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 night, Google responded to the zero click study that said 65% of searches end up without a click. The Google blog post basically summed up what I wrote but added some data. The truth is, Google just gave us a few nuggets of informaton but it is really not enough.

Microsoft has published its version of the ad quality year in review 2020. Microsoft said it suspended about 300,000 advertising accounts in 2020, which was up 30% from 2019. It removed 1.6 billion “bad ads” and rejected about 21 million ads in accordance with its sensitive advertising policy. It also removed 270,000 sites from its system.

Ahrefs published a study a few months ago that I have not reported on. The study’s main thing was that “94.3% of pages out of roughly two million pages didn’t get even a single visitor from Google.” The bigger stat in that study to me was that “66.31% of pages don’t have even a single backlink.”

Google seems to be showing a new radio button selection filter for the image search drop down filters. As you can see from the screenshot below, when you click on a filter option, it shows the option but also a circle to select it.

Alan Kent, Developer Advocate at Google, posted a lightening talk on the Google YouTube channel around how to get your products in search. This can help e-commerce sites get more visibility and sales from Google Search.

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

Google’s John Mueller, once again, said that for SEO purposes, for ranking in Google purposes, you do not need to worry about your site’s bounce rate. John said this on Reddit “Google doesn’t use that for SEO, so if you’re focused on SEO, you can ignore that.”

Ever see one of your sites rank well for a featured snippet in Google Search but the information that was shown was not something you are proud of? Maybe it was inaccurate, maybe it has a typo, maybe it had some other issue? How do you update the featured snippet in Google so that the content is updated fast in Google Search?

Recently, Google’s John Mueller posted about what to do if your site goes offline. The advice was to serve a 503 server status code if the outage is short term. So someone asked if they can serve a 502 server status code instead. John Mueller said you shouldn’t.

Rand Fishkin came out with yet an eye popping study, saying that based on SimilarWeb data “64.82% of searches on Google (desktop and mobile combined) ended in the search results without clicking to another web property.” The previous year he used JumpShot data which showed 50.33% of all Google searches ended without a click to any web property in the results.

We’ve all seen the message in Google Search Console’s index coverage report for “Page indexed without content.” Google’s Gary Illyes said when you see that, most of the time (not all of the time), it is about “pages that are blocked by robots.txt.”

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