Imagine that one day I would write a story here and it would go viral, and get an insane amount of attention. Okay, I wrote a few stories that have done that. But should you be worried about the spammy links viral stories attract? The answer is no, according to Google.

In February, Microsoft Bing started to show explore further recommendations based on what is popular in a textual and simple link user interface. Now, Bing is testing showing this in a more graphical version.

Google Adsense announced that anchor ads, the AdSense ads that stick to the top or bottom of the page as you scroll, now are supported on wider screens. Google launched anchor ads on AdSense in 2013 and has expanded its features over the years.

In the second part of the Search Off The Record podcast released this morning Gary Illyes from Google explained how Google does ranking. In short, he said Google first cuts down the pages that can rank for a specific query to a short list of let’s say about 1,000 pages. Then the magic happens where Google will apply ranking signals or as he calls it “magic signals” to that cut down list.

The past month in Google SEO and webmaster land was a bit insane…

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

CD Baby is placing music by many independent artists in high-profile TV shows and films, and you could be the next success! Want your music to be used in film, TV and other media? CD Baby’s sync licensing program has placed an impressive amount of songs on every major network, in big budget films, and on many of the popular streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu. We’re here to help you find every opportunity for your music to reach new listeners and drive revenue. This has resulted in more CD Baby artists being showcased on major networks and streaming platforms […]

On the latest Search Off The Record podcast, John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt had a special guest from the Google Search Quality team named Dewey. He said that Google has built a “very effective and comprehensive machine-learning model that basically took care of most of the obvious spam.”

Google is testing showing two rows of the popular products section on desktop. Brodie Clark shared a video of it on Twitter and it is really really big – it takes up a lot of the search results page.

Google’s John Mueller said that spammy links to your site would not be the cause of soft 404 errors being displayed in Google Search Console. Honestly, I’ve never heard of this theory before, so it is new, and I figured I would share it. But I do not fully understand why someone would think spammy links would cause soft 404s.

In part two of my talk with the the Mad Mango team…

I read one of those deep thought lines online from Johan Hulsen on Twitter who asked Gary Illyes of Google a question on crawling. In short, Johan asked if the crawl budget looks to the scheduler, which kind of depends on Googlebot, but Googlebot does not render pages, how does it find links within JavaScript pages.

Google’s John Mueller said as far as he knows the page experience update does not have any exception list or whitelist. Meaning, there is not a list of sites where Google says do not apply the page experience update to. John wrote on Twitter “as far as I know, there’s no list of exceptions,” when asked about it for the page experience update.

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. The July Google core update is here and it touched down in a fast and furious way, we got you covered in our story below…

Google announced that on July 1, 2021 it began to roll out the July 2021 core update. We knew we would soon see another core update, and Google delivered this one a month after the June 2021 core update. This one seems to have started out pretty strong and many are seeing big changes with this update.

Google kicked off the July 2021 core update yesterday, right after the spam update. Google ran part two of the spam update on June 28th, the first part ran in June 23rd…