SEO Wash-up Monday 7th January

Google Updates

Google link schemes includes contractually requiring follow links – For the past couple months, the search giant has added to their link schemes guidelines page that basically says you cannot require someone to link to you without the nofollow attribute. If you require such a follow link in your terms of service, a contract or some other arrangement, then this is considered a “link scheme” by Google.

The use of the most restrictive crawling command – Google will typically use the most restrictive crawling command or signals they find on the page. So it doesn’t matter if Google found it via HTML or JavaScript, assuming Google can find it.

Both Google & Bing support ETag/If-None-Match – Google now support ETag/If-None-Match. Although it is rare to see sites using it, most use If-Modified-Since instead.

Google tests black URL/breadcrumbs at top of search result snippets – The search giant is always testing new search results user interfaces. Now it is trying another test you may have noticed that has been reported over the past couple days. Google is now using a black URL or breadcrumb above the title in the search results snippet.

Google featured snippets tests blue feedback bar – Google is testing a new blue feedback bar, a few people have seen it, where they see a new blue bar under some of the featured snippets that lets you give Google feedback about that specific featured snippet. This is in addition to the small “feedback” link that I currently see.

Having too many repeated internal links does not hurt – A member from the Google team has responded to a question “are repeated internal links detrimental to the Google ranking position of a website? Does Google ignore them or does Google give minus points for every repeated internal link?” saying that it doesn’t actually hurt for you to link naturally internally to your pages, even if you think you might be over doing it with internal links.

Google tests more movie & TV streaming options in search – In November 2017, Google began showing movies and TV shows to watch on YouTube and other providers directly in search. However, now it seems that the search giants is pushing that a bit more with the ability to add more streaming providers and testing new interfaces for it.

Bing Updates

Bing ignores default robots directives if there is a bingbot section – A member from the Bing’s search team said on social media that if you create a specific robots.txt directive for Bingbot, their crawler, Bing will only look at that specific section. Therefore, you should make sure that when you do that, copy all the directives from the default to the Bingbot section that you want Bing to comply with.