Subscribe to Search Engine Land’s daily brief

Search Engine Land is your #1 source for need-to-know search marketing news. Every day, you'll receive a comprehensive roundup of exclusive resources, analysis and insights.

Sign up for our daily recaps of the ever-changing search marketing landscape. See terms.

Click here to view the latest edition.

Here's what you'll get…

  • News Recap… A summary of the previous day's news with all the links you need to dive deeper into the coverage.
  • What We're Reading… A list of must-read news from around the web, curated by the expert editors at Search Engine Land.
  • Pro Tip of the Day… A worthy best practice or relevant piece of advice hand-picked from our contributors and bookmarked just for you.
  • Search Chatter… Wrapping up the best insights shared by search marketers on message boards, social media, and more.
  • Indicators… Highlights of recent data points from the field.
  • On the Move… Updates on new hires, promotions and awards among our community members.
  • The Soapbox… Short opinion pieces from our readers and contributors.
  • … and more!
 
August 12, 2020

Good morning, Marketers, well, that was interesting.

Did your site experience the wonkiness of Monday’s Google indexing glitch? What at first sight looked like a big algorithm update turned out to be a bug in Google’s indexing system Caffeine. SEOs started noticing volatility around 1:30 p.m. ET on Monday. Google confirmed it fixed the problem around 12:40 a.m. ET Tuesday.

Some background: Google launched Caffeine in 2010 — read more about Caffeine here. As Garry Illyes of Google explained in a tweet yesterday, it’s responsible for multiple tasks, from ingesting fetchlogs to extracting links, meta and structured data to scheduling new crawls and building the index. “Throw a grain of sand in the machinery and we have an outage like yesterday,” he said, noting complexity of search.

Not so Genius. Remember the brouhaha last year over lyrics Google displayed in search results? Genius sued Google and LyricFind for lifting and misappropriating lyrics from its website.The case caught lots of attention, in part because, as Greg Sterling writes, “it played into the larger narratives of Google’s market power and publisher frustrations with zero-click results.”

A court has now cleared Google and Lyricfind of wrongdoing — music publishers, not Genius, own the lyrics, the court said. The larger implication here is that if your site licenses content, you likely have no recourse if search engines or others scrape and feature it on their own sites.

Claim your name. Authorship and Google+ died, but Google has launched “people cards” in Search. They can show up like Knowledge Panels in the results when users claim their card. The cards are tied to your Google account and are currently live on mobile in India.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
 
 
 
Social Short
 

YouTube quits subscriber email

As of August 13, YouTube is going to stop sending email notifications about your new Channel content to subscribers. Turns out email hasn’t been a great awareness mechanism — YouTube says just 0.1% of those emails are ever opened.

What does work? Mobile app notifications and Chrome browser notifications on desktop will still be in service for users that have opted in to know about new videos, live streams and premieres on your Channel. YouTube says a test showed that turning off email notifications did not impact watch time and actually increased engagement with mobile push notifications and Subscription feeds. Though it didn’t provide any stats on what those increases looked like.

Why we care. Based on the initial tests, YouTube indicates you shouldn’t see any negative impact from the new reliance on in-app and desktop notifications. That said, make a note of the August13 switch date and monitor your analytics for any fluctuations, including the percentage of subscribers receiving notifications.
 

Post-Pandemic SEO Strategy Playbook

As months pass, marketing teams are starting to turn their attention from short-term crisis management to long-term planning for recovery. What actions should you prioritize to future-proof your marketing? How do you motivate your remote team to implement new projects? Find the answers in Conductor’s Post-Pandemic SEO Strategy Playbook.

Get your copy now! »
 
Search Shorts
 

SEO, e-commerce and unconferences

Sold out. A couple hours after Google announced the Google virtual webmaster unconference it was completely sold out. Martin Splitt from Google was a bit surprised but happy.

Titles and meta descriptions. Patrick Stox from Ahrefs has an excellent stream of tweets around uncommon SEO knowledge with titles, descriptions and snippets.

Gigantic e-commerce. Google’s John Mueller said, “Crawling a gigantic ecommerce site efficiently is really hard, regardless of how many servers you throw at it on either end. Making crawling harder is often easy, making crawling easier can be quite a lot of work, especially when there are “many cooks” involved in making a site.”
 

Kiss digital asset chaos goodbye

This free guide from MarTech Today will help you choose the right Digital Asset Management platform for your specific needs.

Get your free copy now »
 
 
 
What We're Reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

A new global COVID-19 map for journalists – Google Blog

Adjusting Paid Campaigns During a Recession – Moz

Google Admits Some Smart Speakers Mistakenly Recorded People Without Wake Word Activation – Voicebot

Google AdSense No Longer Offering Western Union Payment Option – Search Engine Roundtable

How We Utilize Data To Improve Our Marketing Campaigns During COVID – Go Fish Digital

I tracked my Discover feed for 12 days. Here’s what I learned. – Kevin Indig

I’m using Google Maps to plan summer family fun – Google Blog

New ways to get around with Google Maps on iOS – Google Blog

Page Speed & SEO | How Load Time Affects Bots & Humans – Botify

Rich Results & Search Console Webmaster Conference Lightning Talk – Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

The (Almost) Complete List of Google Review Attribute Categories – GatherUp
 
 

Third Door Media, Inc.
279 Newtown Tpke. Redding, CT 06896 USA

© 2006-2020 Third Door Media. All Rights Reserved.