Tag Archives: #digitalmarketing

Google has apparently disabled local reviews functionality — both for consumers and business owners. SterlingSky’s Jason Brown first flagged this issue on Friday. Joy Hawkins, also of SterlingSky, added, “Any review responses posted right now aren’t publishing live. Same thing with leaving new reviews. None of the reviews I left 5 min ago are publishing.” Google has remove the ability to reply to reviews bc Covid-19. #localseo @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/Jv6DawOzDB — Jason Brown (@keyserholiday) March 20, 2020 Appears to follow Yelp’s move. We’ve asked Google for clarification or an official comment and will update this post if one is provided or we learn more. Earlier today, Yelp announced a change in […]

Bing has launched a new portal for the indexing API and content submission API. Announced Friday, the new portal can be found at https://www.bing.com/webmasters/url-submission-api. The portal. The portal educates developers, web site owners and SEOs about these two APIs that Bing has been pushing for the past year or so. The portal provides an overview of the two APIs and their features, details on API usage, developer documentation, tips to get started, FAQs and announcements. Bing Indexing API. This is an API solution that websites can call to notify Bing whenever website content is updated or created allowing instant crawling, indexing and discovery of your site content. Bing Content Submission […]

The right-sidebar featured snippet variant of Google search results has been migrated into the main results column, a Google spokesperson has confirmed. This change is the part of Google’s featured snippet deduplication, which began on January 22. Mordy Oberstein, CMO of RankRanger, spotted the update had rolled out Thursday. Google formerly showed featured snippets in the right sidebar on desktop. The screenshot above, taken before deduplication by SEO consultant at G-Squared Interactive Glenn Gabe, shows a right-sidebar featured snippet for the query “pulp fiction brett.” The featured snippet is now shown in the mainline search results. This screenshot, taken after deduplication, shows the same featured snippet in the main results […]

Yelp is seeing a sudden and massive shift in demand among consumers engaging with local businesses on its platform, according to the company’s internal data. The coronavirus represents a kind of existential threat to a substantial number of small businesses, as more cities issue “stay at home” orders. Yelp’s relief package for bars and restaurants. Friday, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman announced a plan to help support local businesses, primarily in the restaurants and bars categories, but not exclusively. Yelp is offering the equivalent of $25 million in credits, waived fees and support, which takes the form of: Waived advertising fees Free advertising Free access to Yelp page upgrades 90 days […]

Who cares about SEO during a global pandemic? People are dying and all people want to read about is COVID-19 and what’s going on with the economy. Right? Yes, in a sense. But it’s a shame because SEO did not stop being relevant when the virus appeared. And if you’re a publisher writing about the virus (which of course should be accurate and relevant), you could be missing out on traffic (and the opportunity to help more people who are looking for information on the disease) if you’re not using the words people are when they’re looking to understand what’s going on with this pandemic. One of my friends who […]

The last couple of years have seen Google make sweeping changes to the definition of search queries which might be deemed close variants. In late 2018, Google announced that any query it deemed to have the same meaning as a keyword would now be considered an exact match close variant regardless of the actual words the query is comprised of. It then followed up on that update by expanding close variants for phrase match and broad match modifier keywords to also include same-meaning queries. This has meant a meaningful shift in the control advertisers have over the relationship between the queries driving traffic to keywords, and over time broad match […]