Google’s recent major Quality Core update rolled out on 4th May and caused more stir in the search results as compared to its last two updates.

 

As a result, some sites were rewarded for their overall quality while some faced issues such as losses for plagiarized content, pages with too much downtime, and overall lack of E.A.T. (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) Signals.

 

Most SEOs were rather surprised as they weren’t expecting an update amid the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, sites that were actually invested in improving their overall E.A.T. Signals were thrilled to be rewarded with higher rankings and more traffic.

 

Not surprisingly, we didn’t notice any major fluctuations with our client website rankings. In fact, there were quite a few websites with improvement in rankings and traffic after this update rolled out.

 

If you’d like to dig into knowing about the winners and losers, refer to this cool Google doc. Yet again, it all comes down to Quality. On that note, here are a few tips and tricks to boost your sites’ quality keeping in mind Google’s next core update that should roll out in about 3 months, if Google follows its regular timeline.

 

Boost E.A.T. Signals for Your Site Visitors & Google’s Algorithm

 

Things that will help boost your E.A.T. Signals!

 

Update your ‘About Us’ page – Rewrite your ‘About Us’ page while keeping in mind what your customers want. Highlight about your business, your experience and what makes you stand apart from the competitors. Mention if you are a family-owned business. If you hold any awards or recognitions, make them a part of this page. Lastly, add high-quality, fresh images.

 

Improve your website’s downtime – Work on your website’s page load speed, specifically your mobile page load speed. See to it that all the videos and images on your website load fast.

 

Run your site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. The first few pages on your site with major content should ideally open within 3-5 seconds. Speed Index should be less than 9 seconds with ads and 7 seconds without ads. Consider limiting the number of ads or eliminating them altogether if they are the reason behind your page load time.

 

Add ‘Terms of Service’ and ‘Privacy Policy’ pages – These pages give a good impression about your site’s overall authority profile with Google. For more on what these pages should include, you can refer to Google’s quality rater guidelines.

 

Include sources of reference for all medical/scientific claims – If your website contains any medical, statistical or factual claims, ensure to link them with relevant data sources. If your users and Google get to see proof of the claims that you have made on your website, it creates a huge signal of trust.

 

Build up your footer – Typical business information, such as contact details, are often found on the bottom of your site. So be sure it’s there with a current copyright date. As per Google, the address in the footer is recommended and, again, acts as a sign of trust. To show your expertise, you can also add your awards and accolades here.

 

 

Also, if you have been featured on any popular media platforms, always put that in! And add it to your ‘About Us’ page as well.

 

 

Include a clear ad disclosure – Give a clear ad disclosure if you are running a lot of ads on your website. A sentence or two, such as “This post may contain affiliate links”, should be enough with a link to your disclosure/privacy policy. You also want to remember to rel=”sponsored” your affiliate links as best practice.

 

Leverage article markup – Using article structured data markup that includes the “dateModified” attribute is highly recommended. Google knows that your content has been recently updated through article schema. Add a small note with the date the content was updated. This will cover both site users as well as Google’s A.I.

 

Make sure to link to your author’s page within your article markup so as to enable Google to tie together the content with the expert who wrote it.

 

Fix site errors – If your site has any technical issues that are holding it back, make sure to remove them. These issues may include broken links, duplicate meta descriptions, chain redirects, broken images, etc.

 

Have a visible call to action – Your call to action should be the first thing that you want your site visitor to do. It should be visible as they land each of your pages. It should be short and precise. If you want them to give you a call then say it! – Call Now!

 

Be easy to navigate – Looking at your site from the user’s perspective on both mobile and desktop is vital. Perform a ‘user experience’ (UX) audit, which can pay huge dividends, considering how heavily focused Google is on their version of ‘user experience’.

 

Remove and rewrite thin content – In this case, you should combine a handful of thin pages and create a solid resource of a particular topic. After that, you should redirect all those URLs to that single page. You can hear it in the recent Google hangout video.

