Unexpected Content Digest about SEO: Vol.5

Fresh digest is here. So let’s pass the time and read search engines' news, useful articles from other blogs and our latest posts.

Search Engine News (April 2019)

Google

• Google experienced indexing issues in April. In short, it dropped tons of pages from the index, which resulted in pages not ranking for queries they normally rank for. According to Google, now this issue is fixed but it’s worth checking your pages. If you have some pages still not indexed, try using Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool to submit that page to the index manually.
• Google published a new tool which analyzes your images. The machine learning/artificial intelligence algorithm tells you what it thinks the image is relevant for. This tool demonstrates Google’s AI and Machine Learning algorithms for understanding images.
• Google’s Danny Sullivan announced new search commands, the before: and after: commands. The new commands allow users to restrict searches to specific dates.

Bing

• Bing Ads is notifying users about upcoming changes to destination URLs that begin rolling out in August. In August 2019, Bing Ads will no longer support the ability to create destination URLs at all entity levels.
• With all the controversy around Google noticing they haven't supported the rel=next/prev, specialists are curious how Bing supports it. Frédéric Dubut from Bing said on Twitter that Bing uses them for discovery and understanding site structure but they do not use it to merge pages into a set.

Digging into SEO

• Page speed is a significant metric that affects your ranking. Here are 12 steps to lightning page speed. They are divided into backend and frontend and include a lot of technical details.
• Check out the Google Chrome bookmarks that can save you a lot of time in your day to day SEO activities. You’ll discover how to find common site issues with a single click, open multiple queried tabs (e.g. Google Trends, UberSuggest & Wordtracker) from a single search, view the backlinks to your current tab in your favourite SEO tool, highlight all links on a page with the nofollow attribute and much more.
• Guys from ContentKing prepared an interesting interview about knowledge graphs. Find out interesting peculiarities and how important is the knowledge graph for your average SMB.
• Glenn Gabe published the curious case of a massive 1-month algorithmic demotion from Google (to the minute) and what could have triggered the drop. In the end, he highlighted important key learnings for site owners.
• And the icing on the cake, Whiteboard Friday with Cyrus Shepard. Find out what links to target with Google's Disavow Tool.

Posts on Netpeak Software Blog

Let's remember what posts were published on our blog in April:

• Lina Lugova, a marketing manager from Epom, shared non-obvious ways to reach your audience online. Find out alternative sources of quality traffic and how to reach an audience that can’t be found on social media.
• Our customer support team has presented you caring digest with the most frequent questions from users, how to solve them and, of course, funny stories.
• Duplicate content is dangerous for your website and negatively affects SERP ranking. Our content specialist has described which types of duplicates can occur on your website, how to find and fix them.
• How to build a strong and working local SEO strategy for your business? Ric Rodriguez, SEO Director at iProspect, has shared five expert ways to improve your local SEO results.
• In April we released new Netpeak Spider 3.2. Our Growth Hacker Kosta Bankovski has prepared a detailed video review about the update. You will learn more about new features and how to make the most of JavaScript rendering, the express audit of the optimization quality in PDF and enhanced issue description. You can watch a video review or read a transcription on our blog.
• Link building is one of the most controversial topics in SEO. The question is what links work and how they affect the positions in search results. While there is no public guide on how to get the ‘golden link’, most specialists are into PBNs (private blog networks), outreach, crowd marketing or buying links. Overusing of these ‘grey’ practices can lead to disappointing results. The easiest from techniques mentioned above is crowd marketing, or simply, putting links on the forums. You will discover how to find the best topics on forums using Netpeak Checker and get not only a good link but also targeted traffic.

If you think that I’ve missed something important, let me know about it in the comments below and I’ll add it to the digest :)