Last week we reported on a comment made by John Mueller of Google about the head section of your HTML and why you should keep it clean. John, on Friday, posted a Mastodon thread explaining more about the head section and how search engines interact with it, especially if there is a lot of JavaScript in it.

Automation and AI promise to revolutionize the way many people work, but don’t worry – you’re still going to be needed for a long time. The post Will ChatGPT Take Your Job? appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Don’t overlook sitelinks if you’re trying to gain more visibility online. Here’s what you need to know so you have better chances of gaining clicks. The post Sitelinks: What Are They & How Do You Get Them? appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Target your audience at every stage of the marketing funnel consistently. Here’s how to develop a content marketing strategy (with free templates!) The post Downloadable Content Strategy Template And How To Use It appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Top Story In 2017, Google’s Gary Illyes explained what crawl budget is, how crawl rate limits work, what crawl demand is and what factors impact a site’s crawl budget. As Illyes explained, most sites don’t need to worry about crawl budget. “Prioritizing what to crawl, when, and how much resource the server hosting the site can allocate to crawling is more important for bigger sites, or those that auto-generate pages based on URL parameters,” Illyes said. More from Illyes: Crawl rate limit is designed to help Google not crawl your pages too much and too fast where it hurts your […]

Facebook Graph Search arrives In 2013, Facebook announced a new experience that it called Graph Search. Facebook Graph Search relied heavily on Likes and other connections to determine what to show as the most relevant search results for each user. At launch, Facebook Graph Search only included people, photos, places and interests. Facebook Graph Search wasn’t a traditional web search engine like Google or Bing. It was a new type of search – a social search engine. Although Facebook was already using Bing for web search results at that time. Dig deeper: Facebook Graph Search Arrives To Challenge Google, Yelp, Foursquare & Others […]

R.I.P. AMP In 2022, we revealed what happened when Search Engine Land shut off AMP. TL;DR: “We have seen very little disruption to our traffic and have reaped the benefit of having a clearer picture of our audience analytics.” We didn’t see any year-over-year declines in traffic that we could tie to AMP aside from the loss of pageviews to a handful of pieces that routinely spike for organic traffic. Why did Search Engine Land shut off AMP? As we explained in We’re turning off AMP pages at Search Engine Land, it was due to competition in Top Stories (after […]

Reviews are an unavoidable part of doing business today. Here are 18 stats to prove the importance of online reviews. The post 18 Online Review Statistics Every Marketer Should Know appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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

When Google announced the helpful content update, many in the SEO industry expected AI-generated content to get hit hard.  I was expecting AI-generated content to get wiped out by this supposedly sweeping update, comparable to 2011’s Panda algorithm update. Yet, no major impact was recorded.  Soon after, Google released the October 2022 spam update and that’s when we saw websites using AI content affected, although not as dramatically. What happened? Let me take a few steps back. Another vicious Panda attack? Back in 2011, content farms were a serious problem. Many companies like Demand Media made a fortune by mass-producing […]

Mike Blumenthal dropped a simple but thoughtful local SEO tip that all businesses should do some time in the near future. Just check the featured photos that Google selected to be displayed in your Google Maps pin overlay.

Google has a “recent images” photo carousel for some knowledge panels. For example, Google had this for a search on the [golden globes] last week, where it shows photos from the event that were recently taken and published.

A Reddit thread asks if Google engages in link-buying sting operations where they will pretend to want to buy a link and then use that to penalize the network. John Mueller of Google responded by saying “I get sent offers all the time, to an official Google email address.” That means, Google does not need to proactively do that, they come to Google without any official or necessary operation.

Google is now testing the Google Ads sponsored label in the product listing results within the more products section in an additional result. I cannot replicate this, but Saad AK spotted it and posted two videos of this in action.

After a long slow and paused rollout, Google has said that both the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update are now done rolling out. Google said both completed rolling out on Thursday, January 12, 2023.

Google Cloud is launching new and updated AI tools to provide customers with a smoother online shopping experience and assist retailers with in-store inventory management. The post Google Cloud Launches New AI Tools for Retailers appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

This week, the December 2022 Google helpful content update and link spam updates are finally complete after a long, long wait. There was a lot of movement on Wednesday…