Good morning, search marketers, if a page turns on the web, does Google hear it?
Crickets. Turns out Google's been ignoring your Rel=next/prev pagination markup … for years. Even as it's been recommending it … for years. Google recommends considering single-page formatting.
I don't know about you, but we've been wondering about the difference between RankBrain and neural matching since Google started talking about neural matching last fall. Both are AI systems and both help with synonym matching. Google has now answered (many of) our questions. In short, it uses neural matching to relate words to searches and RankBrain to better relate pages to concepts.
Bing announced big advances in intelligent answers, voice search and visual search this week. Intelligent answers are now powered by their very own deep learning models, which means Bing can now show answers to more quickly answer complex questions such as "what are different types of lighting for a living room." Bing's search app will now respond in a more human-sounding voice. Bing's visual search can show similar items including purchase options for objects in an image and automatically detect clickable hotspots in an image to start a new search.
Now that the dust is settling, Marie Haynes offers three case studies of sites that saw nice recovery after Google's March 2019 core algo update. A nutrition, small e-commerce and larger informational site made changes based on clues from Google's Quality Raters' Guidelines; all saw gains in traffic after this past update, says Haynes.
Lastly, Google's program to make nice with publishers turned a year old this week. The company announced a lab to help publishers build their subscription businesses (digital ads haven't been the promised savior).
Lots more below including what Google Post Mentions can do in the local finder.
Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief
Quick links to stories mentioned above:
+ Bing upgrades text-to-speech, expands intelligent answers, improves visual search
+ Google hasn't supported rel=next/prev for a while (thanks for telling us)
+ Google's neural matching versus RankBrain: How Google uses each in search
+ Google's March 2019 core quality update: Stories of recovery
+ Google launches News Initiative subscriptions lab for publishers