 

Verify duplicate content – Check if the content on your website hasn’t been used elsewhere. With third party tools like CopyScape, you can quickly find and resolve duplicate content issues.

 

Refer to Google’s Quality Questionnaire – Google’s August 2019 blog post outlines a big list of questions that you can ask yourself and find out the areas of weakness on your site.

 

Get high-quality user-generated content – Creating user-generated content is important  to encourage reviews for the products that you are selling. Have a Q&A feedback section for big resource articles or prompt positive user comments on your top pages. Not all sites can pull this off, but if you can, nothing like it for your page’s authority.

 

Read Google’s quality guidelines – Take the time out to go through Google’s Quality Guidelines. This all-in-one document is sure to refine your results.

 

After you are done with all the above tricks, make sure to have a read through what Google’s John Mueller said in his recent Google Webmaster Hangout on ways to recover from the most recent update.

 

Again, if you’re affected by the latest update, we can help. Just give us a call and our search experts will be able to assist you right away.

 

 

 

 

 

Google recently announced a new initiative known as “Web Vitals”. This initiative has been created to help websites know and improve their important user experience metrics. If this comes off as fairly new to you, we suggest you to first read that update.

 

 

 

 

With just a few weeks of sharing the news, the search engine giant released yet another information-packed announcement explaining users about how they would be incorporating these user experience metrics into the upcoming algorithm update, planned to be out in 2021, and their factor on the page level.

 

Read how Google plans to calculate these user experience metrics factors in the future:

 

“We’re combining the signals derived from Core Web Vitals with our existing Search signals for page experience, including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of page experience. Because we continue to work on identifying and measuring aspects of page experience, we plan to incorporate more page experience signals on a yearly basis to both further align with evolving user expectations and increase the aspects of user experience that we can measure.”

 

Google also has its focus on making sure websites do not have features that annoy users. Here is an example of how certain referenced buttons shift and lead to accidental clicks:

 

AMP will no longer be a ‘Top Stories’ requirement

 

Google also revealed that user experience will become such an essential factor that the ‘Top Stories’ carousel will not be limited to just AMP Pages. Rather, there will be more attention on pages with great experience metrics as explained in the Web Vitals Initiative:

 

“As part of this update, we’ll also incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility. Google continues to support AMP and will continue to link to AMP pages when available. We’ve also updated our developer tools to help site owners optimize their page experience.”

 

Actionable strategy

Several studies have proved that better user experience can boost your conversions as well as overall rankings. So get ready to welcome the new update that will revolutionize ranking factors for websites.

 

As always, if you are looking to revamp your website as per the latest and upcoming Google guidelines, you can get in touch with us for assistance.

 

 

 

The pandemic has led to some major shifts in consumer needs and the way one conducts business, and Google is trying to do its best to accommodate these changes.

 

In an effort to make it as easy for businesses as possible to adjust to the shifting needs, Google has launched several new GMB features and attributes.

 

What are these new features & attributes?

 

Here’s a list of some of the latest GMB features and attributes that have been introduced by Google during the COVID-19 situation:

 

• Online Classes
• Online Appointments
• Online Estimates
• Online Service Bookings
• Temporarily Closed
• Secondary Hours
• COVID-19 Posts
• Curbside Pickup
• No Contact Delivery
• Dine-In
• Support Links

 

What you should do next

 

It is recommended that you immediately login and check your Google My Business listing to see whether all of these new features and attributes are available for your industry.

 

If you need any assistance with this, do get in touch.

 

 

In an effort to expand its e-commerce capabilities, Facebook rolled out Facebook Shops to enable businesses to set shop on Facebook. Going a step further, this summer, they’re planning on introducing Instagram Shop for businesses in the US. This move is being introduced as “a new way to discover and buy products you love in Instagram Explore.”

