Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Libby.
1. SEMRush’s guest blogging service is LIVE
– oh wait, no it isn’t.
One of the most popular SEO tools in the industry, SEMrush, launched its new guest posting service this week:
And then promptly un-launched it. Because it appears to breach Google’s guidelines:
That’s an unnatural link – the kind the webspam team might take action on. https://t.co/kfQQithCnK & https://t.co/q5GmAxx2YM have more. Making sure the links use rel=nofollow / rel=sponsored would still allow sites to get visibility without having to worry about manual actions.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) June 3, 2020
Kinda weird that such a big, prolific player in the industry would make such a faux pas, but seems they’ve paused the service as a result of the backlash volume of orders received. SEMRush’s CEO did respond with a statement over at Search Engine Land, which states that this service isn’t about buying/selling links, but is about “content development, outreach, and editorial coordination”.
Probably just nip into Search Console if you’ve been using this service, or one like it, juuust to make sure you’ve not got yourself a manual penalty.
2. Google attacks Ctrl F
Click a featured snippet, get taken to the relevant text on the page – NOW ON HTML.
Just like for AMP, Google will now take users to the relevant text on a web page when they click on featured snippets results… but not all featured snippets. It’ll only do it if it’s confident it can do so accurately.
There is no markup needed by webmasters. This happens automatically, using Scroll To Text for HTML pages https://t.co/cE9O2cBgKu. See also more background here: https://t.co/vKFmR3HLK3
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 3, 2020