When Google released Penguin 4.0, Google said that update was about devaluing links, not demoting links. Meaning, Google would simply ignore the spammy and bad links and your website would not be demoted because of those links. Well, Google said sometimes Penguin can also demote your site.

Google has a special Doodle, Google logo, on its home page today and last night for Halloween. The theme of this Halloween Doodle is around wishing Google searchers an “imPECKable Halloween.”

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

Have you ever been listening to a playlist on Amazon Music and wondered how you can place your own music alongside your favorite artists? Now you can with Amazon Music for Artists’ New Release Pitch Tool! This new feature allows artists to pitch their music directly to Amazon’s playlist curators for consideration. If accepted, Amazon’s playlist editorial team will place your song on playlists that match its genre or style. This feature alone can put your song in front of thousands of listeners! What are the benefits of pitching my song to Amazon Music? Placing your music on playlists with […]

The big news yesterday was that Facebook announced its new company name – Meta. Yes, Facebook’s company name is Meta. Like meta data, meta tag, and all the other metas that Google Search might have ranked prior. But when Facebook’s announcement came out – the Google Search results adapted quickly to rank this breaking news.

A Twitter poll by Brodie Clark has SEOs voting that link acquisition is the most challenging area of SEO. The poll had over 750 votes, and almost 60% of those who voted said link acquisition is the “most challenging” area of SEO. Links were followed by technical SEO with 25% of the votes, then copywriting and then local SEO.

Google has removed the following structured data fields from its Google Search help documentation. Google said these were removed “since they are unused by Google Search and Rich Result Test doesn’t flag warnings for them.”

Google’s John Mueller told one webmaster that for his specific example, it might be a good idea for him to have a separate XML sitemap file for URLs that are “often updated.” John said “putting the newer URLs into a single “often updated” sitemap file is probably a good idea here.”

I spotted an interesting comment from John Mueller of Google about URLs and reducing duplication. He said focusing on individual URLs here and there won’t help you much, it is more about looking where you can “reduce duplication by a factor of 10x.”

This week, we almost made it without reporting on a Google search ranking update but we did have one, maybe on October 26th. There is confusion around Google’s continuous scroll and the impact it has on Search Console reporting…

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. Google said when it comes to web search…

Google’s John Mueller said that when it comes to web search, Google does not “look at the specific images on the page” for web search or ranking purposes. For image search, Google does but for web search, John said no.

In September we said Google Merchant Center would enforce that all products would have unique product identifiers (UPI) within the product feed. If there was not UPI, Google would immediately disapproved and no longer showed in free listings. That is now changing to limited performance enforcements.

Brave made some big news the other week when it announced it is replacing Google Search as the default in its Brave browser with its own search engine. The thing is, Brave documented how it does ranking and it actually said it uses click data for ranking purposes.

Marie Haynes ran a poll that asked SEOs “do you do any SEO you’d consider Blackhat?” The results were pretty 50/50, about half said they do not do any black hat SEO and 28% said they do, and 23% said they do “maybe a little” black hat SEO.