How to use Amazon Music’s SPOTLIGHT tool to promote your music Want to speak directly to your listeners on Amazon Music? Artists with more than 3,000 fans on the platform can now post audio messages using Amazon Music’s promo feature called Spotlight. NOTE: That might be a high threshold for some DIY musicians, but Amazon has hinted they’ll lower the 3k requirement soon. Platforms often roll out features in this fashion to make sure everything’s working 100% before they enable it for every artist and see a flood of adoption. What is an Amazon Music Spotlight? A Spotlight is a […]

The other day I reported again how blocking US based users would require you to also block Googlebot, Google’s crawler. And that would be devastating to a site’s search rankings in Google. But John Mueller of Google said it is not out of the question that Google one day may decide to crawl from outside of the US.

Last night Google announced it is temporarily pausing Google ads from serving to users located in Russia. This is due to the “ongoing war in Ukraine” according to the Google statement.

Some folks are asking why there isn’t a demo account for Google Search Console like there is for Google Analytics. John Mueller said Daniel Waisberg and the Google Search Console team looked into it but it is “super hard, and requires constant maintenance.” That is why they have not done it yet.

This week in search, I reported how the Google page experience update for desktop has been fully rolled out. I also posted my monthly Google webmaster recap…

A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google has a new set of ranking factors specific to the Google Shopping tab named the Shopping experience scorecard program. The concern was that merchants are asked to feed these metrics to Google and that the merchants will only feed positive scores, potentially manipulating the metrics and thus their rankings.

Martin Splitt from Google announced on Twitter that the Google Search Central Virtual Unconference is returning at the end of this month for the 2022 event. Google held an Unconference 2021 and 2020 and I guess has decided to host one again this year.

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

Google’s John Mueller said again that websites do not have some form of quota where they can only rank for a limited number of keywords. He said on Twitter “there’s no hard limit for how many pages we show from a site, subdomain or not.”

Google Search is testing removing the estimated number of search results figure you typically see under the search bar after you conduct a search query. Google tested this back in 2016 and I guess Google is testing it again.

Some of you may be wondering why Yoast or WordPress have not integrated the Microsoft backed IndexNow protocol. Well, Joost de Valk, the founded of Yoast said he has seen zero evidence that IndexNow helps sites gain more traffic or reduces crawling or improves crawl efficiency.

Google is now showing how long ago it confirmed a phone number and hours were accurate for a local business. Google can now write in a business local panel “confirmed by phone call” followed by how long ago it was.

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

Yesterday, Google confirmed that some folks trying to use the URL Inspection tool via the console or even the API may be seeing errors. Google said it is working on a fix but almost a day later, some are still having issues and Google has yet to confirm it is resolved.