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In short: Google’s clearly become so confident in RankBrain’s mysterious capabilities that it’s now used to help with every query that the search engine handles, more than two trillion per year.

Having said that, Google has said that RankBrain also is used as an actual ranking signal, repeating that yesterday at our SMX Advanced show.For the SEO and search marketers worried about what they should do now that RankBrain has ramped up, the answer remains the same: nothing, but focus on great content. Even people at Google don’t quite understand how RankBrain does what it does, we’ve been told. Honest. But it’s ultimately designed to reward great content. So focus on that, which has always been the case with SEO, and you’re on the right track.

Begin downloading your backlinks from Search Console on a weekly basis and make it a habit.

Every now and then, Google rotates a small batch of links into your sample files. If you keep downloading them for long enough, you’ll start seeing a bigger picture of exactly what your link profile looks like.

If you have multiple locations for the same business, Google will often show the one with the highest relevance and filter others.

In some cases, the filter causes listings to be completely removed from the Local Finder results unless you zoom in

if your listing is too similar (based on criteria above) to a listing that outranks you, it will cause your listing to rank much lower because Google is trying to “diversify” the search results. 

The changing distribution of middle star reviews means that it’s more critical than ever for businesses to create a review program to solicit a larger volume of reviews from people who may not have thought to leave one before.

BrightLocal’s 2020 edition of their annual survey to over 1,000 users in the US, 79% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family. However, if we look at the overall trend, we can see that 10% fewer respondents trust online reviews compared to 2014.

Users are more web-savvy than ever, and they can tell when there are suspicious patterns in reviews–like when a business has all 5-star reviews that were submitted all within the same time period. However, it also means that consumers can sort through potentially negative or fake reviews as one-offs when one or two individuals were perhaps having a bad day and took it out on your business. 

you can’t create content specifically for Discover. There’s no such concept. There’s no such control. There is no set of standardized “ranking signals” that you can try to optimize for.

Optimizing your images to make sure they’re high-quality or ensuring they’re at least 1,200 pixels wide and so forth isn’t really “optimizing” for Discover. It’s merely making yourself eligible to get into the ballpark. There is no standardized path to actually get on the field.

The way Discover is constructed advocates for a broader approach based on a meta-analysis of how a site is perceived by Google and what can be done to create a stronger profile. It’s almost the perfect blend of content, marketing, and an understanding of how Google works (SEO).

No control over your robots.txt file The problem. Shopify does not allow store owners to edit their robots.txt file. This is an issue because the platform creates duplicate URLs for products associated with a collection/category page. “The ideal solution would be to use robots.txt disallow directives to block these pages from being crawled in the first place,” Kevin Wallner, founder of First Chair Digital, told Search Engine Land, noting that, while Shopify does add canonical tags pointing back to the correct product URL, this does not prevent the duplicate URLs from being crawled and potentially indexed. Solutions: Editing your Shopify theme, as discussed in our technical SEO for Shopify guide, is one way to resolve this issue. Alternatively, pages not included in your robots.txt file can be hidden from search engines by customizing the section of your theme’s layout file, as detailed on this Shopify help page. You can also use an app such as Sitemap & NoIndex Manager to add noindex tags and remove URLs from your sitemap, Wallner suggested. “Unfortunately this won’t work for duplicate product URLs, but it works for several other special Shopify page types with little to no SEO value, so it’s still a good move,” he said. Related: Shopify SEO Guide: How to increase organic traffic to your store Wallner also advised that store owners avoid linking to duplicate URLs in their header, footer, sidebars, breadcrumbs and within the text on their pages. If particular pages have earned important backlinks, store owners can also get in touch with webmasters to request that they link to the preferred URL.

Prior to working with us, the law firm had another company set up dozens of boilerplate service area pages targeting social security disability terms. Each page was focused on an individual city or service area but provided no real value to the users who visited those pages.

we made the decision to delete them all and redirect them to the main pages on the site that were about social security disability.  The result. Within weeks of doing this, my colleague Carrie Hill saw big increases in their local pack rankings for “social security disability attorney.”

In the case study example, it would have been better to add a few service area pages and determine if they perform well instead of adding 50 of these service area pages as a first step.  

The feature seems to allow you to send additional feedback to Google when a suggested edit you make to a Google business listing is not accepted (i.e. not applied) for some reason.

this will help with the process of knowing when your edits are (1) not applied and (2) communicating more information to Google to get them applied to the business listing.

Google MUM, or Multitask Unified Model, is the latest algorithmic successor for the search engine giant. Google has called MUM “a new AI milestone inside of Google search.

It basically gathers subcategories for the query and delivers a more holistic picture for the benefit of the end user. MUM is particularly attuned to comparisons for an umbrella of related queries.

One thing that’s interesting about MUM is that it understands things across text and images. In the future, Google expects to be able to incorporate audio and video in the omnichannel mix, too.