Edwin Toonen Edwin is an experienced writer, editor & content manager. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine. Sometimes you wonder if Google even knows how Google works. Search is getting more complex by the day and there comes a point where it’s anybody’s guess. Yesterday, Google ‘announced’ that their search engine doesn’t use the pagination markup rel=prev/next at all and hasn’t for years. That’s curious because they have been advocating using it until very recently. So what are we talking about here? The web standard rel=prev/next was introduced many, many years ago to help determine relations between part of URLs or different pages. In 2011, Google started using those links as a strong hint to discover pages that were related. Almost every site now uses these links to provide these hints. Yoast SEO automatically adds these links for our users. Now, it turns … [Read more...] about Google says it doesn’t use rel=prev/next for pagination
Google On Neural Matching vs RankBrain
After I wrote up the what is neural matching, I got to thinking and decided to email Google a bunch of questions, which I published at Search Engine Land as Danny Sullivan posted the answers on Twitter via the @searchliaison account.I love how Google summed it up:RankBrain helps Google better relate pages to concepts. Neural matching helps Google better relate words to searches.Google said the Neural matching helps them better relate words to searches. Neural matching is an artificial intelligence based system that Google began using in 2018 primarily to understand how words are related to concepts. Google said it is "like a super-synonym system." Synonyms are words that are closely related to other words, Google said. For example, neural matching helps us understand that a search for "why does my TV look strange" is related to the concept of "the soap opera effect." We can then return pages about the soap opera effect, even if the exact words aren't used, Google said.Whereas with … [Read more...] about Google On Neural Matching vs RankBrain
Google Web Spam Report: Google Sent 33% Less Manual Actions Last Year
Google has released their annual web spam report and I just love comparing the previous year report to this one. Here are some of the highlights from the report, including Google sent 4 million manual actions in 2018, where sent 6 million in 2017.About 4 million manual action messages were related to manual actions resulting from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines, which is about 2% of their notifications. Google sent 186 million messages, of which 96 million were delivered, compared to 45 million messages the previous year. Google received about twice as many spam reports in 2018, 180,000 to be exact (they took action on 64% of them), compared to 90,000 the previous year. Reduced the impact of user generated spam on Google results by more than 80% Google said. Google also reduced link spam and hacked content, in their continued efforts. Google beefed up webmaster/community communication as well. You can see the full report over here.Forum discussion at Google+ and Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google Web Spam Report: Google Sent 33% Less Manual Actions Last Year
Bing Uses rel=next and rel=prev For Discovery But Not Merging Pages
With all the controversy around Google just noticing they haven't supported the rel=next/prev and now trying to dig themselves out of a hole - folks are curious how Bing supports it. Frédéric Dubut from Bing said on Twitter that Bing uses them for discovery and understanding site structure but they do not use it to merge pages into a set.Frédéric Dubut wrote on Twitter, "We're using rel prev/next (like most markup) as hints for page discovery and site structure understanding. At this point we're not merging pages together in the index based on these and we're not using prev/next in the ranking model."Here are the tweets: Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Bing Uses rel=next and rel=prev For Discovery But Not Merging Pages
Google: There Is No Google Organic Traffic Budget
Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that Google doesn't have an organic traffic budget that will stop sending a site traffic once it reaches a certain number. He said "we try to show pages in search when our algorithms think they're relevant, not based on counters."Here are the tweets: This is not the first time Google had to answer this question.In 2016, Google had to confirm they don't throttle traffic to web sites and once again later that year.So once Google sends your page 1,000 visitors in a single day, it doesn't mean Google can't send you twice as many.Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google: There Is No Google Organic Traffic Budget