Google’s right-sidebar featured snippets are no more The featured snippet variant now appears in Google’s main results column, as the company announced in January. The right-sidebar featured snippet variant of Google search results has been migrated into the main results column, a Google spokesperson has confirmed. This change is the part of Google’s featured snippet deduplication, which began on

Search Engine Land » Platforms » Google » Google Ads » Advanced Google Ads script removes locations from keywords Advanced Google Ads script removes locations from keywords This script automates the removal of individual locations from keywords at-scale within Google Sheets. One of the most tedious tasks when working with location-based keywords is removing the individual locations from the keywor

Google is “probably many quarters away” from launching its mobile-first index. So said Gary Illyes, Google webmaster trends analyst, during a crowded session Tuesday afternoon at our SMX Advanced conference in Seattle. “It’s going to be a big change, but don’t freak out,” Illyes said. SEOs and webmasters have been wondering and waiting for a couple of years now for news on when the mobile-first in

Search Engine Land » Platforms » Google » Google Assistant » Google’s ‘Project Owl’ — a three-pronged attack on fake news & problematic content Google’s ‘Project Owl’ — a three-pronged attack on fake news & problematic content Google hopes to improve by better surfacing authoritative content and enlisting feedback about suggested searches and Featured Snippets answers. Google knows it has a search

Search Engine Land » SEO » Content » Google now handles at least 2 trillion searches per year Google now handles at least 2 trillion searches per year The search giant won't say exactly how many trillions of queries it processes, other than it's now two or more. It last claimed 1.2 trillion in 2012. How many searches per year happen on Google? After nearly four years, the company has finally relea

RIP DMOZ: The Open Directory Project is closing As of March 14, DMOZ will no longer be available. DMOZ — The Open Directory Project that uses human editors to organize websites — is closing. It marks the end of a time when humans, rather than machines, tried to organize the web. The announcement came via a notice that’s now showing on the home page of the DMOZ site, saying it will close as of Marc

Matt Cutts officially resigns from Google Matt Cutts is the new director of engineering at the US Digital Service. He has been on leave with Google since 2014 and officially resigned at the end of 2016. Matt Cutts, the former head of search quality at Google, has announced he officially resigned from Google as of December 31, 2016. He has decided to stay on with the US Digital Service and has been

Search Engine Land » Platforms » Amazon » Alexa » SEO without SERPs is here with Google Assistant, Home and Amazon Echo. Here’s how to survive. SEO without SERPs is here with Google Assistant, Home and Amazon Echo. Here’s how to survive. Columnist Bryson Meunier discusses how the rise of digital assistants will impact how search engine optimization is performed. On the first full day that we had a

Fun with robots.txt Columnist Patrick Stox provides some dos and don'ts for creating your robots.txt file -- along with examples of companies who have gotten creative with their files. One of the most boring topics in technical SEO is robots.txt. Rarely is there an interesting problem needing to be solved in the file, and most errors come from not understanding the directives or from typos. The ge

Google has begun testing its mobile-first index, which will primarily look at the mobile version of your website for its ranking signals and fall back on the desktop version when there is no mobile version. We expected this was coming and even heard about it over a year ago, but this is the first time Google has posted details about the mobile-first index on their own blog. Most of Google searches

SearchBot requires a free Search Engine Land account to use, and gives you access to all SearchBot personas, an image generator, and much more! If you already have a Search Engine Land account, log in now. Otherwise, register here! Search engine optimization — SEO — may seem like alchemy to the uninitiated. But there is a science to it. Search engines reward pages with the right combination of ran

Google would show an image box for typically anywhere from 35 percent to 20 percent of the queries they return — at least this is based on tracking tools from Moz and RankRanger — but that seems to have dropped significantly yesterday by half. Both Moz and RankRanger are showing about a 50-percent reduction in the frequency Google will show the image box in the web search results. The box looks li

Matt Cutts Webmaster Video Infographic Matt Cutts of Google gives daily advice on the Google Webmaster YouTube Channel. He has been doing so for years and they recently did a live Q&A to celebrate their 5 million views. Click2Rank published an outstanding infographic documenting the various facts gleamed from these videos. He named the infographic the Matt Cutts Webmaster Infographic. […]