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Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Search Engine Roundtable Stories: Google Home & Assistant Listings May Need Google Guaranteed Label You've seen the Google local services ads before, they have the Google Guarantee label on them. But when the Google Assistant started showing ads, people asked how does one not pay to show up in the local listings if you need the guarantee label but those come from local services ads. Google: Nofollow Link Attribute Is Working Fairly Well Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that the nofollow link attribute has been and still is working fairly well. He added hasn't "seen many cases of sites causing themselves significant issues, or of pages not getting credit in quite some time." Google: AJAX/XHR Calls Can Impact Crawl Budget Google's Gary Illyes posted on Twitter this morning that he updated the crawl budget post from January 2017 to … [Read more...] about Daily Search Forum Recap: April 23, 2019

You've seen the Google local services ads before, they have the Google Guarantee label on them. But when the Google Assistant started showing ads, people asked how does one not pay to show up in the local listings if you need the guarantee label but those come from local services ads.These labels:To be clear, we knew Google can show these if you are listing in by HomeAdvisor and Porch. But Greg Sterling dug into this and reported on How to appear in local services listings in Google Assistant and Google Home.In short, if you do not have a listing with HomeAdvisor or Porch and you aren't in Google local services ads, you can submit a request to be Google Guaranteed using this form. Greg said "in order to be Google Guaranteed, businesses must pass a background check and have their license and insurance details verified." Now, those that pay get this pretty quick, but I am not sure how long it takes for those who fill out that form. In fact, Greg, nor did I, ever hear of this form … [Read more...] about Google Home & Assistant Listings May Need Google Guaranteed Label

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that Google does not manually hand rank any web page. He added the web is too big for that and if they tried, it would be impossible. Here are the tweets that show this conversation: This is not anything new - Google has said this before. In fact, Google in 2011 had to discuss whitelists - does Google maybe have a whitelist to prevent specific sites from getting hit by specific negative algorithms. Back then, Google's John Mueller said no whitelists saying "generally don't have a white-list for our algorithms, but our algorithms are regularly updated." But then Matt Cutts admitted a bit later that they do have some whitelists on an algorithm by algorithm basis - although Panda and Penguin did not.Whitelists is not the same thing as hand ranking specific web pages. It just says this algorithm should not ding or promote a specific site - it is an exception to a rule. Hand ranking sites, like the old Yahoo Directory or ODP, is a hard and time … [Read more...] about Google: We Don’t Hand Rank Web Pages, It Would Be Impossible

Google's John Mueller hinted on Twitter that the URL parameter tool that was added to Google Search Console in 2009 may not be 100% ported to the new Google Search Console. He said Google may make the tool evolve versus make it a 1 to 1 switch over.When John was asked about the tool and why it hasn't been migrated over yet to the new Google Search Console, he said "I don't think it would be going away (I really like it, but I'm apparently biased :)), though it might evolve rather than get moved 1:1."Here are the tweets: So if you have reason for it to move over 1:1 - let John know on Twitter. You can learn more about this tool over here until Google drops this page when they remove the feature. :) Here is a copy of that help doc just in case.I personally am interested in how they would make it evolve for the better.Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google Search Console URL Parameters Tool May Change

For years Google has been communicating and we've been reporting that Google does not support using the noindex direction within your robots.txt file. Well, people still use it and now Gary Illyes from Google is on the case - he may end up making sure it completely doesn't work.In short, John was asked about it again and he gave the same answer he has been giving for years: So then Gary Illyes stepped in and said this may go away soon as he reviews the code behind it: Why fully remove support for this? Well, (1) Google has been telling people not to use it and (2) Gary said "Technically, robots.txt is for crawling. The meta tags are for indexing. During indexing they'd be applied at the same stage so there's no good reason to have both of them."Then people said but people use it, don't drop it. So he said he will investigate and if that is true, he will try to make a pitch to keep it: He goes on: I bet the unofficial support does go away at some point - so just don't use it!Forum … [Read more...] about Google Might Change How NoIndex In Robots.txt Works