 

Both, Facebook Shops and Instagram Shop services are meant to enable businesses of all sizes to set up online stores through their Facebook and Instagram accounts.

 

The Idea Behind This Move

 

As per Facebook’s announcement, Facebook Shops is designed to make it easy for sellers to set up a single online store that can be accessed by users on Facebook as well as Instagram. Businesses can choose the products they want to feature and can also customize the look of their online store with a cover image and accent colors.

 

In their own words,

 

“People can find Facebook Shops on a business’ Facebook Page or Instagram profile, or discover them through stories or ads. From there, you can browse the full collection, save products you’re interested in and place an order — either on the business’ website or without leaving the app if the business has enabled checkout in the US.”

 

 

 

 

If and when the customers wish to connect with the businesses to ask questions, get support, track orders, etc., they can do so through WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct messages. This service is designed to be a mobile-first experience, for both sellers and buyers, and is free to use.

 

Final Takeaway

 

During these times, when a strong digital presence is considered a means of survival for almost all businesses, this service is certainly a new avenue worth exploring. If you are into e-commerce and your business has a Facebook page or an Instagram account, then you should definitely try setting up your store on these platforms!

 

Need help in setting up your store? Get in touch with us for assistance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Serious signs of competition between Amazon and Google were first witnessed when the Popular Products feature within Organic Search was rolled out by Google. It enabled retailers to leverage Google’s Merchant Feed and product schemes to get their products highlighted in Organic Search. All the participating retailers got to appear in this feature for free.

 

Google announced this year that due to the financial strain caused by COVID-19, they have sped up their timeline and are now offering businesses free of charge inclusion into Google Shopping that was initially available in the US as of May 1st, later followed by other countries.

 

“Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google. With hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google each day, we know that many retailers have the items people need in stock and ready to ship, but are less discoverable online.

 

For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab. For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings. If you’re an existing user of Merchant Center and Shopping ads, you don’t have to do anything to take advantage of the free listings, and for new users of Merchant Center, we’ll continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months.”

 

The Google Shopping results will appear to be quite similar to that of organic results, including Paid results at the top/bottom and Organic results in the middle.

 

Those new to the Merchant Center should know that creating an account will let them feed product details and information directly to Google. You do not have to wait for it to get picked up from your product schema. Additionally, there are a ton of other useful features.

 

Google also announced building ties with various other platforms to further simplify processing sales.

 

“We’re also kicking off a new partnership with PayPal to allow merchants to link their accounts. This will speed up our onboarding process and ensure we’re surfacing the highest quality results for our users. And we’re continuing to work closely with many of our existing partners that help merchants manage their products and inventory, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, to make digital commerce more accessible for businesses of all sizes.”

 

Action Plan – With this permanent change, the opportunity is here to stay. But if you are selling products online, you should definitely make it a point to get started with this as soon as possible. All you will require is a Google Merchant Center account and will have to opt into surfaces across Google in order to show up in the Organic Google Shopping results.

 

Know that product markup will help Google understand your products well for features like Popular Products. So get it done as well.

 

For further guidance, use Google’s Help center page or get in touch with us to get your products listed on Google!

 

 

Google My Business (GMB) has become one of the most significant aspects for local SEOs as well as the one-stop-shop for consumers to know about store hours, closures, services offered, and other relevant information.

 

Shifting Engagement on GMB: Consumer engagement has changed considerably during the pandemic, as shown by the click and call data. With this, online buying behavior has also been impacted.

 

For example, the search query “takeout near me” has spiked way up as compared to those for “restaurant reservations” since at-home orders came into force.

