Brian Ussery says, “Google’s new “Google Home” device may be one of the most popular holiday gifts this year, but some marketers are not going to be celebrating in 2017. For instance, if you ask Google Home, “What is Bing?” its response is, “Indicating a sudden event or action.” If you ask, “What is Yahoo?” its response is, “A rude, noisy, or violent person.” Interestingly enough, Google Home responses to the question, “What is Google?” with “search for information about (someone or something) on the Internet using the search engine Google.” Instead of treating... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “Google Home, Google’s latest digital assistant, is part of a broader market experiment in voice-only search. While the hardware is new, Google has been building toward this future for a while, and one of the clearest examples is the introduction of featured snippets to answer questions in search. For example, if I ask Google: “What is a moonshot in business?” I get this answer… In desktop search, Google also returns a set of traditional organic results, and, in some cases, ads, news results, Knowledge Panels, and other features. Featured... [...]

Russ Jones says, “Existential threats to SEO Rand called “Not Provided” the First Existential Threat to SEO in 2013. While 100% Not Providedwas certainly one of the largest and most egregious data grabs by Google, it was part of a long and continued history of Google pulling data sources which benefit search engine optimizers. I don’t intend to say that Google made any of these decisions specifically to harm SEOs, but that the decisions did harm SEO is inarguable. In our industry, like many others, data is power. Without access to SERP, keyword, and analytics data, our... [...]

Lydia Jorder says, “During the holidays, we often let a fair part of ourselves go: diet, exercise, budgets and more. But for local search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, there is something very impactful that can get away from us little by little, until it is completely out of control: Rankings. During the holiday season, we sometimes neglect a variety of strategies that help our businesses maintain positioning within the local pack during a high-traffic time. If you find yourself experiencing a case of holiday ranking drops, you may want to avoid a Scrooge-like boss muttering... [...]

MOZ team says, “It may seem like an impossible uphill battle to compete with big sites in the SERPs, but there are benefits to running a smaller site that can make a tremendous difference to your SEO. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how small businesses and websites can target opportunities the big sites can’t, in spite of their natural advantages”. How Can Small Businesses/Websites Compete with Big Players in SEO? MOZ  [...]

Jo Cameron says, “Welcome to the sixth installment of our educational Next Level series! In our last episode, Jo took you on an adventure diving for treasure in the long tail of search. This time around we’re answering the call for help when you feel like you’ve done all you can, but you’re still not ranking. Read on and level up! You’ve optimized your pages, written delightful title tags, concocted a gorgeous description to entice clicks, used your target keyword in your copy with similar words, and your content is good, like really good. As far as you’re concerned... [...]

Ben Davis says, “What mobile UX mistakes should marketers be looking out for? Here are 23 of them for a start. The information is taken from a variety of Google resources and includes both factors that Google has explicitly stated could be detrimental to search performance, and other factors for which the same could be implied (e.g. from Google’s developer guides). Of course, many factors are used to judge page quality and ultimately if Google judges a page to have the best quality content, it may survive these UX errors. So, on we go… 1. Slow-loading pages For some time, speed... [...]

Cyrus Shepard says, “How fresh is this article? Through patent filings over the years, Google has explored many ways that it might use “freshness” as a ranking signal. Back in 2011, we published a popular Moz Blog post about these “Freshness Factors” for SEO. Following our own advice, this is a brand new update of that article. In 2003, Google engineers filed a patent named Information retrieval based on historical data that shook the SEO world. The patent not only offered insight into the mind of Google engineers at the time, but also seemingly provided a roadmap for Google’s algorithm... [...]

Ben Davis says, “We recently ran an article about the importance of canonical tags to differentiate between similar product pages. You can read that piece here. But what about when a competitor’s page seems to have bumped you out of the search results? That’s another topic that Jon Earnshaw, CTO Pi Datametrics, discussed at Brighton SEO last month. Let’s have a look… More books (where did kitty go?) Just like the last canonical example, we’re looking at Waterstones again. The chart below shows the Google search ranking (using the term ‘Test Your Cat’)... [...]

Bridget Randolph says, “As mobile technology becomes an increasingly common way for users to access the internet, you need to ensure that your mobile content (whether on a mobile website or in a mobile app) is as accessible to users as possible. In the past this process has been relatively siloed, with separate URLs for desktop and mobile content and apps tucked away in app stores. But as app and mobile web usage continues to rise, the ways in which people access this content is beginning to converge, which means it’s becoming more important to keep all of these different content locations... [...]