If you search for [Moz] in Google Search, you won’t be seeing the moz.com home page, that page was removed from the Google index due to a DMCA takedown request. The takedown complaint cites that Moz’s home page, along with 185 other URLs were “distribute modified, cracked and unauthorized versions” of the Dr. Driving app.

The takedown complaint. The DMCA, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, takedown complaint can be viewed over here. You can see the Moz home page listed on line 122. As Cyrus Shepard posted on Twitter “Crazy! You can’t access the Moz homepage from Google right now. A search for “Moz” shows an incredible 8(!) removed results from an overly-broad DMCA filing. DMCA literally lets anybody abuse the system, and it breaks Google.”

Google is aware. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison responded saying “I’ve passed it on for review.” We suspect Google will reverse this issue really quickly – but so far, Moz is still not showing.

The Google search results. Here is a screenshot of the search results page showing the Moz blog coming up in the first position, not the Moz home page:

The footer of the Google results show that Google “removed 8 result(s) from this page” due to DMCA violations:

Should not happen but it does. You are all probably thinking, this should not happen – how can Moz not rank for it’s own name in Google Search. How can it be that easy for someone to use a DMCA request to take down a large respected brand from showing in the Google Search results? And you are right, this should not happen – but it does.

We had our own site, Search Engine Land mistakenly removed from Google because Google thought the site was hacked – it was not hacked. Digg was also removed from Google Search because someone accidentally classified it as spam.

I guess mistakes happen, even in massive companies. But how? We don’t know yet. We have reached out for Google for a statement and if we hear back, we will update this story.

More on DMCA requests and Google Search. Google has its transparency report that says “It is our policy to respond to clear and specific notices of alleged copyright infringement. The form of notice we specify in our web form is consistent with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and provides a simple and efficient mechanism for copyright owners from countries/regions around the world. To initiate the process to delist content from Search results, a copyright owner who believes a URL points to infringing content sends us a takedown notice for that allegedly infringing material. When we receive a valid takedown notice, our teams carefully review it for completeness and check for other problems. If the notice is complete and we find no other issues, we delist the URL from Search results.”

You can dispute these requests and have them reversed but how long does that take? You can submit DMCA requests to Google over here.

Why we care. This is a nightmare for most SEOs and site owners. To be removed from Google Search for your branded term. It should not happen, it is really inexcusable and sad to see but it did happen.

I am sure Moz will return shortly but there is really nothing we can say on how to prevent this from happening to your site. The good news, Moz is a big enough brand that this caught Google’s radar quickly and likely will be fixed soon because of that. But for small brands – good luck.

Postscript. Moz is now back, less than 12 hours after this issue was first reported here:

The post DMCA request removes Moz from Google Search index appeared first on Search Engine Land.

If you’ve ever read Axios, you’ll remember it. At least that’s what Ryan Kellett, VP of Audience at Axios hopes. 

A news article on Axios has a distinctive look. It’s all in the name of Smart Brevity. 

Smart Brevity: “Axios gets you smarter, faster on what matters.” That’s their mission. And they have five excellent guiding principles:

• Audience first
• Elegant efficiency
• Smart, always
• No BS for sale
• Excellence, always

What about SEO? Axios had 24.8 million visitors in March, with 16% of traffic coming from organic search, according to Semrush’s Website Traffic Checker. (For comparative purposes, the New York Times is the largest news site, with more than a billion visitors in March – but Axios doesn’t cover nearly as many topics as the Times, CNN or other large news publishers.)

News is incredibly competitive. And Smart Brevity seems to go against what many consider to be SEO best practices. Namely, longer and more is better.

So how does Axios make SEO and Smart Brevity work together?

Go deeper. Here are highlights from my recent Q&A with Kellett. It has been edited for smartness and brevity.

