Internet Marketing News of The Week

Google’s mobile interstitial demotion updates when page recrawled

If your site has mobile interstitials or popups on it, you will need to wait for Google to recrawl each individual page before the demotion will be removed.

You can submit individual pages or individual pages and the links in Google’s Fetch and Submit tool in Search Console, if you want to get a jump start on the recrawl.

We try to launch all our algorithms globally now: Google

Google used to launch specific algorithms in different regions. Like with Panda, when it launched, it launched in English regions only at first. Then it was pushed to other language afterwards.

Gary Illyes from Google said now, when Google launches new algorithms, they try hard to make sure it is a global launch. He said on Twitter, 'nowadays we're working hard launching everywhere at once.

Google’s algorithms can ignore rel canonical when URLs contain different content

Google’s John Mueller explained if you are canonicalizing one url to another, but the content is different on both pages, then Google’s algorithms might think you made a mistake by using rel canonical. And if that happens, then Google may simply index the url that’s being canonicalized anyway.

DuckDuckGo: 10 billion private searches & counting

Privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo] surpassed a cumulative count of 10 billion anonymous searches served, with over 4 billion in 2016!

People are actively seeking out ways to reduce their digital footprint online. For example, a Pew Research study reported '40% think that their search engine provider shouldn’t retain information about their activity.

Google's Gary Ilyes: use nofollow when linking to bad sites
Google's Gary Illyes said this morning on Twitter that it makes sense to use the nofollow link attribute when you link to bad sites.

So when linking out to bad sites, and your gut makes you feel bad about it, use the nofollow [attribute].

Google' John Mueller: don't build links from Google Sheets

Someone asked Google's John Mueller if they can use Google Sheets to build links. Basically, make a public Google Sheets page, post a ton of links on it and get Google to index the page.

Of course, John Mueller was like - why are you wasting your time with that?

the mobile first index will take some time: Google

In a Google webmaster hangout, Google’s John Mueller said that Google will release the mobile-first index later this year.

I don’t know about Q1 but it is differently not like next week where we will be switching [the mobile first index] on.

No need to change canonicals from desktop for mobile first indexing

If you are updating any canonicals, you do not need to update all desktop/mobile canonicals on your site to make the mobile version be the primary URL.

Sites do not have to make changes to their canonical links; we’ll continue to use these links as guides to serve the appropriate results to a user searching on desktop or mobile.

Google’s penalty for intrusive interstitials on mobile websites now live

Google’s John Mueller and Google’s Gary Illyes both confirmed that Google started to roll out the penalty for mobile websites that use intrusive interstitials.

The new penalty does not impact desktop searches. It seems that some websites lost 10 positions after the release of the new penalty. Some examples can be found here.

How search engines see entities and what you have to do about it: New Google Patent

Recently, Google was granted a patent with the name "Question answering using entity references in unstructured data". The patent is long and full of technical lingo but if offers some insights into how Google finds relevant information on your web pages.

What are entities?

According to the patent, an entity is "a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable. For example, an entity may be a person, place, item, idea, abstract concept, concrete element, other suitable thing, or any combination thereof." In other words, an entity is something that people search for on Google. The patent explains how Google might find information on the pages that are not organized in a pre-defined manner, i.e. regular web pages that can have any kind of layout and code design.

How do you have to adjust your web pages?

Google's algorithms try to find the connections between the different pages and the topics that they find. There are some things that you can do to make sure that Google finds the right "entities" on your pages:

• Make sure that your pages are relevant to a topic
• The structured markup code of your web site is important
• The structure of your web pages is important

The patent does not contain new information. It just confirms that Google is able to see your website as a whole and that they are able to put your website into a greater context with other websites.

Even without dedicated structured data code, your website visitors and search engines should be able to recognize the structure of your website. The easier it is to find the structure of your website, the better.