Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Hello and welcome to the Intelligency Weekly Digital Roundup, whilst it is too early for companies to start making big changes and updates to their products, it’s never too early to learn about best blog practices or a search engine celebrating their success. Read all about it below.
-Eliot
Search Engine Journal talk about onsite blogs
Respected news outlet for Digital Marketing news Search Engine Journal did an article this week about whether it’s better for your blog to be onsite or if it’s better for your blog to be on a separate website that links to the main website.
The author, Mindy Weinstein believes it is best that the blog should be on your main website in a subdirectory from a pure SEO perspective as there are multiple benefits to this.
One benefit is that it can build links to the main website if the blog is written effectively, backlinks are a key ranking factor in order for your site to appear in SERPs. You can use a blog to write content such as guides, interviews, or even roundups. This content attracts links naturally because people link high-quality content.
Another reason for hosting a blog on the website is that it can increase the opportunities of ranking for more keywords. Blogs allow you to seamlessly blend long-tail and information-focused keywords in the content you write about.
The full, helpful article can be read here: Is It Better For SEO To Have Your Blog Onsite Or Off?
Shopify error leads to links displaying a (1) in the title.
A bug on the popular ecommerce tool, Shopify lead to ecommerce sites hosted on the tool to have a “(1)” listed in the title of links displaying on Google’s search results. The bug is believed to be resolved however if you’ve found yourself to be a victim of this, it may take a few weeks for the result to be displayed as intended.
Caio Barros, a community manager for Google had this to say on the subject
“Hello, all!We have been receiving some reports of a “(1)"showing up in some titles in search results. Upon some investigation, our Product Experts noticed that this behavior happened to websites built in Shopify and were using a chat app. It looks like these sites used a chat-bot script which added a “(1)” to the page’s title element. Titles changed with JavaScript can still be picked up, and used as title links in Search.However, it looks like that script has been fixed to no longer change the page’s title element, so as Googlebot reprocess pages, it will no longer see the “(1)” as a part of the pages’ title, and we can take that into account when generating title links in Search. Keep in mind that title links in Search aren’t always exactly the same as the title element of a page, so it’s not guaranteed that Google will drop that element immediately after reprocessing.There’s no need to do anything special to have pages reprocessed. This should happen automatically over time. We crawl and reprocess pages at different rates, usually you’ll see important pages like a site’s homepage reprocessed fairly quickly, within a few days at most. Other pages may take longer to be reprocessed.Thank you all for the reports!”
Here’s an image of what the bug looked like:
DuckDuckGo celebrates the number of searches on the engine.
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo celebrated 100 billion searches from users of the search engine via Twitter.
This is a tremendous accomplishment for the company, as only a year ago they announced that they were hitting over 100 million searches per day, and the search engine is showing no signs of slowing down.
Whilst still behind Google by a longshot, they’re beginning to creep up on Yahoo and Bing in terms of searches per day.
The pressure of user privacy has been affecting the whole tech industry, from Apple blocking third-party cookies in iOS 15 to Google doing the same with their Search Engine, clearly, this focus on privacy has allowed DuckDuckGo to succeed.
Maybe one day in the future we will see SEOers optimising websites for search engines other than Google.
