Google has added a bunch of new supporting details to the robots.txt specification document. Jamie Indigo noticed these changes and explained what was added include “explicit details on the files for IDNs, IP-addresses, and port numbered hostnames.”

Google has made design updates to the Google News Publisher Center. I don’t know if new functionality was added, it does not appear so, but maybe I am missing something. I’ll be honest, I do not use the publisher center that often, so I’m really not sure.

There is an interesting tidbit you can learn about Google’s web rendering service (WRS) in the latest JavaScript SEO hangout with Martin Splitt of Google where Martin said he is “spilling the beans a little bit” by sharing that there is a layer on top of WRS that handles “prioritization, error retry, quality of service guarantees, caching and it also interacts with a crawling subsystem to actually fetch things.”

Google has a few link attributes that allow you to tell Google not to pass any link signals from the link to the site you are linking to. There is the classic rel=”nofollow” and the newer rel=”ugc” and rel=”sponsored”. But no, there is no do follow or rel=”follow” attribute.

Both Microsoft (Bing) and Alphabet (Google) announced earnings last night and both had pretty big uplifts with their search advertising revenues and earnings. Microsoft was up 17% for its search advertising revenue category and Google was up 32% for its search advertising revenue category, year-over-year.

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

Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit that for a page to be indexed by Google “the content still has to pass quality checks.” If that content does not pass the quality checks, Google may not index it even if you manually try to submit the page to Google for indexing.

Starting around Friday, April 23rd or so, there seems to have been an unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm both on the web search results side and the local search results side. There is chatter in the SEO forums, coupled with the automated tracking tools picking up big changes, it does seem like we had some sort of unconfirmed update.

Frank Sandtmann, an SEO consultant, sent me a screen capture of Microsoft Bing testing showing query refinements and search suggestions in a sticky footer user interface. As you scroll down the search results Bing shows you these “results related to” search query refinement options.

Can you be more specific says Google Search with this new “more specific searches” box in the search results. Mordy Oberstein was being super vague with Google and Google shot back at him to be more specific and even gave him a list of samples on how to be more specific.

Saad also spotted back in March Google testing showing that bell icon feature directly in the image search carousel box. The bell icon lets you tell Google you are interested in being pushed information about that topic via Google Discover and maybe Google Alerts (in the older days).

On the coattails of the Google product reviews update, the Google product search results features seem to be getting larger. Saad AK and Glenn Gabe, amongst others, have shared numerous screen shots of the new product boxes in Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller reiterated on Twitter that consistency is the number one piece of SEO advice. He said last night that “SEO lives and dies with consistency.”

Apple has finally announced its new music streaming service, Apple Music CD Baby has covered the news about Apple Music’s launch from a few angles already, including: * a basic description of Apple Music’s streaming service, * some thoughts on what effect Apple Music may have on the music industry at large, * and how you can claim and customize your Apple Music artist page in order to promote your music and control your branding on the streaming service. But there are a few other important things you should know about Apple Music 1. Apple Music is NOT iTunes Apple […]

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

Do you know all the ways your music can generate income? Royalties. Earnings. Income. Revenue. Scratch. Bones. Loot. Notes. Moolah. Dough. There are a lot of words for money. And there are also a lot of ways for musicians to get paid. Independent artists now have access to more revenue-generating opportunities than ever before. That doesn’t mean it’s EASY to earn money as a musician, but it does mean you have more options to explore, more ways of aligning your talents with an income stream, and more ways of putting your recordings, songs, performances, and merch to work. CD Baby […]