Group items tagged

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.

One of the best uses of the robots.txt file is to maximize search engines’ crawl budgets by telling them to not crawl the parts of your site that aren’t displayed to the public.

you should not use robots.txt to block pages from search engines

you could disallow a page, but it could still end up in the index.Generally, you don’t want that.That’s why you need the noindex directive. It works with the disallow directive to make sure bots don’t visit or index certain pages.

Monitoring website performance in analytics platforms to discover insights.

Monitoring performance: AI can process data, alert the user to any anomalies and highlight quick wins to action immediately.

The unifying thread through all of this is the fact that AI can deliver highly relevant insights automatically, at huge scale, and in a manner we can easily share with other departments in our organization. Without the right technology, we could only achieve this with the support of hundreds of analysts and an infinite budget.It is worth noting that the difference between a valuable insight and a simple observation is incredibly significant for any business. A true insight illuminates something new and guides future action based on the moments and metrics that matter

Aggregating data by site vs by page If you group, filter, or compare by page or search appearance, all metrics in the report are aggregated by page; otherwise, all metrics are aggregated by site. For impressions, if a site appears twice on a search results page when aggregating by site, it counts as a single impression; if grouping by page or search appearance, each unique page is counted separately. For clicks, if a site appears twice in search results when grouped by site, and the user clicks on one link, backs up, then clicks the other link, it counts as a single click, since the final destination is the same site. For position, when aggregating by site, the topmost position of your property in search results is reported; when grouped by page or search appearance, the topmost position of the page in search results is reported. When aggregating data by site, the site is the true target of the search results link, which might not be the same as the displayed URL, as determined by Google's skip redirect behavior.  Because of the different accounting methods, the click-through rate and average position are higher when aggregating by site if multiple pages from the same site appear in the search results. For example, imagine that search results for "fun pets for children" returns only the following three results, all from the same site, and that users click each of them with equal frequency: Google Search Results Metrics Aggregated by Site Metrics Aggregated by Page www.petstore.example.com/monkeys www.petstore.example.com/ponies www.petstore.example.com/unicorns Click-through rate: 100% All clicks for a site are combined Click-through rate: 33% 3 pages shown, 1/3 of clicks to each page Average position: 1 Highest position from the site in the results Average position: 2 (1 + 2 + 3) / 3 = 2

Adding structured data to your pages can help search engines display your images as rich results. While Google says structured data doesn’t help you rank better, it does help to achieve a more fleshed out listing in Image Search

Adding images to your XML sitemaps helps Google index your images, so be sure to do so for better image SEO.

Sometimes, Google will display a brand KP or a local KP depending on what was searched.

keep in mind that it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to replace your local KPs with brand KPs for all searches.

It is possible for a manufacturer to participate in both Merchant Center and Manufacturer Center. Information provided via Manufacturer Center will not affect the listed retailers or the sale price of products advertised on Google via Merchant Center. If a manufacturer would like to advertise their products for sale, they can do so via Merchant Center.

Product information that is submitted may be displayed on Google.com, the Google Shopping tab, Google Now cards, and Google Express.

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).

1. Reputation In Your Title Tag You have control over the meta title tag and can change it as we outline above to include your overall rating and review count. Especially if you are optimizing this title tag for a page dedicated to reviews you can also let the user know you are displaying all of your reviews in one place, offering them a lot of data and efficiency. GatherUp customers would benefit here from showing all of their 1st- and 3rd-party reviews in the Review Widget. 2. Reputation In Your Meta Description

The three-year luxury-watch slump in the United States is over.  Swiss luxury-watch sales in the U.S., Switzerland's second largest export market, jumped substantially in the first half of 2018 versus the same period in 2017, according to three indicators, two for wholesale sales, the other for retail sales. The retail data came from the NDP Group, the market research company whose widely respected watch retail tracking service collects point-of-sale data from thousands of stores in the United States. "We're reporting that U.S. sales for watches above $1,000 are up 13.5% in value year-to-date," Reg Brack, NPD's watches and luxury industry analyst, told HODINKEE. Swiss watches dominate the market above $1,000.