 

 

Directions, Clicks, Calls, and Reviews: Although requests for directions have come down considerably since the COVID-19 outbreak, there hasn’t been much of an effect on calls and website visits driven by GMB. According to new data from Reputation.com, “GMB driving-direction clicks are down 60% across all verticals.” Website clicks and calls have decreased by 31% & 21%, respectivel

 

When it comes to GMB, Reputation.com reports a notable decline in retail, restaurant, and automotive industry but also a modest recovery in consumer engagement. This could very well be the catalyst in online shopping and e-commerce spending driven by stimulus checks and by the thought that we’re almost at the end of the lockdown period.44

 

Being hit by the pandemic, Google had stopped publishing new comments from users & replies from business owners until now. Reviews are making their way back in, and it will be interesting to see if and how the patterns have changed amid the lockdown.

 

 

Post-COVID, GMB will continue to be a local business lifeline: As businesses reopen, local marketers can once again turn to GMB for operating hours, products, and service availability. GMB could emerge more powerful than ever post COVID-19 with local features such as posts that allow businesses to communicate seamlessly have a high chance of gaining wider adoption and prominence, with Google possibly accelerating the rollout of other tools in the pipeline.

 

According to a survey by BrightLocal, 68% of local marketing experts said GMB was more crucial at this time than it was a year ago. Even Moz’s recent Local Ranking Factors study concluded that the top-ranking factor for Google Local Pack and #4 for local SEO is GMB signals. Another survey by BrightLocal concluded that 87% of local marketers considered growing reviews to be the most important to local marketing success.

 

 

 

Not to forget the fake reviews problem faced by Google, fighting spam (fake listings, illegitimate reviews) on Google was #2 to local marketing success.

 

Why It Matters: Get ready to experience a huge evolution of GMB. Local search will be redefined and will not be limited to using tools and information to make purchase decisions offline. GMB is no longer just a way to get content to Google but rather a dynamic channel streamlining transactions between consumers and business owners.

 

There will be a much tighter integration of digital tools such as inventory, booking, ordering, and payments with offline fulfillment post-COVID. TheOrderingApp.com and Pointy are examples of how Google is trying to bridge the gap between digital and offline operations while being a trusted, back-office-like platform for local businesses.

 

 

 

The COVID-19 outbreak has forced people world over to stay home and this has made all kinds of businesses realize that their websites just became 10 times more important. During this time, upgrading your business’s digital presence is more vital than ever before.

 

The smallest of changes can yield big results. Keeping this in mind, we bring to you a list of some pretty solid ideas to take your digital presence up a notch.

 

• Look for ways to improve your website’s loading speed.
• Identify the most frequently visited pages on your website and see if you can improve the content, add videos, etc. to help with conversion.
• Create and upload explanation videos for your products and/or services.
• Upload useful blogs on a regular basis.
• Add more visually attractive elements to your website such as infographics.
• If possible, project case studies that will help users to better understand your products and/or services.
• Try and see if you can create a converting landing page for your products and/or services.
• Convert all your PDF forms to digital and if possible, add signature service as well.
• See if you can add a Review widget to your website.
• Consider going the eCommerce way.
• Shipping automation can be of great help.
• Take measures to strengthen website security.
• Backup your website.
• Ensure all the website/plugins issues, that have been on the backburner so far, are resolved immediately.
• Integrate all your current systems, including CRM, ERP, Forms, Shipping, etc.
• Update the Careers page on your website, and if you still don’t have one, add it!
• Come up with a contest for your users or offer giveaways.
• If possible, add a giveaway pop-up or email form.
• Add detailed, searchable FAQ to your website.
• If you have a WordPress website, it better be on a managed platform.
• Look into WordPress site speed optimization.

 

Final Takeaway

This is the perfect time for you to go for all the digital upgrades that have been taking a backseat because you were so busy with other aspects of your business. In order to ensure your business survives the pandemic, update your digital presence to make your business as approachable for the users as possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, there are uncalled times. As the global economy reels from the impact of COVID-19, many SMB’s are forced to ask tough questions and make tough decisions concerning the future of their business.

 

Yes, businesses are going to struggle for a while amid the COVID-19 crisis. But the reality is – businesses can thrive in downtimes. And many of the successful ones will choose to invest in online marketing.

