Search came a long way this past year. We saw the appearance of the zero-result SERP, featuring knowledge cards for answers such as conversions and times. We welcomed the mobile-first index and the mobile speed update. With the focus on mobile, we saw meta description lengths shorten from 300+ to 150 or so. We saw […]
What were Google’s biggest search algorithm updates of 2018? Read More »
Google updates its algorithm routinely. Its goal is to provide users with the most relevant results for their search patterns. The algorithm updates always seem to affect either a larger or smaller percentage of sites. While it may be impossible to predict a change, you can get in the habit of being aware of changes
“Could you please write a post with a clear path on just what to do to rank high in Google?” “What should I do to make sure I’ll outrank my competition?” “Could you write a clear, step-by-step to-do list on how to rank high in Google?” Although I completely understand these questions, answering them is
Google has recently updated exact match close variants; now implied words, paraphrase words and same-intent keywords are allowed to match to exact match keywords as close variants. This change gives advertisers less control over their exact match keywords and gives Google more control to appropriately match search query intent to similar keywords. For advertisers using
An updated look at Alpha-Beta in a world of close variants Read More »
It’s hard to imagine a life without a search engine that knows what it’s doing. I remember the days of AltaVista and co, search engines that just dump random pages on you for every given query. I was so excited to see Google enter the scene and immediately do everything right — the results were
Journeys, AI-driven results and visual search • Yoast Read More »
In the week of August 1st Google rolled out a “broad core algorithm update.” We know it was that because they said so on Twitter. There was quite a bit of buzz around this update. Some sites “won”, others “lost”, which is logical because, in the end, this is pretty much a zero-sum game. We’ve
Google’s Medic update, and how to deal with it • Yoast Read More »
Keyword density is the number of times your focus keyword occurs on a web page, compared to the total text of that page. If you write a post for your blog, you should have thought about what keyword you want to rank that post for. In our Yoast SEO plugin, that keyword is what we call
Last week, I wrote about Google’s decision to shorten the meta descriptions. Now, meta descriptions are about the same size as they were half a year ago. But for a couple of months, they were much longer. We got a lot of questions and quite a few people were pretty annoyed — understandably so. Is
Should I abide every decision they make? • Yoast Read More »
Perhaps you’ve read about the related entities patent which was recently granted to Google, or perhaps you haven’t yet. You should read Dave Davies post about it on Search Engine Land and find out more about it. The related entities patent gives us valuable insights into how Google identifies relationships between content. So, in this
There’s been much talk recently about Google implementing a broad core algorithm update. A couple of weeks ago, webmasters started to notice changes to their search rankings which many suspected were due to an update to Google’s core algorithm. Google subsequently confirmed this via a tweet to its Search Liaison account, manned by former Search
Google’s core algorithm update: Who benefited, who lost out, and what can we learn? Read More »
