the Index Coverage report data is refreshed at a different (and slower) rate than the URL Inspection. The results shown in URL Inspection are more recent, and should be taken as authoritative when they conflict with the Index Coverage report.

Like all search operators, the advanced site is not connected with the Google algorithm. As a result, it’s doesn’t offer any insight related to the search algorithm.

Providing relevant and credible information is Google's responsibility

Users don't just want quick facts, they want to really understand the information

Google will be expanding "About This Source" to include more information about the brand, including *what the site says about itself,* *what others say about the brand,* and any information that Google feels is missing

Content marketing is the most sought-after SEO service for 31.3% of SEO pros, followed by keyword strategy (30.8%) and web design (25.5%)

By tracking what SEO clients are asking their agencies for, we can begin to see where there is a demand for services and potential gaps to fulfill.

1Content strategy

John Mueller explaining that new sites can ultimately use internal linking to funnel Google through the most trusted and quality pages on the site, to earn trust and then get Google to crawl more and more of those pages over time after that trust was earned.

The cover photo can show up in the 3-pack

To increase the chances of having Google pick the cover photo you selected, make sure you do the following: Pick an image that looks good in both landscape and a square layout Pick an image that has most of the image in the top half (not the bottom half) The image should be a close-up and not have a ton of background detail An exterior image is generally preferable to the algorithm Use the dimensions 1332 x 750 for the cover photo Use this trick from Ben Fisher to get Google to display the correct photo

a competing site won’t accidentally be referenced within your featured snippet. Instead, the new iteration (which has now launched in the US as of around September 8th in 2021) will only ever show either Wikipedia or internal pages from your own site.

To improve the topical Authority, a source should cover all the related details to a topic with a certain context, query, and intent template by satisfying the related and possible search intents. To improve the topical authority, the “keyword gap” is not as important as the “information gap”.

something that I see really frequently with sites that are negatively impacted by recent core updates is that they have produced so much content for so long–and maybe way back when the content did really well for SEO–but the rules of the game, kind of changed. 

you have great product pages, service pages, brand pages, but there’s this blog that has so much content on it. And in many cases that content was not up to par with what we would expect nowadays with good quality content. So it’s really chipping away at that and just making sure that whatever is being indexed by search engines is truly high-quality content.

if you see that there’s really no organic traffic going to the page, not a lot of page views, not a lot of engagement, maybe it hasn’t ranked for anything in a few years, that makes it a lot easier to recommend what to do with it. And it’s not always just delete it. In many cases, it’s consolidated into this one, redirect it, and update that existing article.

I’m not saying every site should nuke or replace their long descriptions and I’ll cover the various nuances in this post. But, I do think every site owner should review their category page content, understand what real users want to see, provide the best experience possible

removing 30% of the description content from the original implementation clearly didn’t hurt those pages long-term. Actually, the description content was better for users with more relevant information.

the site’s search visibility surge with the July 2021 core update. So, clearly those new, shorter category descriptions aren’t hurting the site or rankings for those pages.

There isn't a defined order of priority for rich results types, and in many cases we don't show multiple types for the same page. If you have a preference on a page, I'd recommend focusing just on that

maybe there are cases where Google's algorithms have selected a better title and where it makes sense to kind of go in that direction. But there are certainly also situations where maybe Google's algorithms select the a worse title and where you want to keep the one that you had there or maybe you even want to improve the one that you had previously. So I wouldn't just blindly use what we show in search