 

From our experience of two major crashes (the 2000 dotcom crash and the 2008 real estate crash), we can tell you that the best time to double down is when others are not.

 

As Warren Buffet once famously quoted – “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”

 

With more people working from home, consumers are relying on the Internet more than ever. In fact, even during a quarantine, people rely on Google search to look for services and products. This means businesses will still require digital marketing to keep up with the demand.

 

All we can say is – Now is the time for social distancing, not forgetting about digital marketing.

 

In fact, during this outbreak, companies like Google and Facebook are offering millions in Ad Credits to keep businesses afloat. Google has offered USD 340M in ad credits (a part of a larger USD 800M+ commitment). On the other hand, Facebook has promised USD 100M in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible small businesses. You should try and see if you qualify for this and can utilize these great offers. Not just big companies but even small businesses are offering great deals and offers to help their clients tide over this crisis. Think of potential ideas/offers for your clients. Also, renegotiate with all your vendors to see how they can help you in these troubled times.

 

Eventually, COVID-19 will end and things will normalize. The US may have a few weeks left to ride out before the Coronavirus is no longer a threat. Once life returns to normal, the need for law firms, doctors, home services, and other businesses will fully resume. Others like restaurants will have to adapt to more online orders via website or food delivery apps.

 

The demand for essential goods and food has also skyrocketed and businesses like Walmart, Instacart, Amazon, Dominos, and others are hiring like crazy (more than 300K people) to keep up.

 

The key here is not to press the panic button now and make a knee-jerk decision that might hurt your business. One such rash decision could be to halt your digital marketing efforts.

 

We know investing in digital marketing could be intimidating during this time. But, by continuing your marketing efforts now, you are more likely to have an established presence when this uncertainty comes to end. Thus, your return on investment will be bigger by acting now.

 

 

 

 

Businesses of all kinds have taken a toll during the unprecedented COVID-19 situation across the globe. As countries get into lockdown and maintain social distancing to control the spread of the virus, the effects have started to show on Google too! Therefore, a new set of guidelines were introduced for how Google My Business’ Support Team would work during these hard times.

 

Following are the changes announced:

 

Google has taken steps to ensure the health and safety of its team during COVID-19 by reducing the need of people in their office:

 

• Temporary limitations on Google My Business.
• Critical services will be prioritized and could lead to a delay in customer support.

 

Google is currently focused on providing quality, reliable, and relevant information on Google Search and Maps. The company is dedicated to providing users the ease of access to communicate with businesses to know about vital features such as operating hours, special hours, and more. During such testing times, learn the best practices for affected business and what you can do to keep your customers updated at all times.

 

The temporary product changes made by Google are:

 

1. Business Information edits

High priority will be on reviews for edits critical to health-related businesses. Also, reviews will be prioritized for open & closed states, special hours, temporary closure, business description, and business attributes edits for other verified businesses.

 

2. New Listings, Claims, and Verifications

All new listings, claims, and verifications will be manually reviewed by our support team for critical health-related businesses. Due to the priority given to such critical services, there will be a delay in publishing new listings, claims, and verifications on Google Search and Maps for other businesses.

 

3. Reviews and Q&A

New reviews, replies, and Q&A will not be available during this time.

 

Note: You can now mark your business as “temporarily closed” – a new addition to their system that is being used widely all over the world. Google has also stated that moving your status to temporarily closed will not have any negative impact on your listing.

 

Our Take:

The world is going through testing times right now, and Google has done a great job with their temporary changes as they restrict users from leaving negative reviews due to closure, cancellations, etc.

 

In fact, businesses can ask customers to leave reviews directly, making it easy to grow their in-house reviews that can later be marked up with Structured Data.

 

 

 

 

During these unprecedented times, Google is benevolently offering support to the SMB community nationwide in response to COVID-19. Being a Google Partner, we are happy to inform you that Google is committing over $800 Million in Ads Grant money to help alleviate some of the cost for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to stay in touch with their customers during this challenging time.

