[Researchers at MIT have found a way to make graphene with fewer wrinkles, and to iron out the wrinkles that do appear. They found each wafer exhibited uniform performance, meaning that electrons flowed freely across each wafer, at similar speeds, even across previously wrinkled regions. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Glenn Gabe noticed that if you try to block Google from showing your news stories in just Google News by blocking Googlebot-News, it no longer works. So if you want to follow the old advice (I do not see new advice) to block Google News, you can no longer use the feature to block Googlebot-News. Just to be clear, this is specific to using noindex for Googlebot-News. Russ Jones from Moz did a Twitter poll asking if you report rankings related to Bing and Yahoo to your clients and stakeholders. With almost 900 responses, 86% said they do not, while only 14% said they do. Joy Hawkins posted in the Local Search Forums that she is now seeing, sometimes, a new delivery truck icon in some local panels in the Google mobile results. When you click on that delivery truck icon or the the text on the same line, it will show you where that business serves outside of the primary location listed./>

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Blocking Googlebot-News And Bing & Yahoo Rankings

[Google has launched what it calls “Your News Update,” an audio news feed that you access through the Google Assistant. Sources, which Google paid to license, include ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, AP, Politico, USAToday and many others — though apparently not NPR. Google has updated its video structured data help document with new information on some of the latest enhancements to video search results. The updated document has details on how to mark timestamps on YouTube videos, how to monitor performance in Search Console, and more screenshots to show the new structured data types in action. Mike Blumenthal posted a screen shot on Twitter showing a possible sign that Google My Business may be experimenting with doing its own booking or reservation system or engine. He showed that under the booking tab, that Google was listed as a provider./>

Audio News Aggregation And Google Maps

[Machine learning and entities have given search engines the capacity to better understand not just what a page is about but what various intents a searcher may have. A site owner rarely can create content to satisfy all possible intents and it's important to have methods or at the very least, develop instincts to assess which intents the engines are going to weight most heavily. This session looks at the principles behind how the engines accomplish this, but more importantly - how site owners and SEOs can use this information to generate content strategies and page layouts to maximize their own probability of improving their rankings./>

Building Content For All Intents

[Dr. Pete, Pete Meyers, from Moz, posted on Twitter "Any algo update that impacts query interpretation or relevance will impact Featured Snippets." This was retweeted by Google's John Mueller, so I guess that is a vote of confidence without passing DA ;-). In all seriousness, we've all seen it, featured snippets are very finicky and change a lot but algorithm updates can cause them as well. Google announced it is now limiting the number of service areas a business can list to no more than 20. Google wrote in the Google Ads Help page "service area businesses are now limited to having a maximum of 20 service areas per business." Google added the limit, which was previously not listed at all, on the help document, which now reads "you can add up to 20 service areas." What if you need more? Google said they "recommend expanding the existing ones to cover larger areas. You can set your service area based on a combination of entire cities, districts, postal codes, or other areas that you serve." What if you already have over 20 service areas listed? Google said you will "receive suggested updates to their service areas to cover the same geographic area while only using 20 areas." One of the takeaways from the Google Webmaster Conference was that if Google tries to access your robots.txt file is unreachable but it does exist then Google won't crawl your site. Google said about 26% of the time GoogleBot cannot reach a robots.txt file. WordPress might make changes in order to reduce this error rate./>

Algorithmic Updates And WordPress Robots.txt

[Google announced that publishers can now create how-to “actions” for Google Assistant by using structured data. This is an opportunity for publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience on Google Assistant. Yahoo announced that all Yahoo Groups will be shut down on Monday, October 21st, and all Groups content will be removed on December 14th. After October 21st, users will no longer be able to upload new content to groups, but it will still remain on the network. Google Ads is rolling out two new ways to reach your target audiences in Google Search. Over the coming weeks, Google Ads will be launching affinity audiences and seasonal event segments for in-market audiences. Here’s more about each of these targeting options. Gary Illyes from Google was asked if Google search tracks or recognizes authors. He said for Google Search it is more about entities, not authors. But for Google News and Google Scholar, Google does recognize authors./>

