Today In SEO & Search News: May 5, 2017

Today In SEO & Search News: May 5, 2017

Welcome to today’s update on the top stories in search and SEO.  Here’s what’s been going on. Full disclosure … the first two are articles that I wrote and got published since our last update over on Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land. So let’s begin …

10 ‘Hidden’ Ranking Facts, 1 Is A Lie
10 'Hidden' Ranking Facts, 1 Is A Lie

After gathering my luggage I had to jump on the bandwagon. In my article for Search Engine Journal I outline 10 lesser known ranking facts that I’ve seen in action and have backing – except that one is a lie. The game is obviously to guess which one isn’t true before reading the answer.  And hopefully you learn a few things on the way. 🙂

3 Logical Myths About Rankings That Can Destroy A Business
3 logical myths about rankings that can destroy a business

For my article on Search Engine Land I was inspired by a question I was asked by a prospective client that was based on a perfectly logical assumption that unfortunately could be disastrous is pursued blindly. So I added to that a couple other assumptions I’ve seen cause serious problems for business owners in hopes of saving them from themselves.

Bing Explains Their Homepage Images
Get the Story Behind the Bing Homepage Image

For those of you who use Bing … hello … hello?  OK … if you’ve ever bought a new PC and had Edge as the default engine with Bing as the default search provider until you installed Chrome and set the default to Google you might have noticed the images they use for their homepage.  Now if you scroll down from the page you’ll get the story behind the image. A neat little twist and a pretty good idea.

Facebook Adds Reactions To Comments
Facebook comments now have Reactions

Karissa Bell covered the rollout of reactions to Facebook comments and not just posts for Mashable. Facebook has revealed in the past how they use reactions which was also covered unsurprisingly by Karissa.  Whether useful to users or not the data is incredibly useful to Facebook, enabling them to understand more about your feelings towards specific ideas and even specific individuals to further tailor what you see and how you’re advertised to.

Authority Of Web Pages & ‘Not Secure’ Chrome Warnings
Jim Hedger and I discussed how authority is assigned to and passes between web pages, the rollout of more warnings on Chrome for non-HTTPS sites and a lot more on this week’s episode of Webcology. Here’s the episode:

Google Taking On Yelp
Google shortcuts use personalization and rich content to build next-gen local discovery tool

Greg Sterling wrote an excellent evaluation of Google’s new Local Discovery feature and shortcuts over on Search Engine Land. He describes the power of the system and how it sets up Google to take on companies like Yelp. The results are personalized to you, far richer than standard results and while he points out there are any usage stats available yet if Google can gain traction among users and get their reviews on Google instead of Yelp this could be very powerful indeed. As we saw in the last update – Google is adjusting their reviews to personalize them as well and give them context so this is clearly a battleground area for them.

7 Title Tag Hacks
Cyrus Shepard of Moz did a great Whiteboard Friday on title tags and how to use them to increase rankings and (more importantly) traffic.  He covers a lot of the common areas (title tag length, using number and dates in titles, etc) but it’s a great reminder of some handy tricks and even a couple approaches you might not have used yet.  Without further ado … here it is:

Google Maps About To Get More Useful
As reported by Mobile Syrup Google Street View cars will now be able to extract address and business information from images around them (such as street and business signs).  It’s not perfect yet and some businesses require multiple passes but they’re on their way to mapping businesses that might not be listed in other sources.

And that’s all we have for now.  If you think we missed anything please feel free to add it in the comments below.