This was one heck of a busy week, so sit back, get a drink and enjoy the show (okay, it won’t be that exciting of a show but you should still subscribe and smash that like button)…

The day we have been waiting for has come on Wednesday, February 10th – passage ranking (formerly known as passage indexing) is live in the US English search results. Google confirmed this after I pinged Danny Sullivan of Google about the status the other day.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Google launched lead form extensions in 2019 as a beta and then expanded it more over the years. Heck, they even beta tested a form of lead forms via Google Ads in 2011. In any event, Google just updated the lead forms to trigger when you tap or click on the headline of the ad, as opposed to a sublink.

I believe since December 2020, Google has been testing a dark mode theme in the Google Search results. Now I am seeing Google test a toggle to turn on and off the dark mode theme.

Google’s John Mueller released an almost 10 minute long video on image SEO best practices and tips. It is one of the more detailed image SEO presentations I’ve seen from Google. He lists off 12 specific actionable tips and then talks more about implementation and measurement.

More are seeing dark mode in Google Search, what is hard to see are the search ads or at least see what are organic listings versus paid listings. It is just harder to distinguish the search ads in dark mode than it is in light mode. If Google made the ad label in white text in dark mode, that would work better than the gray colored font.

Google may or may not use the Core Web Vitals metrics from pages not within Google’s indexed, pages you may explicitly block from indexing, as part of its overall calculation for the upcoming Google Page Experience Update. John Mueller of Google said he believes this to be the case but is not 100% sure.

I cataloged and classified corporate marketing positioning and delivery (creative treatments) over a roughly 35 year period. I did this as both research for a book I began writing and haven’t finished, and to serve as a “cheat sheet” for marketing classes I taught. A great marketer is deep enough to have profound insight into human nature, but shallow enough to use it for financial gain. My inner Mr. Hyde Positioning Strategies As AL Ries and Jack Trout established, Positioning is the image of a product in the mind of the consumer, and is expressed relative to the position of […]

Google is now labeling some businesses that are in coworking office spaces with that label in the local pack search results. I am not 100% if this is new, but Sarah Blocksidge spotted it and posted a screen shot of this in action.

Ever since Penguin 4.0, we know Google preferred to ignore bad links versus penalize those bad links. Well, that applies to other search spam as well. Google’s John Mueller said the other day on Twitter that “if we can neutralize the effect of bad links, that’s enough; there’s no need to remove the site completely from search then.”

Bing is now recommending additional search queries to try out and websites to check out based on your activity and what’s popular. I am not sure how new this is but this was pointed out to me by @NFG946 on Twitter.

Microsoft posted on its research blog that is has launched Speller100, spelling correction models, to help Microsoft Bing Search do better at spelling corrections. Microsoft said 15% “about 15% of queries submitted by customers have misspellings” so this is needed.

Optimize your YouTube channel to grow your audience The first big question about promoting your music on YouTube is: why? Why do the work of creating a channel, optimizing it, and building a brand on YouTube? The answer: 2 billion. That’s how many users log into YouTube per month, accumulating billions of video views each day. And that number only counts active accounts, not people who watch videos on the platform without a Google account. According to a 2019 Dataportal study, 79% of Internet users say they have a YouTube account. That makes it the second most popular social media […]