SEO is an entry point. For Axios, it’s audience first, always. Kellett said Axios delivers trustworthy breaking news and insights in the smartest and most efficient way possible. So what role does SEO play at Axios? Here’s what Kellett said:

• “The goal with our SEO discipline is to introduce readers to our fact-based coverage and Smart Brevity in a way that earns their time, attention and trust. You’ll notice Axios is distinctive not just in the quality of what we produce but in the actual look of the written article. Have you seen our bullet points and bold before? It’s memorable.”
• “If we can convince a search reader to identify Smart Brevity wherever they next see Axios (say, in a social feed, Apple News or a forwarded email from a friend), chances are good they will eventually convert to being a subscriber to one of our many amazing newsletters.”
• “Sure, we’d love it if they signed up for a newsletter on the spot after coming over from search, but search mostly is a top-of-funnel entry point for readers who may be coming to us for the first or second time.”

One exception: Axios Pro, which is a specialized news subscription. Pro readers coming from search may be looking for a specific company or individual that Axios is covering, Kellett said. 

Smart Brevity is core to Axios. It’s hard to stand out in a crowded news space. Making content longer would go against everything Axios is trying to do. Kellett believes shorter is better. And that most news articles across the web could benefit from being shorter and more readable:

• “Everyone focuses on the brevity part. But it’s brevity in combination with making the reader smarter that drives everything we do.”
• “We most certainly get dinged for this in search rankings, but we have to be comfortable knowing that the reader will appreciate Smart Brevity when they encounter us, recognize it in the wild, and eventually seek it out from us. We obviously can’t abide if our stories don’t index or rank at all, so we look to avoid that. But otherwise, we have broad shoulders and navigate the best we can.”

Why Axioms matter. As Kellett noted, Axios articles have a distinctive look. And this look has a name internally at Axios: axioms. The style can be traced back to Axios co-founder Mike Allen’s flagship newsletter, Axios AM. Kellett said axioms have debatable SEO value – but undeniable value for their audience:

• “How many articles have you read where the most important point and the whole reason you should care is buried in paragraph seven or ten? We use the ‘Why it matters’ axiom so you, the reader, can quickly identify why the story is relevant in the first place.”
• “The SEO part of axioms may be quite subtle. I could make the argument we’re giving a consistent pattern for search engines to identify and parse our content. But I’m unsure how much it practically helps us rank at the moment. If you have creative ideas on how to extend axioms for search, my DMs on Twitter are open until Elon Musk shuts me down.”

“Start from a good place and optimize from there.” Their homegrown CMS defaults help nudge reporters to write good URLs and SEO-friendly headlines. Axios doesn’t have a separate search team outside of its larger audience team, so it relies on its newsdesk, copy editing and audience teams every day, Kellett said.

Headlines are one area Axios regularly tries to improve to enhance performance. Their teams do this manually, by looking at performance and going into the CMS. Axios does not use any kind of automated testing of headlines. 

5 Axios SEO best practices

1. SEO education. Kellett said this is ongoing and an important part of keeping up with changes to SEO.

• “I am always on the lookout for myths and bad habits to correct. And Director of Audience Neal Rothschild writes a weekly email (produced using our own Axios HQ software) to the newsroom that reviews examples and changes in best practices, which is incredibly helpful to get the word out internally quickly.”

2. Authority and depth. Axios is not CNN.com. They don’t cover every single topic under the sun. Kellett said Axios focuses on reinforcing its areas of authority:

• “Readers may see some of the breaking news coverage we publish, but we also have amazingly, deep coverage on narrow topics like space, sports betting, electric vehicles, China, privacy, immigration, to name a few. All of these are forward-looking areas that will only be more important to the country as time goes on.”
• “And that depth can come into play down the road. As an example, Axios had more authority than you’d think when the war in Ukraine started because we had covered Volodymyr Zelensky, including this amazing interview we did with him for Axios on HBO in 2021. Using that expertise furthers both pure journalistic and SEO goals.”

3. Explainers.

• “I’ve loved working on our explainers, which really help us step back and give regular readers a chance to access a storyline with Smart Brevity. Axios Explains Ukraine is a great example of where we are headed with this.”

4. Speed. For breaking news, Axios is fast. Really fast. 

• “Being among the first URLs on the web on a big story helps us rank as news develops. We’ll often get beat when the big publishers come knocking but generally staying fast, pointing to our expertise through internal links, and peeling off really great story angles gives us a fighting chance.”

