437 | News from the EDGE | Week of 7.26.2021

[00:06:00] Google News and Discover Abuses Targeted by New Manual Actions When a site is reviewed by humans for alignment with Google's webmaster guidelines, a manual action might be the result for violations, and there's a whole new set of those manual actions. By Barry Schwartz [00:11:02] No Difference by Site Type in Google Core Web Vitals When Google provides a Core Web Vitals score for a site, it does not differ according to the type of site, although Google's John Mueller understands why it might feel that way sometimes. By Barry Schwartz [00:16:59] New "About This Result" Feature in Google Search Users will soon be seeing three little dots on the top-right corner of a search result snippet they can click on to learn more about a specific result before following the link in the result. By Barry Schwartz [00:21:31] Can Google and Australia Avoid a Bad Breakup? Australia wants Google to compensate some Australian news publishers for linking to their content. Google says a deal is in the works, but will it satisfy the Australian government? By Roger Montti

9 Feb 202126min

Fernando Angulo, Head of Communications at SEMRush, digs into the SEMRush World Data Trends of 2020 they published and we discussed the ability to see world-wide social consciousness trends. Want to get a tour through the entire SEMRush platform? We went through the platform with Fernando, and covered the three main layers of the tool. We found out Fernando's favorites and shared our favorites as well. Get a great take on what SEMRush has in store for the future of the tool as well, on this podcast. Be sure to check out the first segment of the interview as well at EDGEofthewebradio.com [00:01:47] SEMRush World Data Trends of 2020 Infographic[00:09:58] Most trending fashions in 2020? Sweatpants![00:18:29] The three layers of SEMRush functionality[00:28:35] SEMRush Projects[00:33:34] Future innovations of the SEMRush platform

4 Feb 202145min

[00:03:35] Are Google Local Services Ads Tanking Google Ads Accounts? Google launched local services ads for lawyers in September and many lawyers are seeing steep increases in cost per conversion coupled with big drops in conversions. Those are seriously negative impacts. [00:11:05] How Will Australia React to Google's Counter-Offer? Google has added a banner to Australian news search results expressing its willingness to pay to support Aussie journalism, essentially making a counter-offer. Will Australia accept? [00:18:02] New Privacy Standard Proposal: Global Privacy Control (GPC) Privacy advocates are proposing this new standard, Global Privacy Control (GPC), that would strongly signal users don't want their data shared with third-party data brokers.

2 Feb 202129min

Fernando Angulo, Head of Communications at SEMRush, shares his thoughts on the changes that the company had to go through over the course of the last year. We cover the management of 1,000 staff going to remote, the stresses of that change and the opportunities for innovation that it caused. We learn about how businesses reached out to SEMRush for their advice and counsel during the shut down. Throngs of businesses didn't know where to start in marketing and needed the help of SEMRush. Listen in as we learn how they helped.

28 Jan 202137min

[00:03:37] Price Drops Featured in New Google Rich Results Consumers love finding out about price drops, and Google is launching a new rich results feature to highlight product price drops. Online retailers just need to use the right structured data to get in on it. By Roger Montti [00:07:20] Do Contextual Links in Featured Snippets Threaten Click-Through Rates? SEOs are concerned that more links in such a high-visibility search results feature will hurt brands by potentially reducing click-through rates. Is this a legit concern or just SEO panic? By George Nguyen [00:14:09] Google Turns up the Heat Down Under Everyone knows Google doesn't pay content publishers to link to their sites, right? Except Google just agreed to do that in France. So where does that leave Australia? By Barry Schwartz

26 Jan 202126min

Sam Tomlinson joins us to discuss the issues revolving around the antitrust cases of Google & Facebook. We unpack each company's challenges and the concepts of fairness. Isn't this Big Tech's platform that they invested in? [00:05:27] The argument FOR business acquisition [00:09:13] The FTC reviews these acquisitions already [00:13:36] Facebook's weakest argument. [00:14:47] What are we upset about? [00:16:13] Google and Antitrust [00:18:16] Google: The Texas Lawsuit [00:21:00] No sympathy for the News: It's Google's Platform [00:24:13] Build a better platform [00:29:41] Please to Government

20 Jan 202139min

[00:03:24] New Community Feedback Feature on Yelp for "Health and Safety Measures" Enough people want to know how safe they'll be from the pandemic if they visit local businesses that Yelp has added a feedback feature for social masking and social distance compliance. [00:10:52]Google Doesn't Want to Pay Australian News Company Australia wants an industry code requiring tech giants like Google to pay news publishers. Google's "experiment" of disappearing Australian news from search is a chilling response. [00:19:21]Dedicated Results Pages for Hashtag Searches on YouTube Previous searches by hashtag inevitably included results not carrying the hashtag, but YouTube has an improved hashtag search now that limits results to videos actually carrying the hashtag.

19 Jan 202126min

Sam Tomlinson joins us to discuss the issues revolving around the antitrust cases of Big Tech (Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon). We cover the history of antitrust and how the archaic laws from 1872 cannot apply to the complex technological realm we are in. Sam had great input into the perspective of US and EU comparisons. Dive into this very topical discussion. [00:07:59] History of Antitrust Laws in America [00:11:00] The Differences In Big Tech As Opposed To Other Industries [00:17:52] The Competing Factors [00:18:44] What Are We Trying To Solve? Big Tech Being Mean To Big Tech? [00:22:36] The Network Effect And The Utility Concept

16 Jan 202129min