What is music publishing? Music publishing is the exploitation of a song’s composition copyright. The composition of a song is the lyrics and melody as written by one or more songwriters. This is an important distinction to make between the two types of copyright we covered in our Copyright 101 guide: the difference between the composition copyright and the sound recording copyright. Music publishing only relates to the composition. Are you a songwriter, producer, beatmaker, composer, or lyricist with ownership over your compositions? If so, read on to learn how to earn the most money from your songs. What types […]

Yesterday reports came in that there was a spike in errors around Google FAQ schema powered through Yoast. The issue is being resolved and should be fixed today but supposedly Google changed how it parses FAQ schema and it caused FAQ rich result to drop from sites that use Yoast.

Google’s John Mueller listed a few reasons why your site may not show rich results in the Google Search Results. One of the three reasons is that sometimes Google does not trust the site enough, on the site level, for Google to warrant that the site shows rich results.

Daniel Waisberg of Google released a really nice explanatory video on how crawl budget works with crawl demand and crawl rates. He also spent most of the video doing a deep dive into the new crawl stats report in Search Console.

Google has updated the Google My Business “available performance metrics” help document to talk more about the new performance reports. Google added a section for “users who viewed your profile” and added more details to the other section.

I have yet another unconfirmed Google search ranking update to report on. This was started around March 2nd towards the evening and continues through March 3rd. There was a nice amount of chatter over a 24-hour period and then it seems to have died down a bit. Many of the tools also picked up on this update.

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

Most SEOs I know are still grumbling a little about the rel=next and rel=prev is no longer supported, as of two years ago. Google did give us pagination SEO advice in an unstructured format a while ago but really has not put together a document SEOs can reference to deal with pagination.

A couple of months ago John Mueller of Google was asked a question about a site with a mega menu of about 1,000 links in it but those links would dynamically change based on user action. John responded that it might be an issue for Google to understand a menu that has that many links and changes that often.

Here is the monthly Google Webmaster Report where I sum up the more important topics webmasters and SEOs care about when it comes to Google organic search. This past month was super busy with numerous unconfirmed updates, passage ranking rolling out, the upcoming page experience update and mobile-first indexing and so much more.

Abby Reimer posted a Twitter poll that asks is there a shortage of SEO talent available on the market. The poll is open for the next several hours, so please take it. It does seem like there are a lot of jobs on the market currently hiring SEOs but that is not based on any data collection process.

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

So we’ve seen Google do the scroll to text fragment links for a while now, with featured snippets and some product listings in search. Soon it might also come to images and videos.

Last week, Max Prin from Merkle, notified me that one of his awesome free tools on technicalseo.com was removed over a false DMCA takedown request. There are a couple of issues here (1) the DMCA takedown was false and successfully removed his free tool from Google Search and (2) he was not notified of the removal.

Since 2014 Google had a method to follow news and updates related to social profiles and other knowledge panels by clicking “get notified” or more recently “follow” button. Now Google is testing showing a bell icon and testing this on medical knowledge panels.