Daily Search Forum Recap: March 12, 2020

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Bing: The Magnitude Of Algorithm Changes Has Been Larger Than Usual
  Frederic Dubut from Bing said on Twitter that Bing has been very business working on algorithm changes. He said “the magnitude of the algorithm changes we made recently may be larger than usual.”
• Google: Start With Fewer Pages For New Sites
  Google’s John Mueller said he would “recommend erring on the side of having fewer pages, especially when starting up a new site.” He said that having too many pages makes it hard for Google to “find the unique value of each page.”
• Google Webmaster Conferences Postponed Until Further Notice
  Google has announced it has postponed the Google Webmaster Conferences that it was planning to host throughout the year in regions where many cannot find SEO conferences. Gary Illyes from Google said “To wit, with the growing concern around coronavirus and in line with the travel guidelines published by WHO, the CDC, and other organizations, we are postponing all Webmaster Conference events globally.”
• Google: We Have No Mechanism To Block Indexing Parts Of Pages
  Google’s John Mueller said there is currently no official “mechanism to block indexing of a part of a page.” There are “hacky ways” he said but nothing official from Google like a googleon/googleoff tag that is supported only for the Google Search Appliance, not Google web search (the public search engine).
• Google In This Video Key Moments Shows Multiple Times?
  Google launched key moments for videos in the Google search results last September. But generally you only see one video that shows the “in this video” key moments timeline in search. Brodie Clark posted a screen shot on Twitter showing it come up numerous times for several videos.
• Google NYC Scooter Sign For Speed Warnings
  Google has some signs around the NYC office for its scooters. These signs basically say slow down, do not go to fast. The signs read “This isn’t Fast & Furious XXVI. Check your speed.”

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Clear cache will suppress the whole snippet until it’s reprocessed, which might be a bit extreme depending on how bad it is…, John Mueller on Twitter
• Our guidance on that hasn’t changed — that’s up to you., John Mueller on Twitter
• Usually, yes. We tend not to make up URLs — it’s hard enough crawling the URLs that we find. 🙂, John Mueller on Twitter
• When a good time turns around, you must snippet ✂️ In this episode of Search for Beginners, learn how to ?change your Google Search result snippet ?write good page title and descriptions ✅effectively use met, Google Webmasters on Twitter
• Yes, any links we show in search to your site generally (I think always, there might be individual exceptions that I’m not aware of :-)) appear in search console as impressions., John Mueller on Twitter
• You’re never going to get any exact numbers or tests for speed. What’s used needs to use a variety of tests, and it will need to evolve over time., John Mueller on Twitter
• For How Long Will A Domainer Keep A Name?, WebmasterWorld

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Links & Promotion Building

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

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