• Google search result removes Moz’s homepage
• Google offers Digital Marketing & e-commerce certificate 
• Google possibly had a Google Algorithm update
• Reports of large numbers of knowledge panels disappearing from SERP for different brands

2/5 – Google offers Digital Marketing & E-commerce Certificate 

Google now offers a digital Marketing & e-commerce professional certificate which is taught by Google employees who are subject-matter experts. The course requires no relevant experience and it can be 100% online. 

Additionally, Google is offering businesses in the U.S. up to 500 scholarships each to Google Career Certificates to train their employees.  Google stated that “Businesses can use Google Career Certificates to train their employees for jobs in data analytics, digital marketing & e-commerce, IT support, project management or user experience (UX) design.”

The best thing about this course? Google says that the course qualifies you for jobs like marketing coordinator, email marketing specialist, e-commerce associate, and most notably search engine optimization specialist. 

Google possibly had an algorithm update 

Over the weekend, sites reported lower traffic numbers in the webmaster world forums and some of the weather tools are also spiking which may suggest a possible algorithm update.

However, it should be kept in mind this does not directly prove that Google had an algorithm update as coincidently, it is a bank holiday weekend in the UK and other parts of Europe, so low traffic could be due to those seasonal trends. Reports of large numbers of knowledge panels disappearing from SERP for different brands

Reports of large numbers of knowledge panels disappearing from SERP for different brands

There have been rumors that Google might be removing knowledge panels for brands as Jason Barnard reported large numbers of knowledge panels disappearing from the SERP for different brands. 

Could this suggest that there has been a shake-up with the knowledge graph? Either this is a bug on Google’s side, or it is intentional as Google has lost confidence in how likely that branded search is actually about the brand. 

4/5 – Google search result removes Moz’s homepage

Moz’s homepage was removed from the Google search result by a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) request for supposedly distributing “modified, cracked and unauthorized versions” of the Dr. Driving app.” Moz.com was included in a list of 185 URLs allegedly doing this.

For a period of 12 hours, a search on Google would return only the blog for Moz instead of the homepage. Thankfully, after some quick response from Google’s public search liaison, Danny Sullivan who passed the issue on for review, Moz’s homepage returned to Google search results. 

That’s it!

That is all for this week’s news folks. What do you think about this week’s news? Would you be taking Google’s course? Would you want to be an SEO specialist? Let me know in the comments below.

Updated: 22 November 2024