 

The $800+ Million in Google Ads Grants includes:

 

• $340 million in Google Ads credits to ALL small and mid-sized businesses with active accounts since Jan 2019. These credits can be used until the end of 2020.
• $250 million in ad grants for the World Health Organization (WHO) & hundreds of government agencies.
• $200 million in support for NGOs and financial institutions that are needed to provide access to capital for small businesses.
• $15 million in cash grants for Non-Profit Organizations from Google.org
• $20 million in Google Cloud credits for academic institutions and researchers
• Additional direct financial support for manufacturers of products and services that are critical to the nation during this time.

 

We’re here to help our partners, businesses, and health organizations secure these Google Grants to ensure your operations stay up and running at this time.

 

Do not miss out on this opportunity!

 

Reach out to our team to understand how you can avail these Ads credits, or if we can assist your business during this crisis.

 

 

 

 

 

The COVID-19 outbreak has severely impacted the global economy, including small businesses. Considering this, Facebook has promised to reward $100 million in cash grants to 30,000 businesses across the world.

 

“Facebook is offering $100M in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible small businesses in over 30 countries where we operate. We’ll share more details as they become available.”

 

How to apply?

 

For more information on the grants process and/or to fill in the application visit this page, scroll down and click the ‘Sign up for updates’ button.

 

You can also check out some amazing tools and checklists that your business could leverage at the new Facebook COVID-19 resource hub.

 

Here’s a resilience toolkit with the best practices, tools and a self-assessment to help protect your business from interruptions. And a quick action guide to help minimize downtime and develop plans for emergency response.

 

Also, communicating with customers may be disruptive in this situation. Using these customer service resources you can learn how to quickly provide your customers with relevant support.

 

 

In an effort to extend support to the local businesses that are most impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak, specifically the independent restaurants and nightlife industry-related businesses, Yelp has announced a special ‘Relief Program’. On 20th March 2020, Yelp declared that they will be offering affected local businesses $25M worth of free services.

 

How the Relief Program will help

 

Since independent local restaurants and nightlife businesses are the ones who’ve been most affected by the coronavirus outbreak, Yelp will support them by waiving advertising fees and offering free advertising, products and services.

 

Restaurants and nightlife businesses that remain open during this time will receive free access to Yelp page upgrades. The idea is to allow these businesses to quickly and effectively communicate important information to their customers through Business Highlights, Call to Action and Connect. It has also been decided that the restaurants will be given free access to Yelp Reservations and Waitlist for 3 months.

 

$100 in free search advertising will be provided to restaurant clients that offer delivery and/or take out services. Yelp will also be extending support to local independent advertisers in other categories, who are currently finding it difficult to pay their bills.

 

What you need to do

 

The best part about this is that the relief program is not just limited to businesses with an active Yelp advertising account. If your business falls in any of the above categories, the best thing for you to do is to check out the specifications of this program and see whether you are eligible.

 

Even if your business is not a part of the above-mentioned industries but you still think that Yelp can help you out in some way, then we recommend you reach out to them with your ideas. Since it’s quite clear that Yelp wants to help the businesses that have been impacted by COVID-19, they may be receptive to your ideas.

 

 

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Google is issuing notices, through Google Search Console, to sites with mobile-first indexing issues. Google communicates issues it faces while moving the sites over to mobile-first indexing through emails. These emails also say, “Google expects to apply mobile-first indexing to all websites in the next six to twelve months.” Have a look at the screenshot that says, “mobile-first indexing issues detected.”

 

 

Image Source: https://search.google.com/search-console/

 

In a recent announcement, Google has now confirmed that it will completely switch over to mobile-first indexing for all websites by September this year.

