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The COVID crisis has lasted six months and a week and maybe more and Jim says he’s starting to lose it as both his and Dave’s regions enter a distinct second wave of the virus. The conversation strays around the news of the week with a constant loop back to planning for a future with fewer in person gatherings and retail opportunities. Going into a new growth phase of the disease is frightening but at least planning for and communicating about online businesses is getting easier.

Google introduces new schema mark-up language allowing online retailers to provide shipping information. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-shipping-details-schema-30156.html

Barry Schwartz and Martin Splitt exchange interviews for their respective VLOGs late last year. The collaborative interviews revealed a lot about how Googlers feel about SEOs as persons and as practitioners. Dave and Jim talk about some of the SEO Myths Martin addresses in the interviews. https://www.seroundtable.com/vlog-086-30105.html

Microsoft leaked about 5.6Billion terabyes of search data after leaving a server open and unprotected from September 10 - 16. https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/23/microsoft_leaks_over_65tb_bing/

Did Google drop hints it is compiling authority profiles? A post by Danny Sullivan appears to suggest it does. There’s a lot of conversation about it in the SEO community. https://searchengineland.com/did-google-just-hint-at-an-authority-profile-340815

LinkedIn is pulling a professional Facebook with a redesign. Jim and Dave wish it luck, hope it doesn’t suck, and genuinely hope it remains a place businesses can talk to and research each other while other people can use it for employment spam as long as it doesn’t actually become Facebook.

Lastly, Google alters text in guidence to confirm good reviews bring good rankings. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-how-reviews-impact-local-rankings-change-30158.html

Be good, don’t touch your face, for goodness sake wear a mask, stop the spread, wash your hands, be kind to each other, rank well, we’ll talk with you next week.

It’s about six months even in the ongoing COVID crisis and we’re starting to see numbers crawl upwards in central and western Canada again. Transmission appears out of control in the United States though some states appear to have a handle on it.


It was a busy week in search with a lot of items to cover.


Google has shown such volatility various forecasting tools are constantly suggesting a Google Update is underway. Jim and Dave talk about the idea this is just the way Google is supposed to operate after a major update takes place. Jim is of the opinion Google is sorting things out as its engineers make a larger number of tweeks to the algorithms than they normally do as affects of the previous core-updates are understood. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-volatility-continues-30128.html


A few housekeeping news items

Affiliate links are mostly treated as nofollows https://www.seroundtable.com/google-affiliate-links-nofollow-links-30124.html

Manual penalties have long term consequences. Don’t expect to clean your way back into Google’s good graces quickly if your history says you’re likely to mess about again. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-expect-same-rankings-after-manual-action-recovery/380948/

Webmasters should view Core Vitals as reported in Google Search Console as low hanging fruit in their bids to build better and more useful websites. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-speed-is-complex-to-measure-30123.html

The Crawl Anomaly report in Google Search Console’s Page Performance metrics will be replaced by something that might actually be useful for webmasters. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-remove-crawl-anomaly-data-30117.html


Winston Burton has written what Dave refers to as “the best primer on machine learning” at Search Engine Journal. It’s on the SEO Required Reading list. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/machine-learning-seo/208415/


Lastly, Adam Reimer has written a document on how to deal with temperamental SEOs on your staff. We love Adam but we also love being that temperamental SEO. It’s a good piece but... side-eye or something. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/work-with-seo-guru/373894/

Google says a lot of things. Sometimes the search engine’s spokespersons are incredibly transparent and sometimes they’re bizarrely opaque. Sometimes they contradict each other and sometimes the effects of technologies being innovated on the far side of the Googleplex aren’t as well known by their spokespersons around the world. Today Jim and Dave discuss a number of things Google’s said in the last week that directly contradict things they told webmasters previously, focusing on core-update recoveries and the importance of core web vitals as potential or future ranking signals. We also talk about a terrible case of negative SEO, the Change.org petition for Google to restore hidden search term data for SEMs, and congratulate John Mueller for being named Search Personality of the Year. We also noted the panel hosted by Ginny Marvin, “The SEO Gender Gap and How to Close It”, being held online, Sept. 11, 2020.

It's been about six weeks since Jeff published a Search Engine Journal article (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/math-decode-google-algorithms/374391/) questioning the methods, conclusions, and qualifications of many SEO studies that try to decode Google's algorithms.


Jeff Ferguson, partner at Amplitude Digital, joins Jim and Dave to talk about the statistical science, or lack thereof, behind some of what many might consider foundational studies in the SEO industry.

A general show about SEO and Google news. Dave and Jim talk about Google’s upcoming open virtual conference, announcements Google reps made during the week, the difference in importance between content and links, and weirdness with the newest version of WordPress.

Jim and Dave walk through the weekly news touching on many of the things affecting the search engine world this week. We spend a lot of time talking about how search engines now render pages based on an article Dave wrote in Search Engine Journal with input from a few notable Googlites. We also cover a vulnerability in DIVI WordPress Themes, TikTok as a Greased Up Punching Bag, how four-letter comments can hurt your blog, and how non-ranking factors can cause tiny algorithm adjustments that could affect a website’s placements.