kristine Schachinger cohosts as we talk through a slew of news about search and social. Topics included:
The new host of LPO: Landing Page Optimization, and the founder of Conversion Sciences Brian Massey joins us in the last two segments to talk about pressing issues affecting those working on landing pages and conversion and the evolution of that space over the span of the last 24 months.
Air Date: May 9, 2019
This week we cover information coming out of Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O. The biggest announcement is Googlebot is now rendering for Google’s new browser Chromium which means it can detect and deal with most incidents of JavaScript.
That means Googlebot is once again considered “evergreen” in that it is capable of constantly updating Google’s index live-time rather than waiting minutes or hours after encountering a site, page or other web object. Chromium brings dozens of other new features to Googlebot’s crawling, rendering, and reporting abilities.
Airdate: May 2, 2019 –
Webcology is recorded live to podcast on WebmasterRadio.FM. We have produced a weekly one hour live show for the last ten years. Each episode has several thousand listeners and tens of thousands of downloads.Â
Airdate: April 25, 2019 –
Airdate: April 18, 2019
Airdate: April 4, 2019