 

Mobile-first indexing was first introduced by Google in November 2016 and by December 2018, half of the sites in Google’s search results were from mobile-first indexing. It means that Google crawls websites from the eyes of a mobile-browser and uses that mobile version indexing and ranking.

 

The prime reason why Google sends these emails to sites that are not yet moved to mobile-first indexing is to advise them on what needs to be done in order to become mobile-first indexing ready.

 

Our take on this:

When you receive any such notice, you should read it and take needed action. Failing to do so might impact the indexing and ranking of your web pages in Google. As always, if you need any assistance with making your website mobile-ready, we are ready to help!

 

 

 

 

There was some discussion on Twitter last month about an update in the Help Center that suggested that the description field in Google My Business played a part in helping you rank better.

 

We tested it ourselves and found that the description field has ZERO impact on your ranking in the 3-Pack. And this is how it should be; because if Google makes ranking a cakewalk, the results would be nothing short of mediocre, and that would be bad for both Google and its users.

 

The document said the following:

 

 

 

Image Source: https://searchengineland.com/google-use-relevant-keywords-in-your-google-my-business-description-329112

 

We got in touch with Google to bring misleading information to light, and a day later, the part at the top was removed. The removed excerpt was:

 

“Think about the words customers would type to find your business, and make sure that your listing actually includes those keywords within it.”

 

 

 

Our take on this:

 

Although the information is still unclear and misleading, we are sure Google will keep updating to give a clear understanding that using a ton of keywords is not the way to improve rankings.

 

 

 

 

What is Scraped Content?

Scraped Content is the content that is copied from other places on the web and pasted on a particular website as if it belongs to the site owner. For well over 15 years, scraping has been predominantly active.

 

Heart of the Matter

Recently, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst – John Mueller said on Twitter that he wouldn’t lose sleep over people scraping copyrighted content. He wrote, “there’s a lot of scraped content out there which has minimal visibility, it’s not always worth losing sleep over it.”

 

John tweeted the following:

 

 

Our Observation:

Many times when websites publish their articles, it is scraped almost within seconds. Such scraping is automated scraping, the rest use it for articles and newsletters, days later. Scrapping happens, and it is normal. People do copy and paste.

 

Back in 2011, Matt Cutts shared a video on Stolen Content Outranking You. Later in 2013, we understood that if you get penalized, then it is possible that Google may rank the stolen content above your original work.

 

 

 

 

 

Bing Webmaster Tools, which were often reported to be slow and outdated, just got a serious upgrade. The new and improved Bing Webmaster Tools portal, which was earlier released to a select group of users, was set to be made accessible to all users by the first week of March 2020.

 

The Idea Behind This New Development

According to Bing’s blog post, the backend datastore has been updated to improve data extraction and the user experience has been redesigned in an effort to make it more intuitive and user-friendly. Moreover, it states that the portal’s responsive design offers users the flexibility to access it across devices.

 

 

 

 

Image Source: https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/february-2020/Announcing-the-new-Bing-Webmaster-Tools

 

 

In their words, “The refreshed portal is being built with key principles of keeping the design Cleaner and Responsive with Faster and more Accessible tools.”

 

Key Features of the Upgraded Webmaster Tools Portal

 

The new portal is said to have 3 key features:

 

1. Backlinks – The new Backlinks report that features in the refreshed portal is the Inbound Links report integrated with the Disavow links tool.

 

2. Search Performance – Page Traffic and Search Keywords reports have integrated to become the new Search Performance report.

 

3. Sitemaps – The new Sitemaps page is the refreshed version of the previous Sitemaps page.

 

 

Final Takeaway

Now would be the best time to get familiar with the new portal. It is being said that it will only be a few weeks before they start deprecating the functionality from the old portal. Users that use webmaster APIs to get data programmatically, can continue doing so as the Webmaster APIs will remain as-is.

 

Bing invites users to leave their feedback on Twitter and Facebook, and raise a service ticket with their support team, in case they encounter any issues with the new portal.