Digital Always Media Inc.
: Search, Social & Analytics :

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:

• AdWords Editor is now Google Ads Editor
• Ahrefs is building a search engine!
• Theories and speculation on Google’s increasingly big March 2019 Core-Update

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.

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.

• Does Google use Click Through Rates (CTR) as a ranking signal? It’s a good question requiring a completely indirect answer.
• Goodbye property sets and hello domain properties
• much more

A busy week in search brings another news round-up on Webcology.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

In this episode we discuss a Reddit AMA Google’s Gary Illes conducted covering,

• Robots.txt
• Rank brain
• Behavioural signals
• Image and video search
• more…

Also, Google now consolidates data under canonical URL in Search Console, and changes a number of metrics while it’s at it.

Google offers fairly simple albeit roundabout instruction on removing pesky old sitemaps. Google adds vocal search results and metrics for vocal search

Yet another heavy newsweek in tech

• Google allows mobile businesses entry into Google My Business program by allowing them to specify service areas. Previously businesses required a solid street address for inclusion
• Google testing a video lightbox to display video in mobile search results
• Google asks National Labor Board to nullify an Obama era rule allowing workers to use company facilities to organize and pass information. This comes in relation to the Google strike earlier this year where workers walked off the job over the company’s alleged preferential treatment of male execs accused of sexual harassment.

Today was a special show. We were joined by Canadian advertising legend, Terry O’Reilly, host of CBC’s Under the Influence and Age of Persuasion. Terry talked about the recent Gillette and Nike social action commercials.