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🔍 RankBrain vs. Neural Matching | Pagination What?

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

 
 
 
Pro Tip
 

Here's what Google Post Mentions can do in the local finder

Google Post Mentions – one of four symbols that regularly appear as snippets within the map pack and local finder of Google My Business – can be seen when there is a matchup between a search query with the content within a Google Post, explains Brodie Clark of Optimising.

Since this feature was discovered in February, it is still in the testing phase and appears sporadically for different users.

"Two primary benefits can be received from utilizing this feature once it rolls out completely. The first is the CTR benefit for driving traffic to your listing, which could make your listing stand out in the map pack or local finder for queries that might not be obtainable through Review Mentions or Website Mentions. The other benefit is giving you a chance for more visibility for your Google Post through keyword targeting, being placed at the top of the listing within the 'Related to your search' section."

READ MORE »

 

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Search Shorts
 

What fun...

Google Assistant bookings.  Watch this guy book a restaurant using the Google Assistant, it is pretty wild.

Merging Sites and SEO. If you are merging a site with another site, and the URLs are not a one-to-one match, Google may take longer to process the merger.

What's your name.  Do you have a hard time remembering names that go to faces? Well, Google has an internal app to help Googlers remember their co-workers names. This is not a joke.

Video bomb. Watch Gary Illyes from Google video/photo bomb John Mueller during a webmaster video hangout.

 
What we're reading
 

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

Fake eBay Ad in Google Search Led to Tech Support Scams – Bleeping Computer

Google bans VPN ads in China – ZDNet

Heroes Don't Work Alone: PPC Agency Partnerships – PPC Hero

How to Choose the Right Attribution Model for Your Vertical – Portent

Tips from Google to stay safe while browsing the internet – Google Blog

What Is Latent Semantic Indexing In SEO? – Thrive Global

The Beginner's Guide to Small Business SEO (6 Easy Steps) – Ahrefs

 
 
 
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Attend Search Engine Land's SMX Advanced, June 3-5, 2019 for expert-led sessions, networking (including the 2019 Search Engine Land Awards), and top amenities including WiFi, delicious meals, and snacks. This is your once-a-year event to learn only advanced SEO and SEM tactics. You'll come away with at least one tactic that you can immediately put to use… we guarantee it. View rates and register today!