Weekly SEO Recap:

It’s all about Google today, sorry, so let’s be quick about it. Luckily, we’re allowed to forget about Yandex now, sorry, bad pun, I know.

Let’s get on with it:

Is Google’s webmaster communications failing?

We’ve “lost” Matt Cutts as a spoke person to the SEO community about a year ago. Some other Googlers have stepped in and apparently not everybody is as happy with them as they were with Matt, judging by this article. I have to admit that Matt definitely had more “klout” within Google, but I don’t really know whether that was always a good thing. I find it’s easier to reach a Googler now than it was a couple of years ago, and it’s also less limited to a specific group of high level SEO’s.

Google indexing Twitter more

Earlier this year, Google gained access to Twitters “firehose”, the feed with all tweets sent out. It turns out that since that time, Google has started indexing more and more tweets, now indexing 5x as much as before. 96% of tweets still go unindexed, but let’s be fair, most of them probably are a waste of indexation space and time anyway.

Should you ask for links?

Well, of course you should. You should ask because the stuff you write is awesome and very interesting for other people’s readers, right? If you’re asking purely for the SEO value, you might be in trouble. But none of you do that, ever, right? Oh and in case you wondered, yes even that link from that German SEO friend on his German blog is worth while.

Speaking about links, Sophos uncovered a massive case of link spam. Might not change anything for you but it’s interesting to see the scale at which SEO poisoning takes place.

Google testing giant ad / knowledge panel

If you wondered where Google was going to take those knowledge panels, here’s your answer. This is one direction I’ve fully expected to see happen, an integration of ads and content that makes it incredibly hard to figure out what’s paid for and what’s not. This cannot be a good thing if you ask me, but for Google it probably means mo’ money.

That’s it, see you next week!

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast