google 

Google’s exact match close variants expand again: Now include same meaning variations

Exclusive: The latest machine learning-powered update to close variants means exact match will match to the intent of the query. Google’s exact match keyword targeting used to mean one thing: the keyword had to match exactly whatever query the searcher used. Then close variants came into the mix, and that definition has steadily morphed over the past few years. First including plurals, misspellings and other similar variants came in 2014 and then different word order and function words took hold in 2017. Now phase three is here. On Thursday, Google…

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Google speeds up some searches by 2x with use of Service Worker and Chrome for Android

VentureBeat reports Google is now speeding up some search queries by two-times by using Service Workers, a script that your browser runs in the background. Google said this currently only works on Chrome for Android running version 62 or up. Dion Almaer, Google director of engineering, and Ben Galbraith, Google senior director of product said last week at Pluralsight Live in Salt Lake City, Utah that this was the “largest deployment of Service Worker probably out.” They were able to get Service Worker to “give you results sometimes twice as fast”…

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Google Medic Update: What You Can Do To Fix Your Rankings

I know Google has said that with the Google Medic Update that started around August 1st that there is “no fix.” Google just wants you to make your site better and over time, you might be rewarded. But SEOs and those impacted in a negative way want to know what they can do to recover. While I personally cannot say you need to remove bad links or improve your on page SEO, I decided to run the survey data through a toolset named Cora that has a reputation of going…

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Google Medic Update Complete But We Are Seeing New Search Fluctuations

Google has confirmed that the Google core algorithm update that we named the Medic Update is now fully rolled out. But the SEO community noticed a lot of fluctuations and ranking changes yesterday as well. Danny Sullivan confirmed on Twitter for me that the update is complete, despite the industry noticing a lot of fluctuations in the Google search results yesterday. Danny said the broad August 1st algorithm update is done but “that said, we always have changes that happen, both broad and more specific.” There was indeed significant chatter…

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New Google Search Console Finally Gets Link Report

Google has announced that the new beta Google Search Console is now getting the link report. Google said they are moving the Links to your site and Internal Links report from the old interface into the new Google Search Console under a single Links report. I do not see it rolled out yet but it should be live soon, Google says. You will be able to access the link report, as I covered at Search Engine Land, over at https://search.google.com/search-console/links when it is rolled out – but that might take…

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Google marks 14 years as a public company

Today the search giant ranks as the world’s third most valuable company. Despite concerns that going public might endanger Google’s famously quirky but intensely focused culture, the company’s initial public offering (IPO) went forward on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share, valuing the company at more than $23 billion. Fourteen years later, Google parent company Alphabet’s market cap is just over $766 billion, behind only Apple ($927 billion) and Amazon ($778 billion). The company was just five years old at the…

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Google Add Google Posts In Local Knowledge Panel

If you are logged into your Google My Business account and do a search for your business, you may see a call to action from Google to add Google Posts to your Google local knowledge panel. Here is a screen shot from my business where Google is saying “add a post, tell customers about a special event, deal or product.” This is only visible to me, because I have rights to add posts to my Google My Business listing. Here is a screen shot: I am not sure if this…

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Google’s Aug. 1 core algorithm update: Who did it impact, and how much?

Google would not tell us how much of the search results were impacted by this update, as Google has done in the past with Panda, Penguin and others: Finally, we know the update has been fully rolled out and is done as of sometime yesterday or earlier. Who was impacted by this update As we explained above, Google said this is a “global” update, which implies every niche and every type of site could have been impacted. But based on the data that I’ve been seeing from surveys, multiple data…

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Google to yank advertisers’ option to exclude all mobile apps from display campaigns

It will not be possible to use adsenseformobileapps.com or other controls to keep mobile Display ads from showing on all apps, including interstitial ads. This article has been significantly updated to reflect changes that will be clarified in the Google Ads help center. When Google Ads (formerly AdWords) uses the word “simplify,” waves of concern ripple through the paid search community that the opposite will be true, controls will be lost and campaign performance will be affected negatively. The latest torment is coming from Google’s move to “simplify” targeting controls…

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Report: Google mobile speed update has no impact on general mobile rankings

The Google Speed update, which began rolling out on July 9, has reportedly so far had almost no impact on downgrading the ranking of mobile pages in the Google mobile search results in general. The SEO PowerSuite folks looked at about 33,500 keywords, 1 million pages of search results and the positions from one to number 30 before and after the update and have come to the conclusion that there was no change in ranking, even for many slow pages, a week after the Speed Update was released. They ran the…

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