Google Assistant And Google Ads Updates

[There is some early chatter in the SEO forums, including WebmasterWorld and some on social media. Some of the tools are showing some fluctuations as well today, where some others have not updated yet. Google announced it is changing the user agent name of the current GoogleBot in December. We knew this was coming when Google launched the new Evergreen GoogleBot. Google didn't change the user agent from Chrome 41 to what it was really running to not cause issues for some who hardcoded scripts for user agent detection. The only way to see which version of Chrome GoogleBot was running was to see what features that GoogleBot can render. A WebmasterWorld thread has some complaints that the number of external links reported in Google Search Console's link report is down by about 50%. Like Google cut out about half of the links they were originally reporting./>

Search Ranking Algorithm And GoogleBot Update

[Tomorrow is Google's 21st birthday and Google has already released its very own birthday Doodle to celebrate. The Doodle depicts a desktop computer from 1998 and the old Google home page and old Google logo. Google's John Mueller said that if someone takes your image and embeds it on their site using your image URL as the source, also known as hotlinking images, that image would not be considered a link to your web site. So if you take an image from my site, but don't just copy it to your server, instead you request the image from your server, that won't be considered an inbound link. Gary Illyes from Google said last night on Twitter that emailing Google for support with your SEO and your ranking problems in Google never really works. He said "That’s impossible" when someone claimed that emailing Google did help his ranking issues. He joked "Yeah cos emailing google is a great solution" after seeing a photo from a presentation that said "We sent emails to Google staff we knew."/>

Happy Birthday Google!

[Google announced an algorithm update intended to rank original news higher. Despite Google’s update, apparently an authority site like Yahoo News can syndicate content and outrank the original. In the past 24 hours or so, we had numerous reports sent to us that searchers are seeing only URLs for the Google search results snippets. The title and description portion of the snippets were missing. LinkedIn is introducing skill assessments which allow users to demonstrate their expertise and add a “verified skill” badge to their profile. New research from LinkedIn shows that 76% of professionals wish that employers were able to verify their skills. In response to that feedback, LinkedIn is providing a way for professionals to validate their skills to employers, which can help them stand out amongst other candidates./>

Syndicated Content Over Original Publishers And The Google Search Bug

[Google announced a change to the nofollow link attribute yesterday and with that announcement, Googlers spent the next day responding to questions about it on Twitter. I will go through what changed according to the announcement and then cover almost all of the responses from Google (removing duplicates) so you get a full perspective of this change. Nofollow is an HTML attribute that is added to links. It tells Google that a link is not trusted. It was originally designed to combat blog comment spam. It evolved for use on advertising links and for user generated links that couldn’t be 100% trusted. Google’s systems cannot verify the accuracy of content; instead, it relies on signals that the company thinks aligns with “relevancy of topic and authority,” according to Danny Sullivan, Google’s search liaison, in a tweet posted from his personal account on September 9. This attracted attention from SEOs and kicked off a conversation./>

Nofollow Link Attribute Change and How it Affects SEO

[In the latest installment of the #AskGoogleWebmasters video series, John Mueller tackles the topic of how Google chooses canonical URLs. Mueller says its common for websites to have multiple, unique URLs that lead to the same content. For example, there’s WWW and non-WWW versions of a URL. Another common configuration is when the homepage is accessible as index.html, or when upper and lowercase characters in URLs lead to the same pages. Hackers are reportedly exploiting vulnerabilities in over ten WordPress plugins in order to backdoor sites with rouge admin accounts. This is an escalation of an attack that was reported on back in July in which attackers were hijacking sites to serve ads, scams, and malicious app downloads. Now, the same hacker group is taking complete control of vulnerable sites using similar tactics. ZDNet reports as of August 20 the hacker group modified the malicious code planted on hacked sites./>

How Canonical URLs are Chosen And WordPress Hackers

[Google said in February that average position would be phasing out earlier this year. Now, we have about 6 weeks to fully absorb the repercussions of the change and implement updates to any reporting, rules or scripts that use average position. In lieu of average position, Google says advertisers should transition to using the position metrics — search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate — introduced last year. These indicate the percentage of impressions and impression share your ads received in the absolute top (the first ad at the very top of the page) and top of page (above the organic results) ad slots. It’s been proven that consumers are more likely to engage with your brand if you’re offering them excellent content. But every day, writers are overwhelming the web with more and more content; the “rules” of digital marketing are constantly changing…as are the qualities that define what an “excellent” piece of content looks like. />

