Scott Services: Daily Search Forum Recap: July 7, 2020

Tuesday, 7 July 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:

Bing Advice On Optimizing For Intelligent Answers & Questions?

I will be honest, the blog post Bing posted yesterday confused me. The title is “How to Optimize Your Content for Search Questions using Deep Learning.” The author of the blog post, which is unknown, said “I think one approach to do this is to evaluate our content by following the same process that Bing’s answering engine follows and contrast it to an evaluation of competitors that are doing really well.”

Web Stories Image Thumbnails In Google Mobile Search Results

In 2018, Google launched AMP Stories and then they got more visual, with visual stories in 2019. Now, Google renamed them from AMP Stories to Web Stories. Did you know that if you publish a web story, Google’s mobile search results will show you a fancy image thumbnail in the search result snippet?

Google Tests Video List View

Google is testing replacing the carousel interface in the Google search results for videos with a list view. Here is a screen shot from Mordy Oberstein where he spotted this when he was looking for new jeans :).

The Google Indexing Issue From A Month Ago Was A Crawling Issue

On June 2, 2020, Google yet again confirmed it was having issues displaying new content in its search results. Google said it was an “indexing issue.” Well, it was actually a crawling issue that led to Google not being able to show the new pages in the index.

Google: Scoring 100 In SEO In Lighthouse Doesn’t Make You A Good SEO

Gary Illyes of Google said on Twitter “achieving a SEO score 100 in Lighthouse just means that you can follow a handful of directions, not that you’re great at SEO.” He did say “but good job!” Those that do score 100 he said are good at following directions.

Google Mic Catchbox

This won’t fly until COVID is over but here is a photo of a catchbox, those soft microphones you can throw to each other when doing Q&A at an event. You speak into it and it goes to a loud speaker.