Barry Schwartz says, “Google has added the ability to filter between AMP pages that show up in the rich cards section, i.e., the top news carousel, versus AMP pages that show up in the core mobile search results. You can access this report filter within the Google Search Console, under the Search Analytics report section where it shows the search appearance filter. Google wrote on Google+, “to make it easier to differentiate between how your AMPs are being shown, you can now filter between AMP article rich results & normal search results shown as AMP”. Google AMP reporting in... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google has started slowly rolling out the mobile-first index to a small subset of users, and we have published a large list of FAQs around the mobile-first index. But one somewhat shocking item I learned yesterday was that Google, by default, won’t use the AMP version of your page for the mobile index, even if you do not have a mobile-friendly alternative. For example, you have a website that is only desktop-friendly, i.e., there is no mobile-friendly version, but you decide to skip mobile-friendly and go directly to building AMP pages for your site. So now you have... [...]

Ryan Shelley says, “Google has started testing its mobile-first index. This new index will look first at the mobile version of your website for its ranking signals and fall back on the desktop version when there is no mobile version. Google has been slowly moving toward a mobile-first index for quite a while now. Google first hinted at their intentions of a mobile-first index about a year ago, but November 4 was the first time Google has posted details about the mobile-first index on their own blog. So if you have been slow in joining the mobile revolution, now is the time to take action.... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Many critics of the presidential election are partly blaming false information and fake news stories propagated on Google and Facebook for influencing the outcome. While some Facebook employees share this concern, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has largely dismissed the notion that fake news on Facebook contributed to Trump’s victory. Despite this, both Google and Facebook have now taken steps to address the challenge of false news. Google is implementing a policy change that bars sites displaying fake news from using ads from the Google Display Network. This is an attempt... [...]

Tony Edward says, “Google has updated the How Search Works page to say they now have knowledge of over 130 trillion pages across the web. The page reads, “Search starts with the web. It’s made up of over 130 trillion individual pages and it’s constantly growing.” That figure is up by 100 trillion pages from when Google first launched this web page back in March 1, 2013. In fact, the original blog post from Google shows the metric of pages back then, which was less than four years ago, to be only 30 trillion pages. This story has been updated to reflect that this number is not based... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google debuted price extensions in July, enabling advertisers to show pricing information about products and services in mobile text ads. At that time, the extension format was in list form. On Monday, Google announced in a tweet that the swipeable card format that has been popping up will now be the standard format for price extensions. In addition to the new standard, Google announced price extensions will be available in 10 more languages. Available languages now include English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. In... [...]

Tony Edward says, “Most of us are aware of link penalties that occur if you have low-quality or spam links pointing to your site. But did you know you can also be penalized by Google for how you link to other websites from your site? Yup, you sure can. It’s called an “unnatural outbound links” penalty, and similar to the inbound link penalty, it can be applied partially or sitewide. Recently, we conducted an audit for a new client, and we flagged the spammy linking that was being done in a particular section of their site. The content manager was unknowingly allowing guest bloggers... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service by Google that allows you to check your website’s indexing status and to optimize its visibility for searchers. To adjust your website in Google Search Console, you need to go to the dashboard and select your site’s main property. If it’s www, then select that choice. If you have an SSL certificate, you’ll have to select the property with “https” (with or without www—depending on your main mirror). Let’s start from the Search Appearance. We’ll go... [...]

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... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Tom Greenaway, a developer advocate at Google, published on the Google Webmaster Blog their first best practices and recommendations for how to get your Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) indexed and discovered, and potentially ranked, in the Google search results. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) is a web technology that lets you use modern web technologies to make application-like experience for mobile and desktop devices without publishing a native iOS or Android app. Google is a leading force behind it; you can learn more about it over here. Google’s blog post is a “checklist”... [...]