May 20
19
The business of the world has been interrupted for the past few months by the Covide19 pandemic. As we move through the crisis the business of the Internet continues. The Internet is likely to be the most stable business environment for the foreseeable future. For small businesses that were already struggling in the brick and mortar world, the consumer shutdown is going to hurt so much that many won’t be able to survive.
This post was written ten weeks after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic and the world wisely shut its doors. It has taken this long for me to get my own sense of what the near future might be like and how Digital Always Media will be able to provide services moving forward.
We will have to find new ways of conducting business in the coming months. It is most likely the disease will haunt us for several months before a vaccine or some other means of controlling the spread becomes widely available. The obvious venue is digital. As we move forward, digital will probably be the safest, easiest, and most stable way to reach current and potential customers or clients.
Our job is to make you visible in what had already become a very crowded environment. DAM drives up traffic to your website through effective organic search marketing. More importantly, we can help you in find other digital specialists to build, manufacture, market, and move your goods, service, or products.
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
Think Big. Think Big Blue – Try to imagine practicing SEO in an almost infinite working environment, one that has its own positronic brain. We had a special guest, Keith Goode, one of the SEO team at IBM on the show. Keith talks about SEO as a harbour pilot talks about bringing massive cargo ships into port. How do you control a super-tanker? It’s all about deft training and properly instructing the assisting teams.
We also talk about:
This was a fun show…
Facebook was forced to acknowledge it had, for years, stored hundreds of millions of user names and passwords in a simple, unencrypted text file. The admission came after cybersecurity writer Brian Krebs reported on it. Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati said the discovery was made in January as part of a routine security review. While the logs were directly accessible to 2000 engineers and developers, Canahuati said that none of hte passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook.
Google used to be about making the world’s information accessible to everyone, getting people to data. Now it’s more about how each user gets from query to answer, using the steps they take as a guide to their intentions and actual desires. The user-journey is playing an important role in Google’s attempts to fully figure out what any given user is really looking for. SEOs should start thinking that way as well. Shifting our thinking to better match Google’s will give us insights into how to draw consumers into a client’s business funnel.
So, ummmm… like it seems Google has stopped supporting the rel=next/prev markup it launched back in 2011 to support content that spreads itself out over several pages. The funny thing is, Google stopped using the damn taga few years ago but didn’t bother telling anybody. Google says it can figure out which pages lead to which using links so it doesn’t see why any of this is a big deal. Heheeehe… Ha. hehehe. LOL. ROLF. OMGWTFROLF. ha. The universe doesn’t really need any more stupid stuff like this but if you got it, laugh at it.
Google has released another video around JavaScript and SEO, this one on how to do testing and debugging to make sure your JavaScript web site is performing well in search.
Mar 19
14
Google released a significant algorithm update on March 12, a week after the recent Pubcon conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The last time Google made a major update directly after a Pubcon conference was held in Florida was November 2003 and the update was aptly named Florida by Brett Tabke and the WebmasterWorld community. Naturally, many in the SEO world nicknamed this update Florida II, which isn’t necessarily a good thing because the two updates have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
In this show we try to talk our way around what a broad-core update actually is and what we think Google’s intentions are with the update. It’s the early days yet so little is actually known about how this update will affect search engine results.
A busy week in search brings another news round-up on Webcology.