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unless you are an authoritative website such as Wikipedia, your information probably won’t appear in the answer box.

having an image from your website in an image pack is not very beneficial.

Besides the common video thumbnail and video knowledge panel, videos may also appear in a carousel, both on the mobile and the desktop devices.

<loc> and <lastmod>. These two tags are very important, so make sure you add them to your sitemap!

Google limits that to only 10MB so make sure your file doesn’t have more than 50,000 URLs and 10MB

You can differentiate via the user agent and show an HTML sitemap instead if a real person visits the page.   Yoast SEO already does this. Visiting a /sitemap_index.xml file on a WordPress website will return an HTML sitemap, while hitting CTRL + U to view the source will return the actual XML sitemap.

Only 43% of online stores see significant traffic from their social media pages.

Having a video thumbnail in the search results can double your search traffic.

Mobile ad blocking is increasing 90% year-over-year.

Technical tasks such as marking up with structured data will become more and more obsolete since Google needs less and less structured information for understanding via natural language processing.

The content and links remain the most important influencing factors. Links are joined by other important factors that underpin authority. Co-occurrences in search queries and content (text, video, audio and images) are important trust and authority signals

content marketing along the customer journey

Why Doesn’t Rand Fishkin say the Words? October 2, 2009 by Roger · 2 CommentsFiled under: SEO General  There’s a very informative video on SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday about link volume verses link quality. At about the 5:00 minute mark you can see Rand Fishkin holding himself back trying not to say the B word … “buy links”. He does say barter. Does that mean exchange links for money? I guess it could. The sad truth is that if you are in a very competitive market like travel, car hire, hotels, and you aren’t a top 200 brand, the only way you are going to get on the front page of Google is to BUY LINKS. Cheap hotels Sydney is an example of the sort of search term you would probably need to buy links for. $1000 to $2000 per month for some quality links should do the trick which is still cheap compared to other forms of mass media, and I do see Google as a form of mass media. Yep, buy links. But that’s Blackhat you say and Google doesn’t like it I can hear some people say. It seems it’s OK to buy links if Google gets the cash via their Adwords money machine, but if you get caught selling or buying links, then watch out. Ever wondered why Google uses a very pale yellow background on their Adwords ads? Why not red or blue, or even a muted grey? You know the answer don’t you?  I suspect over 30% of the market don’t even know the difference between Adwords ads and organic links. What number do you believe? And if you believe the white-hat nonsense about not buying links you will still be spending time and/or money on article marketing, press release submissions, forum signatures, link exchanges, and other link-building methods.

More importantly, this means that Googlebot will be able to crawl most modern websites and access thousands of features that a modern browser can access including ES6 and newer JavaScript features

But, Googlebot still can’t see everything. Google said, “there are still some limitations, so check our troubleshooter for JavaScript-related issues and the video series on JavaScript SEO.” Google has listed the JavaScript issues that you should be considerate of. You can watch Google’s advice on JavaScript SEO on YouTube.

Why we care. This update means we as SEOs can focus more on creating useful and helpful content for our audiences and less time on working on technical workarounds for Google’s crawler. That doesn’t mean you can forget about how Google crawls and indexes your content, however. You still need to make sure your website is built in a search engine-friendly manner and that Google is crawling and indexing your website. But you likely will have to worry about this process just a little less now that Googlebot will always be running the latest version of Chromium.

How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).

Most article links that appear in Google Discover are sourced from non-Google publishers.

There are not many technical requirements to be featured in Google Discover, compared to Google News. You do not need a specific sitemap for Google Discover, nor is there any sort of manual submission process to make your content eligible for Discover feeds.

less predictable or dependable when compared to Search

Here Google is providing direct and clear advice that if you want your videos to perform better in Google Search, then give that video its own dedicated landing page, with prominent placement on that page. It probably also makes sense to add the video title, description and even the transcript of the video on that page.

Google said “it’s fine to include the same video on both a dedicated page and its original page alongside other information, like a news article or a product detail page.” But you should also look for a way to place this video on its own dedicated page.