Scott Services: Daily Search Forum Recap: May 13, 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: Merging Or Splitting Sites Is Like Creating A New Site

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that when you merge or split a site, it is “essentially creating a new site.” So that might mean, that if it is a substantial enough site merge or split, that Google may decide to treat the site as a brand new one and maybe some of the legacy signals might not carry over?

Google Search Suggestions Based On Your Recent Search Activity

Google for the past month or so has been giving over search suggestions to some logged in searchers. These search suggestions are not based on generic queries but based on that specific users recent activity within Google.

Gary Illyes Teaching Google Search Engineers About Web Search

Gary Illyes from Google shared this morning that he presented a two-hour demonstration to new search engineers at Google named the “Life of a Query.” Gary said he has been a loaq (life of a query) instruction since 2012. I asked if anything in that presentation would be novel on some level to SEOs, Gary kind of said no.

Google: Link Buying IS Like Buying Deals Off AliExpress

Sometimes Google’s John Mueller has funny and humorous one liners on Twitter. Here is one when someone told him that they were buying links and there is nothing he, John, can do about it. John responded “Yeah, those weekend AliExpress shopping splurges can be hard to resist, and it’s surprising to get the results in a few months. “What was I thinking? Why would I have ordered THIS? At least it was cheap.” :-)”

Google Still Crawls #! – But The AJAX Crawling Schema Is Not Officially Supported

In 2015 Google said they would deprecate the AJAX crawling schema and then in 2017, two years later, Google did do that. A year after that, Google said they stopped crawling #! for the most part. But today, in 2020, Google said technically they still do #1 crawling.

Empty Google Picnic Tables

Here is a photo from the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California showing the empty picnic tables and chairs. Sad thing, it will likely be like this for the next several months as Google is n