New Useless Google Search Console Beta

As Many of you know, google has launched the Public Beta of the Google Search Console, the one problem is, more than half of the features are missing. The one's people actually need.
All there is a little coming soon notification on the left menu bar!

Whats the point of teasing us with the traffic graphs and not giving us the whole kit and caboodle?
They have been making this thing for over a year, whats taking them so long? Don't they have some of the best programmers in the world working for them?

Also, they are sending out mass emails to everybody with a site in search console with the subject line "Introducing the new Search Console (beta)" .

Whats the point of introducing an unfinished product? I got so excited when it was first released, but so disappointed to see that it is practically useless now.

Hopefully the complaints will start rollin in and they will give us all the features soon. But who knows!

So now Google doesn't want to Index Links?

So now Google is changing their indexing limits for Add URL function in Search Console? WTF
If we SEO's didn't have it hard enough already, google is fighting us tooth and nail.
How do they expect us to rank if nobody can find our backlinks?

Barry Schwartz aka @rustybrick interviewed John Mueller a week ago and we got several different vague answers. 

[John] It sounds like it was too useful in some sense. So that's it's something where sometimes we get a lot of abuse to some of these features and the team has to figure out ways to kind of deal with that abuse in an elegant way. And that it doesn't affect most normal users but it's still able to kind of catch these issues that we run into.
So I believe, especially the the submit URL feature, is something that obviously you can use submit spam as well and some people have used that for example to submit hacked content on a website. Which is all not really what what the tool is meant to be used for. So finding a way to deal with that elegantly sometimes takes a bit of experimentation and trying things out.

Barry keeps pushing him to admit it was because of webmasters abusing the tool and he vaguely admitted it. Since late February, webmasters have been seeing a huge delay in getting their links indexed. Some news outlets and even twitter are not indexing for 12 hours or so.

How will we be able to know about the news if google won't tell us about it?

Here is the video of John Mueller telling us all about it.

BTW: Its been 9 days and this link isn't indexed via search console, nor site: operator in google.
But search plain url, its there. Very odd google!!

Google My Business being rolled out to new users across the GMB platform

New Features are coming out for Google My Business users.

They are giving us a few interface and a sidebar navigation bar to help with navigating between posts, insights, and photos

  

 It has been confirmed by Mike Blumentahl, that new GMB UX is being rolled out to many more users in the United States. They will all be switched to a list view and no longer an option for a card view.

Also in Google News, John Mueller reveals new details about googles mobile first index 

He says "Google will notify users when a site is moved to the mobile first index". I think this is a bunch of BS. I think the Google Update back in december was a partial mobile index rollout. All results are not completely the same, but they are pretty close.

Signs that your site may have been moved.

1. An increase in crawing from Mobile Googlebot

2. A drop off in traffic from desktop users

Mueller said that markup on mobile sites is going to be very important coming up. Who knows what he means by that. Responsive wordpress sites show almost all the same code, but different navigation menus.

Heres a little slidershow from SMX

 Who knows whats up googles sleeve, but we will see soon.

 

Google starts rolling out mobile first indexing to more sites

Google has officially announced that it has begun the process of rolling out mobile first indexing to more sites that are ready and have show best practices when it comes to mobile sites.

This is the first confirmation Google has given us, but many of us have suspected for a while that the mobile first indexing was rolled out in December with the Maccabees update. 

For a while, i noticed rankings exactly the same on a few of my properties for mobile and desktop search engine ranking positions.

Last october google said that a limited amount of sites have been moved over, but now it sounds like they are starting to do this on a large scale.

Google will notify website owners via Google Search Console that their sites have been moved to the mobile first indexing process. 

Webmasters will see a sharp increase in crawling activity from mobile Googlebot.

Google has defined mobile first indexing as:

To recap, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our — primarily mobile — users find what they’re looking for.

Google has published a

Get Ready for the Mobile Apocalypse!

Google My Business now lets you add a description to your business listing

Google Finally allows Businesses to add their business description to their knowledge panel

Google finally announces that businesses can now

To use this feature, log in to your Google My business account and click on the info button on the navigation bar. You will see a new field called Add Business Description.

Click on the little pencil edit box next to it and a box will popup allowing you to add your description of your business. 

It looks like they limited it to 750 characters, but that should do for most businesses.

 



Residents of th UK, The EU is coming to confiscate you .eu domains

United Kingdom Site Owners prepare for Brexit and handing over their .EU Domains

UK Site owners are going to be in for a surprise when The UK officially breaks from the European Union next year. The EU commission announced that companies based in the UK will have to surrender their .eu domains after Brexit.

Their statement says

As of the withdrawal date, undertakings and organisations that are established in the United Kingdom but not in the EU, and natural persons who reside in the United Kingdom will no longer be eligible to register .eu domain names or, if they are .eu registrants, to renew .eu domain names registered before the withdrawal date.

The worst part about it is those companies will not be able to redirect their former domains to a new domain such as .co.uk . There are about 300,000 Uk businesses with a .eu domain. These consequences could be dire if those businesses don't act now and 301 redirect all their link juice to a new domain.
Once Brexit takes effect the Registry for .eu will be able to revoke the domain because people or businesses in the UK will no longer meet the general eligibility requirements to hold a .eu domain. 

The following is the criteria for registering a .eu domain

In accordance with Article 4(2)(b) of Regulation (EC) No 733/2002, the following persons are eligible to register .eu domain names: (i) undertakings having their registered office, central administration or principal place of business within the EU; (ii) organisations established within the EU (without prejudice to the application of national law); and (iii) natural persons resident within the EU.

People should be concerned and take appropriate actions now to migrate your website to a new domain and 301 redirect the old domain asap. Also if you can change any of your links to the new domain it would be highly beneficial to your websites keeping its link juice after Brexit.

Using Google Knowledge Graph for higher rankings

How to use Google Knowledge Graph to achieve higher rankings for your site

Google has been on a mission to convert data to things and to connect everything so that Google would know the searchers intent. This was why they invented RankBrain and released the Hummingbird update.

To pull this off they needed to create connections between the data they had and real world things.

This was when the knowledge graph was born.

Google set out a goal to create a  

massive graph of real-world things and their connections, to bring more meaningful results.

In reality, they did much more than that, google almost anything from a person, to a business, to a service and google will describe what it is to you, usually pulling much of the data from Wikipedia.

The types of Knowledge graph cards google has are for

• People
• Map locations
• Current Weather
• Popular Music
• Sports scores and stats
• Popular tweets
• New and old movies
• Food Recipies
• Businesses

Schema markup is one way that google can extract this data from ordinary websites. Going to Schema.org will make your head spin, so just concentrate on the popular markups such as creative works, person, product, review, and organization.

Google now prefers the data to be in JSON-LD format versus the old HTML itemprop way of implementing it. 

To test your schema to make sure you have done it correctly, check your website in

Google also has expanded its questions and rich snippets to give users a way to instantly find answers to their questions. This is both good and bad for the search community because searches can find the most important information without ever visiting your website.