Today In SEO & Search News: March 10, 2017

Today In SEO & Search News: March 10, 2017

Welcome to the last post of the week.  Let’s look at what happened today to give you some light reading for the weekend:

Google Update ‘Fred’ & More
On yesterday’s episode of Webcology Jim and I discussed a whole array of issue but the most prevalent was the latest Google Update folks are naming ‘Fred’. We dig into what is happening, possible reasons and areas being impacted and question why it seems to be hitting mobile so much more than desktop.  If you missed it you can listen to it fully here:


Why Expert Roundups Suck
Rand Fiskin did it again … another valuable Whiteboard Friday.  Today Rand gets into why expert roundup articles suck and gave some very valuable ideas of what you might want to do in their place.  He talked about the lack of visual appeal to roundups as well as listed the reasons they don’t work as you’d like (but why you’re tempted to do them anyways) and gave 4 great suggestions for what to do in their place.

Google Home Has More Answers Than Echo
Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land covered an interesting (and probably painful) test done by the folks at Stone Temple Consulting wherein they asked both a Google Home and Amazon 5000 questions.  Google answered 3400 with an accuracy of 89.5% where Amazon could only answer just over 1,000 with an accuracy of 87%.

PageSpeed Is Important For SEO
Jon Henshaw of RavenTools did a podcast for Search Engine Journal on why PageSpeed is important. What I love about Jon is that he doesn’t just tell you what the problem is but gives good suggestions as to how to fix them. If you don’t understand why speed is important and what to do about it it’s highly recommended listening.

Google Running Machine Learning Competition
Google has announced a machine learning startup competition with over $2 million in prizes.  The competition is for young startups implementing machine learning and prizes will be awarded based on how innovative they are in the idea and implementation. It’s going to be a very interesting competition to follow.

Google Taking On Slack
Reported on in USA Today, Google is revamping hangouts in a clear move to go after both Slack and Microsoft.  Theyre diving Hangouts into two apps – a video chat service and a team-oriented messaging service which is the app clearly targeting Slack.  This comes right before microsoft launches it’s one chat space called Teams as part of the Office 365 offering.

And that’s it for the day. Now go enjoy your weekend !