Google just posted a short four-minute video on how Google has changed since it first launched in 1998. In short, it is about going from ten-blue links to a giving you a much richer search experience with answers.

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…

CD Baby paid musicians more than $126,000,000 in 2020. Artists and labels using CD Baby for worldwide music distribution, monetization, and promotion were collectively paid $126,782,389 in 2020, a 26% increase over 2019’s payout of $100,953,195. That’s an encouraging indicator of the health of the independent music sector, especially given that this growth occurred during a year defined by a global pandemic. If you’re an artist, it’s also a good reminder to professionalize all your music rights and fully monetize your music. This includes publishing administration, YouTube Content ID, sync licensing, and more. CD Baby offers all those services, we […]

Google is starting a new Google Ads content policy called “Evasive Ad Content.” Evasive Ad Content will extend the prohibited manipulations of trademark terms in ad text to domains, subdomains, and logos; prohibit usage of invisible UNICODE characters in ads that add no value to the ad content for users; and disallow manipulations of images or videos to hide policy violating content.

It was a busy week in our search industry on so many levels but I kick off this recap with the monthly Google webmaster report. Then I go into not just one but two different unconfirmed Google algorithm updates that were spotted this week…

Google has added to the Google Ads mobile app custom notifications and review performance insights notifications. Google says this will “help you monitor and improve performance in real time.”

Despite all the new messaging that the Google Page Experience update won’t result in massive changes and the impact won’t be huge after it rolls out, many SEOs will still prioritize their Core Web Vitals / Google Page Experience optimization efforts.

When Google first launched “short videos” in Google Search it seemed to just show videos from YouTube. Shortly after we spotted both TikTok and Instagram videos in this short video carousel. Now we are notified Google can also show videos from Facebook.

Google seems to be rolling out a new interface for key moments videos they have been testing for maybe a year now? The results show the location of the key moment but also add the text from the video of what that section is about. It use to show video clips or thumbnails from that section of the video but now it shows text.

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

What is music publishing? Music publishing is the exploitation of a song’s composition copyright. The composition of a song is the lyrics and melody as written by one or more songwriters. This is an important distinction to make between the two types of copyright we covered in our Copyright 101 guide: the difference between the composition copyright and the sound recording copyright. Music publishing only relates to the composition. Are you a songwriter, producer, beatmaker, composer, or lyricist with ownership over your compositions? If so, read on to learn how to earn the most money from your songs. What types […]

Yesterday reports came in that there was a spike in errors around Google FAQ schema powered through Yoast. The issue is being resolved and should be fixed today but supposedly Google changed how it parses FAQ schema and it caused FAQ rich result to drop from sites that use Yoast.

Daniel Waisberg of Google released a really nice explanatory video on how crawl budget works with crawl demand and crawl rates. He also spent most of the video doing a deep dive into the new crawl stats report in Search Console.

Google’s John Mueller listed a few reasons why your site may not show rich results in the Google Search Results. One of the three reasons is that sometimes Google does not trust the site enough, on the site level, for Google to warrant that the site shows rich results.

I have yet another unconfirmed Google search ranking update to report on. This was started around March 2nd towards the evening and continues through March 3rd. There was a nice amount of chatter over a 24-hour period and then it seems to have died down a bit. Many of the tools also picked up on this update.