The Swatch Group boasted that it had "the best first semester sales in the history of the group," CHF 4.27 billion, a 14.7% increase over the same period in 2017. The company reported a 66.5% jump in net income to CHF 468 million.

The main drivers of this year's boomlet, according to the FH, were Asian markets, mechanical watches, and relatively affordable steel watches.

Local Falcon displays Google My Business rankings for listings that show up either in the Maps portion of the organic search, or from a search in the Google Maps Local Finder (i.e. Google Maps).

If you wish to record a visual representation of the scan, you will need to save a screenshot before performing another scan. We will need be added saved screenshots as a new feature shortly.

100s of backlinks from http://theglobe.net  and related spammy domains. Ignore or disavow?

We already ignore links from sites like that, where there are unlikely to be natural links. No need to disavow :)

Target question-based keywords. Check if there is a featured snippet on the SERP and what type it is (paragraph, list, table etc) using a tool like Ahrefs. Keep your paragraph and sentences fairly short. Answer the query as directly as possible. Structure your content with logical subheadings (H2, H3, H4 etc). Use tables to display any data. Include the question within the answer if possible. Include a summary at the start or end of the content.

One way to combat duplicate meta descriptions is to implement a dynamic and programmatic way to create unique meta descriptions for automated pages. If possible, though, there's no substitute for an original description that you write for each page.

If a page is targeting between one and three heavily searched terms or phrases, write your own meta description that targets those users performing search queries including those terms.If the page is targeting long-tail traffic (three or more keywords), it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines populate a meta description themselves. The reason is simple: When search engines pull together a meta description, they always display the keywords and surrounding phrases that the user has searched for.

One caveat to intentionally omitting meta description tags:  Keep in mind that social sharing sites like Facebook commonly use a page's meta description tag as the description that appears when the page is shared on their sites. Without the meta description tag, social sharing sites may just use the first text they can find.

They could insert links into the site to boost their SEO rankings. Hackers can make a killing selling links from exploited sites. Alternatively, a hacker could deface the site and demand money to restore it (ransom). They could even place ads on the site and use the traffic to make money. In most cases, an attacker will also install backdoors into the server. These are deliberate security holes that allow them to come back and exploit the site in the future – even if the insecure plugin has been replaced.

Unfortunately, under WordPress, every plugin and theme has the ability to alter anything on the site. They can even be exploited to infect other apps and sites hosted on the same machine.

Theme developers are often relatively inexperienced coders. Usually, they’re professional graphic artists who have taught themselves a little PHP on the side. Plugins are another popular line of attack – they account for 22% of successful hacks. Put together, themes and plugins are a major source of security trouble.

Hreflang URLs must be crawlable and indexable and therefore non-200 URLs are treated as errors, and ignored by the search engines.

This is optional, and not necessarily an error or issue.

Unsafe Cross-Origin Links – This shows any pages that link to external websites using the target=”_blank” attribute (to open in a new tab), without using rel=”noopener” (or rel=”noreferrer”) at the same time. Using target=”_blank” alone leaves those pages exposed to both security and performance issues.

Our financial client created COVID landing pages for both personal and business accounts. This client saw a 95% increase in organic goal completions from February to March. There was also a 97% increase in organic goal completions YoY. Google posts that focused on coronavirus-related services and products have also performed well.

Figure out the best method for earning reviews. Test email, texting, and in-person requests from your team, physical cards with a bit.ly link, etc. Test each one for a few months, then switch to a different method. Test until you find the method that works best for your customers.  The other thing that really needs to be considered is how to get customers to write about the specific services they used when working with your company. Little prompts or questions that they could answer when you reach out will help customers write better reviews.

Home Services

“make sure the image looks how you intend it to look on a purely white background (for example, if the logo is mostly white or gray, it may not look how you want it to look when displayed on a white background).”

It can show in the knowledge panel, maybe top stories and other areas