This should come as no surprise, but Google has removed the app indexing features within the Search Console API. Google announced this on its blog the other day saying it “no longer support these Android app search appearance types.”

Posted by KameronJenkins Even though blogging has been around for a while, it looks a lot different today than it did in the early 2000s. In those days, people read your blog because they followed it (anyone else have a few old .blogspot blogs floating around out there?) or subscribed to your RSS feed.

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed that XML Sitemaps are still the second most important source Google uses to crawl and discover URLs. He confirmed this on Twitter the other day after someone quoted him as saying this back in 2014

LinkedIn shared a list of the 10 most followed pages with insight into what other pages can learn from them.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Instagram is literally doubling down on stories ads in a test that will show back-to-back ads to some users. The post Instagram is Doubling Down on Stories Ads via @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Joy Hawkins posted in the Local Search Forums that Google has added, for some industries, new service options that these businesses can choose. She posted about plumbers, music schools, piano instructors, and more. Other local SEOs are seeing this as well.

We know that it is okay to have sponsored content on your site, in fact, Google says in its news publisher guidelines is acceptable as long as it doesn’t exceed your primary content and is not mislead as editorial content. Google’s webmaster guidelines add that you need to nofollow links on content that is sponsored.

Yelp is giving users the option to personalize their search results based on diet, lifestyle, and accessibility. The post Yelp Introduces Personalized Search Results via @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

While SEO best practices may be a benchmark to aim for, here’s why no successful SEO strategies are the same. The post There Is No Single Way to Do SEO – Here’s Why via @TaylorDanRW appeared first on Search Engine Journal