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

If you’ve been researching ways to market your music recently, you’ve probably read suggestions to use social media influencers. That’s great advice! Working with an influencer can be an effective way to market your music online. But are you scratching your head at just what all that means? You’re not alone. Of all the new terms to enter the lexicon of the social media age, “influencer” is one of the more nebulous. What is an influencer? And what do they do? What is an influencer? According to our Modern Music Glossary, an influencer is: “Someone who has significant knowledge and […]

Google is now testing a “not helpful” button in the local reviews within local listings in Google Maps and Google Search. Tom Waddington spotted this and posted the screenshot below on Twitter.

On a bit of a gloomy day, Dan Toplitt was out in my neighborhood and stopped by to get on the vlog. Dan and I met prior to him becoming an SEO…

For most SEOs, this is very obvious, that it is not about the raw number of links you have to your webpages but rather the quality of those links. Google can and likely does ignore the low quality links, so having a billion low quality links is worthless in many cases. But having one high quality link can be huge for a site.

Google’s local panel allows you to message or now chat with some businesses that enable the messaging feature in Google My Business. Previously, Google always called it “message” in the local panel but now Google is testing calling it “chat.”

Last week, @PPCGreg spotted Google testing a brand new match type in Google Ads named “Smart Matching.” What is Smart Matching? I have no idea but Google Ads confirmed it was a “small tests that select advertisers have opted into.” But I have no idea what makes this match type “smart.”

Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that Google has stopped automatically moving sites to the mobile-first indexing system. Instead, the last batch of sites are being queued up and will all be moved over sometime in the coming month or months.

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 am seeing some early signs of yet another Google Search ranking algorithm update – it is early but the chatter is kicking up and some of the tools are already picking up on the fluctuations and tremors in the search results. Yes, we had some quiet this week but it was super busy the past couple of months.

Cyrus Shepard posted a poll on Twitter asking SEOs and marketers if they do any affiliate marketing in the course of their day. Only 45% of those who completed the poll said yes, they do affiliate marketing. I am a bit surprised, I would have thought more SEOs do affiliate marketing on the side, at least.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he thinks that many SEOs and sites think about links “much more than necessary.” He said Google does “use links to help discover new content.” He didn’t mention ranking but yes, Google does use links for rankings.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google looks at the number of blog posts on a blog as some sort of metric to figure out if the site should rank well or not. John Mueller said “Google doesn’t count your blog posts.”

Microsoft Bing seems to have swapped out the magnifying glass button on the search bar in the search results landing page with the button that says “search.” It is a small but interesting change, below are before and after screen shots.

I am back in my real office after over a year of recording from home – it is weird but good to be back. After Google dropping featured snippets significantly in the Google Search results a few weeks ago, they returned this week, out of the blue and with no explanation from Google…