What do you MEAN that title doesn’t make any sense? Sure it does, you just have to read the news stories I’m sharing with y’all below, such as Google using…heh…romance novels…hehehehe…to teach language to a machine learning AI…hehehehe…well it is kind of absurd, isn’t it? Regardless, enjoy the news, and have a great week and weekend ahead!

Google News

• Apparently Fewer But Better Quality Pages Can Get Better Traffic – In a recent Q&A, Gary Illyes was asked why a webmaster’s site got better traffic once they removed a bunch of low-quality pages. Illyes basically replied that if you have fewer, yet higher quality pages than a lot of low-quality pages, you’ll get more traffic, which makes sense. I guess isn’t news, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

• Google Brings The Hammer Down On Pages With Sneaky Mobile Redirects – Google has been warning webmasters about sneaky mobile redirects ever since 2014, but now they’ve begun to take manual actions against sites they find still use the practice, according to the Google Webmaster Team. If you’ve been hit, Google has provided this help article to guide you to fix the problem you never should’ve had in the first place.
• Most Algorithm Updates Apparently Go Unnoticed – In a Tweet (I know, I know) from Gary Illyes, he said, “Most algo updates go unnoticed, but we may communicate about the named ones, like mobile-friendly,” when asked about Google’s stance on update announcements. This is unsurprising, but again, still interesting enough for me to include here…or so I hoped…
• Google Wants To Bring Voice Search Results To Analytics – In a recent Google Hangout, John Mueller said that they’re considering how to bring voice search results to analytics. The problem is that because voice searches can be so long they’re having issues on how to implement such a thing. But if they can do it, that would be awesome.
• Google Reading Romance Novels To Help With Conversational Search – Laugh it up fuzzball, but apparently Google is having its machine learning AI thingy reading romance novels in order to understand conversational search and language. This is because the plots to these novels are all the same, so it’s easier for the AI to understand the actual language used within them.

Other News

• Bing Says A Quarter Of All Searches Are Voice Searches – In other voice search news (not related to the last story at all but still interesting), Bing recently revealed that around a quarter of its searches are now all done by voice, and that the searches queries are getting longer. Where they used to be between one and three words, searches between six and ten words are far more common. Soon we’ll be living in Star Trek, I tell ya.