It was another busy week in search with a lot happening in organic search, local and big news in the PPC space.
John Mueller Recommends Pyramid Site Structure
Google’s John Mueller gives advice on site structures, bad site structures, mega menus and hierarchies. Basically, he’s talking about PageRank flow between your pages, and gives important advice.
Google Adds More Info About Domains in Search Results
Google has added more information to the search results info icon. The idea is to give additional information to searchers on the trustability of the domain, and whether it’s an add.
Dave’s Note – I’m guessing that what we’re seeing is Google moving to create an area where they can bury the note as to whether something is an advertisement or not.
Bing Estimated Reading Time In Search Result Snippets
Bing has added the estimated reading time for a document. This is an interesting move and may provide users with the ability to predict whether a document is too details or not detailed enough for their needs.
Google’s People Also Search For Entity Overlay Feature
Google has added an interesting feature, with an overlap of entity details in the “people also search for” area, providing a quick glimpse of info on the subject for context or to let you know if it’s a good click.
Google Keeps Printing Money: Up 23% YoY & Search Up 17%
Google announced their Q4 earnings and revenue was up 23%. Not a surprise in a year people were pushed online.
Google Agrees to Pay for (Some) Australian News
Google has agreed to pay some publishers in Australia for use of their stories in Google News. This comes just a couple days after Bing offered to.
Daves Note – And the EU to make the same threat in 3 … 2 ….
More from John Mueller, a note that to get the
Google Adds Black-owned Business Label To Product Results
In celebration of black history month, Google has rolled out a “black-owned business” label in Google My Business. This allows consumers to choose to support black-owned businesses more easily.
Google Displays Stars With Reviews In Local Knowledge Panel
Google has added visual stars to the reviews in the Local Knowledge Panel. Great news for some. And a reminder that reputation management and reviews are increasingly important.
Apple Maps Showing Restaurant Menus From Yelp
Apple Maps on iOS and desktop and now showing menus for restaurants, pulled mainly from Yelp. Great news for Yelp.
Google Ads to Phase Out Modified Broad Match
Google has announce that they’re phasing out modified broad match, but I think that’s a bit of a disingenuous way of saying what they’re really doing which is phasing out phrase match.
In short, they are taking away our ability to fully manage our own keywords. Coming just a few months after they stopped showing most of them to us at all.
Capital One did a great commercial that describes what’s going on better than I can …
Google Ads Rolls Out Portfolio Bid Strategies For Manager Accounts
Google Ads has rolled out portfolio bid strategies being accessible to all manager accounts. I’ve played around with them. They’re very handy, and can be combined with portfolio budget strategies.
Chrome Data Added To Google Search Console Discover Performance Report
Google is gradually adding Chrome data to Search Console Discover reports. Basically this will add in clicks that were not being counted into the data.
Google BERT vs SMITH: How They Work & Work Together
Beanstalk’s own Dave Davies discusses BERT, SMITH and how they work and work together in his latest article on Search Engine Journal.