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…

Last week, we reported that the performance report in Google Search Console for the dates of August 23rd and 24th had missing data. We were hoping Google would be able to retrieve and backfill the data, but it seems the data is lost forever and will not be backfilled.

So now there are some SEOs asking if it makes sense for you to replace your HTML title tag with the title Google selected to show in the Google search results. John Mueller from Google said no, don’t just do that blindly – if it makes things better for your users, sure but don’t assume Google’s algorithms are right here.

Google’s John Mueller said a couple of weeks ago that he has internal tools to look at sites or pages and see if a site is low quality. He said this in the August 20th video hangout.

For the past couple of weeks, people have been showing me a feature in Google search that shows expandable snippets in a carousel format. Kind of like expandable sitelinks of some sorts. I thought I saw this before, but it was actually something Bing launched a few months ago, not something Google was testing.

Google’s John Mueller said that just because some content might be behind a paywall, it doesn’t mean Google sees that content as thin content. Google allows content paywalls and will show them as much as it shows content not behind paywalls. So no, Google does not automatically treat paywalled content as thin content.

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

Are you trying to produce quality music from a home recording studio? You picked the perfect time! From Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, to Charlie XCX’s fan-collab how i’m feeling now, to Taylor Swift’s folklore, a number of successful releases have been recorded outside of a traditional studio. But those albums were still made with the backing and financial benefits of a major label. What about someone who doesn’t have a few hundred thousand dollars to install a cutting-edge recording studio in their home? Or who can’t hire the most in-demand producer? Or who […]

Most SEOs do not login to Bing Webmaster Tools, a recent Twitter poll determined. The poll asked “SEO’s do you ever log in to Bing Webmaster Tools?” It had 1,220 results, which is a pretty big response.

There are a lot of people asking if the title/header change Google made on August 17th has any impact on rankings. Like, is Google uses the new title it itself generated for ranking purposes. The answer is no, there was no ranking change with this – as I wrote originally.

This title change has been causing a lot of stir in the SEO community. Personally, I think it will eventually blow over, like so many other things. But ultimately most SEOs by far want an opt out feature to force Google to use your HTML title tag over something else it finds on your page or pointing to your page.

Google’s John Mueller, with a tad of annoyance, posted on Twitter that “lighthouse scores do not affect Google Search.” He then shares a tweet about people cloaking and cheating their lighthouse scores as a scam to trick Google.

In part one we mostly spoke about core updates and in part two we go into a quicker paced conversation on a boat load of SEO topics…

Mordy Oberstein, Head of Communications at Semrush, shared some really early data on the Google title change we’ve all been obsessed with. In short, the number of Google search results showing with the HTML title tag on the SERP dropped 77% on average and when that happened, roughly 75% are utilizing the H1 instead of the HTML title tag.

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. I posted the weekly SEO video recap today, check it out and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel…