Google’s John Mueller shared a number of tweets the other day with specific SEO advice around what to do when you remove or disable functionality of parts of your website or your whole website in order to encourage users to take action on an issue. So maybe you replace your home page with a message or something else, you want to avoid any SEO issues with doing that.

Google announced it rolled out a Google Image Search algorithm update in November 2020 aimed at reducing duplicate images in the search results, to instead show “relevant yet visually distinct” images. Plus, Google made the alternative meanings refinement boxes more helpful with better images – the company said on Twitter.

Google is expanding the scroll-to-text feature it has on featured snippets and some other search elements to the free top product listings boxes. Brodie Clark spotted this for a search on [bluetooth headphones] and I was able to replicate this.

Google’s John Mueller said that having a shorter domain name or a shorter URL is not going to benefit you in terms of your SEO and ranking in Google Search. He said on Twitter “domain name or URL length is not a factor, adding that “shorter is not better for SEO.”

This was one heck of a busy week, so sit back, get a drink and enjoy the show (okay, it won’t be that exciting of a show but you should still subscribe and smash that like button)…

Google’s John Mueller said Google does not have manual action penalties for building sites that are missing logos, or missing the menu links at the top or even the footers at the bottom. John said on Twitter “I’m not aware of any manual actions / penalties that we’d apply for lack of those items. Sometimes minimal, old, simplified, or even ugly pages rank well, sometimes that also changes over time.”

The day we have been waiting for has come on Wednesday, February 10th – passage ranking (formerly known as passage indexing) is live in the US English search results. Google confirmed this after I pinged Danny Sullivan of Google about the status the other day.

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

Google launched lead form extensions in 2019 as a beta and then expanded it more over the years. Heck, they even beta tested a form of lead forms via Google Ads in 2011. In any event, Google just updated the lead forms to trigger when you tap or click on the headline of the ad, as opposed to a sublink.

More are seeing dark mode in Google Search, what is hard to see are the search ads or at least see what are organic listings versus paid listings. It is just harder to distinguish the search ads in dark mode than it is in light mode. If Google made the ad label in white text in dark mode, that would work better than the gray colored font.

Google’s John Mueller released an almost 10 minute long video on image SEO best practices and tips. It is one of the more detailed image SEO presentations I’ve seen from Google. He lists off 12 specific actionable tips and then talks more about implementation and measurement.

I believe since December 2020, Google has been testing a dark mode theme in the Google Search results. Now I am seeing Google test a toggle to turn on and off the dark mode theme.

Google may or may not use the Core Web Vitals metrics from pages not within Google’s indexed, pages you may explicitly block from indexing, as part of its overall calculation for the upcoming Google Page Experience Update. John Mueller of Google said he believes this to be the case but is not 100% sure.

I cataloged and classified corporate marketing positioning and delivery (creative treatments) over a roughly 35 year period. I did this as both research for a book I began writing and haven’t finished, and to serve as a “cheat sheet” for marketing classes I taught. A great marketer is deep enough to have profound insight into human nature, but shallow enough to use it for financial gain. My inner Mr. Hyde Positioning Strategies As AL Ries and Jack Trout established, Positioning is the image of a product in the mind of the consumer, and is expressed relative to the position of […]

Microsoft posted on its research blog that is has launched Speller100, spelling correction models, to help Microsoft Bing Search do better at spelling corrections. Microsoft said 15% “about 15% of queries submitted by customers have misspellings” so this is needed.