🔍 Hey Google, delete my activity | New Googlebot user agent strings

Oct 03, 2019

Good morning search marketers, Google's giving up (a relatively tiny) slice of data.

Google announced a couple of privacy features Wednesday. It is rolling out incognito mode for Maps and will soon allow users to delete their recent voice activity on Assistant. With incognito mode, users can stay logged into their Google accounts but, when the mode is enabled, their location searches won't be saved or used for personalization. Google will also allow users to tell Assistant to delete their recent search activity, starting in the coming weeks. The voice-enabled deletions will go back a week. Earlier history will need to be deleted manually. These options aren't likely to have a material impact on Google's trove of targeting data, while giving consumers a couple of more privacy levers.

The new evergreen GoogleBot, which runs on the latest version of Chromium to render web pages, is getting new user agent strings. Starting in December, the user agent will reflect the browser version of Chrome being used in Googlebot. Google says most sites won't be affected, but if you're using any user agent detection scripts that are hard coded for Googlebot, you'll need to make changes.

And finally, a reminder that Google Ads will migrate Search and Shopping campaigns set to accelerated delivery to standard delivery starting October 7 (a week later than the original October 1 migration date). Google also updated the list of error codes you may see with API clients and scripts.

Read on for a Pro Tip on using Screaming Frog, Ubuntu and Google Cloud for SEO and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

How to run Screaming Frog SEO Spider in the cloud in 2019

"Advanced technical SEO is not without its challenges, but luckily there are many tools in the market we can use. And by combining some of these tools not only can we address the challenges we face, we can create new solutions and take our SEO to the next level," explains Fili Wiese of SearchBrothers. "I combine three distinct tools and utilize the power of a major cloud provider (Google Cloud), with a leading open source operating system and software (Ubuntu) and a crawl analysis tool (Screaming Frog SEO Spider)."

"Both Google Cloud and Screaming Frog have further improved a lot in the last few years so I created an updated, much shorter and easier guide to run one or multiple instances of Screaming Frog SEO Spider parallel in the Google Cloud or on your own Virtual Private Server."

Read More »

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Search Shorts

HTML sitemaps, bad links and your focus.

HTML sitemaps. John Mueller of Google implied HTML sitemaps don't really help much with SEO.

Focus on yourself. "Don't lose too much sleep over their site, focus on your own instead," said Mueller when someone asked about a competitor.

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