Every fortnight the Croud SEO team collate the latest news from relevant sources around the web so you don’t have to. Read through the top SEO news stories for this week below and follow us on Twitter or sign up to our newsletter.
Featured snippets: The nine rules of optimization
02/11/2020
Search Engine Land (SEL) reviews the best practices for improving your chance of gaining featured snippets within the search engine results pages (SERPs). This includes tips on defining a featured snippet, the different types of featured snippet, and individual elements to optimise and include on a page to boost the chances of triggering a featured snippet.
Could Google passage indexing be leveraging BERT?
29/10/2020
SEL reviews the potential impact of ‘passage indexing’ in regards to Bidirectional Encoder Representations (BERT), which was first brought into the spotlight at Google’s recent Search On event. This covers a review of what BERT and passage indexing is, as well as its impact on the SERPs. Subsequently, this review also explores where this may take us in the future and what it means for search engine optimisation (SEO) experts.
Adobe forecasts $189 billion U.S. online sales this holiday season
28/10/2020
According to a forecast by Adobe, online sales in the US could reach $200 billion, with the majority of this online traffic driven though smartphones – this means that mobile sales could make up 42% of total revenue. With the ongoing pandemic, online shopping will play a larger part in driving holiday sales than ever before, potentially fostering two years worth of growth in one season!
Google launched DeepRank in October 2019: DeepRank is BERT
03/11/2020
A few weeks ago, Google released a video detailing the ins and outs of Search, which caused some confusion regarding a project named DeepRank. However, it’s been reported that DeepRank is simply the internal code name for BERT, not a new upcoming project.
How to get the most out of Google’s product Knowledge Panels
02/11/2020
SEL looks at how to get the most out of Google’s product Knowledge Panels. This includes a review of what they are, the SEO benefits they can bring, what platforms and techniques to use to ensure accurate information, and how to influence the panels.
Google Search Ranking Algorithm Disturbance On November 4th
05/11/2020
There has been some notable movements within the SERPs on the 4th of November, which appear to have impacted the traffic of some sites (both increases and decreases). It’s important to bear this in mind if reporting traffic across the previous week.
