Scott Services: Daily Search Forum Recap: February 24, 2020

Monday, 24 February 2020

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google Patent Related To Medic Update? Website Representation Vector For Classifying Web Sites.

Bill Slawski posted about a new Google patent application filed in August of 2018 that was just revealed last week named Website Representation Vector to Generate Search Results and Classify Website. This patent can explain a lot around the August 2018 Medic update theories out there.

Google Penalties Can Reoccur – You’re Site Is Not Immune

John Mueller from Google said just because a web site was once penalized, it does not mean it cannot be penalized again for the same issue. It is not like when you get a specific virus, that if you survive it, you become immune to getting that specific virus again. You can be penalized by Google for the same issue more than once.

Vlog #48: Dixon Jones – SEO Legend Mastering Links Tools & Now Semantic Tools

Dixon Jones has been doing SEO since 1998, you may know him mostly from his work at Majestic.com but he has been in the SEO industry since before there was an industry…

Google: Quality Raters Help Us Understand If Our Signals Produce Good Results

Danny Sullivan at Google again explained what the role of the search quality raters are. Again, for those who do not know, Google search quality raters are not Google employees, they are third-party contractors. They grade search results and the sites ranked. Those grades and scores do not get fed back into the algorithm, but are shared with Google’s ranking engineers.

Google Image Search Adds New Image License Metadata

Google announced that you can now use markup and metadata to tell Google about the image licensing rights and details. When you add this metadata and when Google decides to show the results in image search, Google may show a new Licensable badge for the image.

Google In Europe Now Shows Other Local Search Providers

This comes as no surprise, Google has been testing it for a while after the EU has required them to do something for anti-competitive reasons. Now Google is showing other search providers for local results. They did this for other verticals as well in the past, at least testing, but now this is live.

Google Welcomes Super Heros

Here is a photo from the Google Germany office that has slides up welcoming superheros. It says “Welcome Superheros.” I am not sure which super heros were invited or expected to show up. Batman, Won