Good morning search marketers, did the WSJ catch your attention?
You may have seen or heard about the Wall Street Journal's big piece on Google that came out Friday, provocatively titled "How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results" (read it here with subscription or here). It's worth a read, and there are some interesting anecdotes, but the paper also gets a lot wrong, as Greg Sterling reports.
There's no debating that Google is a behemoth and that the actions it takes, both manually and algorithmically, have far-reaching and sometimes devastating implications for businesses. Further, as Rand Fishkin said during his keynote at SMX last week, Google's interest in zero-click searches means site owners need to think differently about their organic search strategies. There's plenty to debate about Google's role, size and level of transparency, but from our POV, the WSJ story makes several faulty leaps. We'll have more to come on this through the week, including industry reactions, but would love to hear your take. Send me your thoughts at gmarvin@thirddoormedia.com.
If you're looking to up your Schema game, international SEO consultant Aleyda Solis mapped out the structured data framework she uses to generate lasting visibility in the search results in a talk at SMX last week. Chris Long, architectural SEO manager for Go Fish Digital, then highlighted several Schema tactics for achieving greater visibility in the search results. For example, after conducting an audit of Wikipedia, Long discovered that the site uses the mainEntity property to include a link to their Wikidata page, which contains a list of all the different topics that make up that entity.
Read on for a handy Pro Tip for merchants and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
