Daily Search Forum Recap: February 5, 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:

• Vlog #43: Jim Boykin – The Ultimate Link Building Guru Shares Sage Advice
  
  
  
  Jim Boykin from Internet Marketing Ninjas invited me to his office to sit down and chat about links. The funny thing is, he came to my office like 15 years ago to build links, no joke…




• Google: URL Length Is Not A Ranking Factor
  
  Google’s John Mueller had to say on Twitter that “URL length is not a ranking fraction.” He was told that a CMS autogenerates URLs that are often longer than what is recommended for SEO. Now, what is recommended for SEO in terms of length?




• Google: Use rel=sponsored For Affiliate Links If Possible
  
  Google’s John Mueller said that if you can, it is best to use the rel=sponsored link attribute on your affiliate links. You can still use nofollow or combine them if you want, but it would make things clearer for Google if you uses rel=sponsored.




• Live: Google Top Stories With Descriptions In Snippets
  
  Back in December, Google announced an update to the top stories section and some of those screen shots showed descriptions, not just an image and title and site name, in the snippet section of the top stories. Well, now I see descriptions in some top stories cards.




• Google Pairing Knowledge Panels & People Also Search For
  
  Yesterday we covered a feature that shows “see the connection” between two entities and/or people in Google’s knowledge panel. Google has been doing this for the past few weeks according to Mordy Oberstein and he shared more examples of this in action.




• Google: GoogleBot User Agent New Name Is Fully Live
  
  Martin Splitt from Google said on Twitter that the new name for the user agent for GoogleBot should now be 100% live. The new user agent name is dynamic, meaning, it will show the latest version of Chrome that GoogleBot is using to crawl and render your web pages.




• Google Boat At The Kirkland Office
  
  Michael Wyszomierski, aka Wysz, who has been at Google since 2006 and was part of the spam fighting team with Matt Cutts, shared a photo on Instagram of the Google boat at the Kirkland office.

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Just because your site isn’t being indexed in the way you want, doesn’t mean there’s a problem in our systems. Sometimes things just don’t happen in the way people want, that’s not always a sig, John Mueller on Twitter
• Looks like a new Google Discover feature? “Discover More” tiles where there is usually an ad. @rustybrick, have you seen these before? https://t.co/IgfJR1kup3, Jeff Flowers on Twitter
• Main point is that if you do a search and start interacting with featured snippets, you’re effectively refining the search. The results below don’t change, but what’s happening there becomes far less an issue, Danny Sullivan on Twitter
• SEMPO members now part of Digital Analytics Association (DAA), WebmasterWorld
• That assumes you’re using a desktop computer, that people see the full URL, and that they understand how affiliate URLs are structured — that seems like quite a stretch to as, John Mueller on Twitter
• Twitter Suspends Large Network of Fake Accounts, WebmasterWorld
• Yeah, and the Googlebot team is involved, too. We’ll make sure you can always tell it’s Googlebot but we’re looking into the new UA hints API proposals as well., Martin Splitt on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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