DuckDuckGo has hit a new record of 30 million daily direct searches. That represents a 50% increase from last year’s daily direct record of 20 million searches. Being an advocate of transparency, DuckDuckGo makes its traffic data publicly available. As you can see in the chart below, DuckDuckGo hit its new record traffic day on Monday, October 10th. For what it’s worth, October 10th was just days after news came out about Google’s failure to disclose a security breach that …

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has published a series of tweets regarding recent updates to search algorithms. Many SEOs and site owners have observed significant spikes and drops in search traffic over the past several weeks. This has led to much speculation as to what might be going on with Google’s algorithms. Google has finally set the record straight. Here is a summary of what Sullivan tweeted. Google releases updates every day Google usually releases one or more updates each …

Google’s AI Blog published an article discussing how Dataset Search works and what signals it uses to rank datasets. Google is already showing dataset rich results and may begin showing more as publishers add the Schema.org markup. Understanding what datasets are and how to rank them is important because it can become a new source of traffic. Google is already adding Dataset information in rich results. Google’s dataset developers page was updated in May 2018 to note that dataset rich …

Google’s John Mueller has stated that app interstitials will be problematic when it comes to mobile-first indexing. For example, if an app interstitial replaces a website’s homepage, then that’s what Google will index in search results. Clearly that’s an issue as it’s the homepage that should be indexed. Mueller says: “On the topic of interstitials … With Mobile-First Indexing, an app-interstitial will be problematic. If it’s robotted, your homepage might be too. If it replaces your homepage, that’s what we …

On a Webmaster Hangout John Mueller offered advice on whether it was helpful to prune low traffic content. This topic is related to what the SEO industry calls Keyword Cannibalization and also Content Cannibalization. Google’s John Mueller offered insights into internal discussions at Google about content pruning. He then offered two solutions. Is Pruning Content a Good SEO Strategy? The question asked was whether it was worth it in terms of SEO to prune content that was not performing. By “performing,” …

Google Search Console stats have begun showing up in search results when users look up a query their site ranks for. Want to see how your site ranks for a particular query? Just search for it. Directly in search results, below the paid positions, Google has begun showing data related to the query that was searched for. Specifically, Google is showing: Average ranking position for the query Number of impressions for the query Number of clicks your site has received …

Someone asked me what the latest “small” Google update on September 27 was about. The only thing I could tell him was that the black hat link spammers saw it first. Did that mean the recent update was related to spammy links? Probably not. Black hats tend to build sites that are essentially a collection of landing pages built on the foundation of shopping keywords. So it could have been an update related to content. It could have been a …

Nobody forgets to focus on SEO. Until they get hacked and the rankings go away. Shouldn’t improving web security be a part of your SEO effort? Even if your site is not hacked, the constant attacks from site hackers can prevent GoogleBot from adequately accessing your site by causing your web server to slow down (throttle) your web traffic and even stop showing web pages to Google. Ever see strange 404 errors in the Google Search Console for pages that …

Google appears to have extended the length of titles in search results snippets, according to a recent report. RankRanger‘s tracking tools show the average length of page titles in search results has increased from 55 characters to 83 characters on average (at the time of this writing). Here is RankRanger’s original tweet from earlier in the week, although the average length of page titles has increased even further since then. Seeing noticeable increases (circa 20%) in the average length of …