Technology News and Industry Knowledge

Search engine optimization (SEO) proceeds to evolve, and the past years can be seen as proof. In addition to the ever-present Google updates, social influence and artificial intelligence, Google is constantly expanding search. And yes, SEO can be comple

Last year, we called 2019 a “roller coaster of ups and downs.” Hindsight is 20/20, and while many of us can’t wait to put 2020 in the rearview, the way the search industry’s biggest players responded to the new needs of businesses and consumers, brought on by the pandemic, will have lasting consequences for how marketers perform their duties. From Google’s new organic Shopping listings to how SEOs rallied for gender equality and diversity to the upcoming Page Experience update, here’s our retrospective of the most impactful SEO news of 2020. RELATED: PPC 2020 in review: COVID leaves its mark on e-commerce and paid search The Google algorithm updates of 2020 There was some early suspicion within the search community that major algorithm updates would be on hold during the pandemic — in retrospect, we can’t imagine that was the case. News Editor Barry Schwartz has already recapped 2020’s most important algorithm updates , so here’s a brief summary of what rolled out. The core upda...

Fifty-one and a half.  That’s the percentage of online users surfing the web from a mobile device. With those odds, it’s likely that a significant number of your business’s potential customers are coming to you from a 480px screen

This year will forever be known as the year that brought introspection, slowed people down and had them focus less on business and more on family. But, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, business must go on, and so it did with SEO and Google’s numerous algorithm updates throughout the year. From core updates, to machine learning efforts with BERT, passage indexing (or is it passage ranking?), the upcoming Google Page Experience update and many unconfirmed changes — we would not call 2020 as a slow year for Google search algorithms. Google’s January, May and December core updates rocked the SEO industry January 2020 core update. Google kicked things off early in 2020 with the first core update of the year, the January 2020 core update , that started to roll out on January 13, 2020. While most core updates take two weeks to fully roll out, Google said by January 16th, it was mostly rolled out . Like virtually all core updates, the January 2020 core update was big and impacted a lot of s...

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important elements of your digital marketing strategy. There’s more and more content being released every day, which means your competition is getting stronger by the minute. The only way to fight

Last year, Google announced BERT , calling it the largest change to its search system in nearly five years, and now, it powers almost every English-based query . However, language models like BERT are trained on large datasets, and there are potential risks associated with developing language models this way. AI researcher Timnit Gebru’s departure from Google is tied to these issues, as well as concerns over how biased language models may affect search for both marketers and users. A respected AI researcher and her exit from Google Who she is. Prior to her departure from Google, Gebru was best known for publishing a groundbreaking study in 2018 that found that facial analysis software was showing an error rate of nearly 35% for dark-skinned women, compared to less than 1% for light-skinned men. She is also a Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory alum, advocate for diversity and critic of the lack thereof among employees at tech companies, and a co-founder of Black in AI, a n...

Posted by rjonesx. This is not the link building article you — or really anyone — were probably hoping for. It isn't a step-by-step guide to getting the best backlinks, it isn't some list of hot tips or new opportunities, and it isn't the announcement of some great tool. What it is, unashamedly, is a window into the brutal slog that is outreach-based link building.  What can you expect? 1. YELLING IN CAPSLOCK. 2. Some tips and tricks. 3. Weeping and gnashing of teeth   Courtesy Some Ecards All kidding aside, one of the few aphorisms I’ve come to believe is that sharing how we do things as SEOs is almost never a problem, because 99% of people don't have the follow-through and resources to make it happen. I would love to be proven wrong by the readers on Moz. My goal here is to give a realistic understanding of the monotonous slog that is white-hat, outreach-based link building. I happen to think that link building is a perfect counterexample to the "Pare...

In part one with Joe Beccalori of Interact Marketing we spoke about the diminishing value of the organic SERP , so in part two we talk about how to tweak more about organic search by blending it with other digital marketing techniques. We first went over how the SEO competitive landscape in almost all niches were virtually not existent but now, it is all super saturated and competitive, even in really small niches. We work in a space that is ever evolving and SEOs are amazing as adapting and evolving. So it is important to build research and development into your process so that you can leverage the upcoming trends for your clients and always be on top of the most recent and beneficial marketing efforts. You, your agency and your clients need to be one step ahead of the competitors he explained and even shared an example or two. Here is the video: If you’re a search professional interested in appearing on Barry’s vlog, you can  fill out this form  on Search Engine Rou...

Posted by morgan.mcmurray Here we are again — that time of year filled with wrap-ups and lookbacks and “best of” compilations. 2020 was a year like no other, and that’s certainly reflected in the topics covered by the blogs in the list below. We published 170 blog posts this year (including Whiteboard Friday episodes) — not too shabby for a year rife with personal and professional challenges! We’re looking forward to what 2021 has in store, but in case you missed anything, we’ve compiled the top 25 most-read pieces from the last 12 months*. You’ll find several Whiteboard Friday episodes (past and present), local SEO tips, and advice for empathetic marketing, along with the optimistic SEO predictions for 2020 and beyond — made in pre-COVID times.  So without further ado, here are the best Moz Blog posts of 2020. Enjoy!   *The top 25 Moz Blog posts listed below were published between January 1 - December 22, 2020, and are in order by unique pageviews generated...