It’s an SEO conundrum: Why is it you’re not getting the volume of website visitors you thought you would? Especially now, when you’re in the top results on Google for those popular searches you targeted.
Tim Soulo at Ahrefs tackles this very question. And the other one you have: why you’re getting so many visits from that niche search term you’re also ranking well for.
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Facebook Ending the Explore News Feed Experiment
Facebook announced it was ending a news feed test called the Explore Feed. The test allowed users to choose from two news feeds. One feed was dedicated to friends and family. The second feed was for public pages.
That may be bad news for businesses and other organizations who have seen their traffic levels plummet with Facebook’s current news feed.
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Google’s plan to make the whole web as fast as AMP
This week Google announced it hopes to convince the group in charge of web standards to adopt technology inspired by Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework.
Google has an uphill battle on its hands. AMP has been highly contentious, with many seeing it as a ploy by Google to get even more control over the web.
Google recognises this and isn't proposing to turn the entire web into AMP. Instead, it plans to take some of the ideas behind AMP and make them a universal standard that has nothing to do with Google.
If Google gets its way it will mean that virtually all web pages could gain the same benefits as AMP - the key one being near-instantaneous loading. This would significantly improve peoples' experience accessing the web on their phones.
For more information, check out this insightful interview The Verge did with Google
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Google expands snippets to answer more questions directly in the search results
Google’s “featured snippets” provide quick answers to users’ search queries by pulling information from web pages and placing it in a box above the search results.
Last week, Google began rolling out a new feature called “multifaceted featured snippets.” These are designed to provide alternative answers to questions which could be interpreted in multiple ways.
An example Google gives of such as query is; “garden needs full sun?” Google recognises this could be interpreted as “what garden plants need full sun?” or “what counts as full sun?” and offers featured snippets for both. When we tested this query multifaceted featured snippets only show up in mobile search results, so it may be that these are only for mobile search.
Read Google's announcement here...
Google offers free machine learning crash course
We’re not sure that “machine learning” and “crash course” should really be used in the same sentence, but Google now offers one.
The free “Machine Learning Crash Course with TensorFlow APIs” is part of the Google AI resource centre. Google describes the course as “a self-study guide for aspiring machine learning practitioners”, and says it is intended for people at all experience levels.
Start learning here...
