Search Engine Strategies Forum

Is there any news yet as to what the December 2020 core update focused on? What types of sites were the biggest winners vs biggest losers?

www.domain.com/favicon.ico is showing up as a Soft 404 in my GSC Coverage report. I can't imagine blocking it with robots.txt because it seems as if bots might want to access it from time to time. Suggestions? Or should I just ignore?

AMP pages are clogging the Valid Pages coverage report, grouped as Indexed, Not Submitted In Sitemap. My AMP pages are linking to the AMP version of the URLs the desktop versions link to. Desktop links to desktop. AMP links to AMP. What this means is that sometimes the AMP version of a page gets discovered before the non-AMP version. When that happens, it gets indexed as its own page, cluttering up the coverage report. Once the non-AMP version gets crawled, the AMP version leaves the coverage report. With millions of pages, and new pages constantly added, the coverage report is …

If a page is noindexed, but includes a meta reference to an AMP version, is this a mixed signal? Is the AMP version checked to see if it’s noindexed as well? Are there situations where you would want to index the AMP version but not the desktop version? Is Google even willing to index an alternate version of a URL when the primary version is noindexed?

The new Crawl Stats in Google Search Console shows a breakdown of how much googlebot recrawls existing content for refreshing its index, and how much is discovery of new content. Has anyone been working on increasing the rate of new content and seeing that correlate to a linear increase in traffic?

Just a heads up that Google announced they’re running a core algorithm update starting today. There hasn’t been one since May 2020, which is longer than they usually go. The SEO community was expecting one back in September. I’m anxiously staring at Google Analytics to see if we come up ahead or left behind. Has anyone else seen anything noticeable yet?

I am trying to remove an entire folder of thin content from Google to help me recover from a Panda/EAT-related penalty. I want to keep the content on the site for the benefit of users, but not waste crawl budget or have Google think that we have so many pages of thin content. I added the folder to robots.txt quite a few months ago. While some pages are showing up as "Blocked by robots.txt", the majority of pages now show up in my coverage report as "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt". About 2 months ago, I submitted a removal request …

This is a two part question. Firstly, what are some methods to build backlinks in late 2020 that are __not__ through guest blogging / blog outreach? Secondly, what are some methods to encourage users to share your content on social platforms?

Googlebot is crawling my AMP pages more than they are crawling my desktop pages. I have the appropriate canonical from AMP to desktop and amphtml from desktop to AMP. The desktop version also has a self-referencing canonical. Only canonical pages are in the sitemap. This is a concern because less than 10% of our traffic is from mobile devices (unique, I know), yet it's more than 50% of our crawl budget. The one thing that we do, which I'm not sure if this is appropriate or not, is whenever a desktop page 1 links to an internal page 2, the …

There was a huge fluctuation in the SERPS yesterday that left a lot of people baffled by the unannounced algorithm ... until Google officially announced it was a bug that was rolled out. Unlike just about everyone who commented on WW, SEW, etc., I actually fared well from it, until it was reverted, of course. Do you think it's a sign of good things to come? Or that it's a sign that I'm on the wrong end?

Has anyone read about any studies, or has any anecdotal evidence, that might demonstrate that detailed schema.org/Person markup about an author improves the authoritativeness of an article or tutorial in Google's eyes?