Say Goodbye To Average Position In Google Ads And The Track for Content Creators

[Google has confirmed that as of earlier this morning it is unable to index new content across the web. There is a bug that Google said is “impacting some sites.” But it is bigger than some sites. From our view, this seems much larger than just “some sites.” Clearly Google is eager to fix any indexing issues, because Google wants to surface the most recent content from publishers. For Google to not show breaking news from the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other popular magazines is something Google probably isn’t too happy about. What it looks like. If you try to search for content from a popular news site and then filter to only show content within the past hour, you won’t currently be given any new real content from that site. Google announced another round of updates to how close variants will work. Queries with the same meaning could already trigger ads for exact match keywords as of September 2018. But now, close variants with the same meaning may also affect phrase and broad match modified keywords. Google expects advertisers to see around a 3 to 4% lift in clicks and impressions on the affected keywords with 85% of those being incremental for the account./>

Google not able to index new content And Other Google Changes

[Dan Shure posted on his podcast his audio notes from after a private dinner with Gary Illyes of Google from April 4th 2017. Basically, they had a dinner with several SEOs, after the dinner when Dan got into his car, he took audio notes of what he remembered from that dinner. Google announced that in the coming weeks broad match modifier and phrase match keywords will also begin matching to words within the search query that share the same meaning as the keyword. The SEM/PPC community is not surprised but still very frustrated by this news. It is Google Ads (formerly AdWords) expanding the keywords you want to match on for your ads to even more types of keyword phrases. That ultimately can lead to your ad showing more often but also it can lead to your ad showing for queries that you do not want your ads to show for. This has been the trend Google Ads has been going with since 2014 and has been a huge frustration point for the SEM industry. Google has published official guidance on Core Updates that goes beyond anything published before. The guidance covers four areas of content and recommends becoming acquainted with Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines to learn how to judge your own content. The guidance additionally mentioned that updates could affect Google Discover./>

Interesting Google Search Ranking Tidbits And Google Ads Expand

[Google's John Mueller talked about YMYL, specific to the health space, and mentioned that it is if you are writing about a topic on health that you are not an expert on then you are starting off already on a "shaky foundation." He said it probably makes sense for you to find experts to write or review what you wrote so that the content is "correct and it's trustworthy." He added it is content you want to feel comfortable that your friends can share with other friends. LinkedIn is adding a new feature to user profiles allowing people to list the professional services they offer to clients. This creates an opportunity for users to market their services outside of their business page and possibly connect with new prospects. The new services section in LinkedIn profiles will also be a helpful way for people to communicate exactly what it is they do for work. Just think – how many times have you had to explain to someone what an SEO does? Now you can clearly list the services you perform in your profile. Over the past few weeks or so there has been lot of rumors around why those suspensions have happened. Google has not be exactly clear about the issue but they did say they restored the suspended listings. That was not true and we waited. Now, Candour shared on Twitter a screen shot of Google My Business saying the shortnames connected bug with suspensions should be resolved soon, probably within 48 hours. The direct message reads "our engineering team has conformed that there was a technical issue connected to short names that is in profess of being fixed. If however, you are still experiencing the issue after 48 hours, please reply here with your dashboard URL."/>

YMYL Sites, LinkedIn And Google Search Indexing Issues

[Google was in a hearing this week in congress around antitrust issues, so was Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Well, Congressman David N. Cicilline questioned Google on the Google's mission on getting people to go off of the search results page and on to a different site as quickly as possible. He then referenced a study Rand Fishkin published on SparkToro named As the Antitrust Case Against Google Kicks Off, Here’s Where the DOJ Should Start. This study basically shows that Google sends a surprisingly low percentage of clicks out of its search results pages to non-Google properties. Is Google in some way biased against conservative sites – especially in news? Some people believe this. This controversy has been growing over the last couple of years or so. This claim of bias started with the president but has even made it all the way to Congress. Today, Google will appear before Congress (again) and answer questions about these accusations of conservative censorship. The other day we reported that the Google My Business issues were reportedly fixed according to Google. Well, many local SEOs and businesses are saying this is not true. Google told Greg Sterling "all listings that were not visible have been restored." That might not be 100% true./>

Congressional Hearing On Google And Google Non Biased Against Conservative Websites

Webcology takes a deeper look at the ecosystem of the Internet as it affects webmasters and web marketers from the points of view of two well known web marketers, Jim Hedger and Dave Davies. Based on interviews with special high-profile guests or panels, Webcology introduces, explores and explains how the various segments of the web marketing world work.

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Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm

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