Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

Whether you work at an agency or you’re managing a marketing budget in-house, you’ve probably had the classic debate before: do you focus on organic lead cultivation through SEO or try to generate as many leads as possible with aggressive tactics right now?  I won’t pretend to be impartial: When you have the choice, favoring SEO is almost always the better investment. This isn’t an unfounded hunch, either: in our client programs here at TopRank Marketing, organic traffic consistently converts at a higher rate than overall traffic across a range of conversion types.  Marketers tend to argue that SEO is important because it’s essential for “long term” growth

This Google August 2024 core update has been shaking things up since it began to rollout. We saw some early signs of some sites hit by the September 2023 helpful content see some signs of life.

Google has overhauled its video SEO documentation to vastly clarify the video indexing criteria and technical requirements. Plus, Google added a new watch page section to the document and expanded the examples in the document.

Google Search is testing new designs for the default favicons it shows in the search results. This is when Google is not showing the site’s favicon or the site does not have a favicon, Google will show this default favicon.

A negative SEO question came up in the last Google SEO office hours on the topic of sending “bad actor” fake traffic to a site, to make the destination site look more questionable in Google’s eyes. Martin Splitt from Google said that sending such traffic to a site would not negatively impact the destination site.

Google is a bit delayed with its appeal process for Google Business Profiles. Appeals are now taking seven days or longer, some are saying about 15 days, which is much longer than normal.

Google has updated its title links search developer documentation to add that Google Search may use your og:title meta tag title for your title link in the Google Search results. The OG title is normally used by social sharing sites for the title of your posts, but Google may also use it for the title of your search result snippets in Google.

Boost your Shopify store’s search engine rankings with these proven SEO techniques. Optimize your website for Google and drive more traffic and sales. The post Shopify SEO – How To Optimize Your Shopify Site For Google appeared first on Search Engine Journal

Google confirms that low-quality traffic won’t impact ranking algorithms and explains why it has no effect The post Google Explains Why Low-Quality Traffic Can’t Impact Rankings appeared first on Search Engine Journal .