5. Pillar and evergreen content. Axios publishes more than just short articles.

• “We have a set of Deep Dives that cover topics in-depth and from a bunch of different angles. Those stories have potential to be great pillar content and evergreen too with some continued editorial and technical SEO work.”

Breaking Axios SEO news: Axios has just hired their first Director of SEO: Priyanka Vora, formerly Quartz’s Audience Editor. She will help build out Axios’ SEO practice further.

• “I would also keep an eye on the Axios job listings page as the company is in growth mode across a number of areas, both in and around our newsroom.”

Axios’ SEO tool of choice. “We’re a Semrush shop for now,” Kellett said. Though he is personally partial to exporting GSC data to Google Sheets.

Most important SEO KPIs or metrics? Raw referrals matter to Kellett most. Also, the percentage of overall referred traffic from search.

“Though, of course, I will also celebrate anyone in our newsroom who sends me a screenshot of when Axios is in Top Stories carousel,” Kellett said.

The post Axios news SEO playbook: Speed, authority and brevity appeared first on Search Engine Land.

A hub and spoke content marketing strategy can help you boost keywords rankings, increase website traffic and enhance downstream metrics like conversions, leads and sales.

Join Conductor in a live webinar and learn the basics of a hub and spoke model. You’ll also take away a four-step process you can use to rank higher.

Register today for “4 Steps to Ranking Higher on Google with Hub and Spoke Content Marketing” presented by Conductor.

The post 4 content marketing steps that will help you rank higher on Google appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Every time you type a question into Google, the results page can look completely different. Think videos, images, ads, graphs, and related questions.

Today there are more than 40 different interactive elements or SERP features that can appear. These responsive results offer an improved user experience, but pose a real challenge to search engine optimization (SEO).

So, how can you know what SERP features should be at the forefront of your strategic planning? In this report, Similarweb analyzed the most popular SERP features across various industries. It covers

• Best practices to help you rank for key SERP features
• Important factors that influence search behavior
• Varying trends and growth rates of SERP features
• Which SERP features are most prominent by industry
• How branded and non-branded search impact SERP

Read it now to find out the best strategies to leverage and how.

The post SERP feature trends every SEO must know appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google today has turned off support for the URL parameter tool within Google Search Console. Google did notify us just about a month ago that this would be happening and it did – the URL parameter no longer functions today.

What happened. If you try to access a specific Search Console profile using the URL parameter tool, Google will tell you “this report is no longer available here.” It will show this warning icon along with it:

What is the URL parameter tool. The URL parameter tool launched in 2009 as a parameter handling tool, a way to communicate to Google to ignore specific URLs or combinations of URL parameters. Two years later, in 2011, Google upgraded to tool to handle many more parameter scenarios.

The tool essentially let you block Google from indexing URLs on your site.

You are currently able to access the tool over here but when you try to use it, that error will show up.

Why is it going away. Google said it has become “much better at guessing which parameters are useful on a site and which are —plainly put— useless.” Google added that “only about 1% of the parameter configurations currently specified in the URL Parameters tool are useful for crawling.” “Due to the low value of the tool both for Google and Search Console users, we’re deprecating the URL Parameters tool in 1 month,” Google said.

What do I do going forward. Google said there is nothing specific to do. Google said “going forward you don’t need to do anything to specify the function of URL parameters on your site, Google’s crawlers will learn how to deal with URL parameters automatically.” You can always use robots.txt rules, Google said “or use hreflang to specify language variations of content,” Google added. Plus, Google said your CMS and platforms handle building quality URLs these days.

The old rules will no longer function or be considered going forward.

Why we care. If you previously used the URL parameter tool, now that the tool is no longer being used by Google, you will want to annotate your reports to document the change. You probably should keep a close eye on your analytics and Search Console reports to see changes, if any, in crawling, indexing and ranking that may be related to this change. This might be a gradual impact, so keep an eye on issues over the next several days to several weeks.

The post Google Search Console’s URL parameter tool is officially not working appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Have you recently received a DMCA copyright infringement notice through email from a personal claiming to be a lawyer? Well, that email might be a scam and the lawyer who emailed you might not be a real person, but rather an AI generated persona for a lawyer at a fake law firm. That is what The Next Web uncovered in a recent report about such a DMCA request.

What is a DMCA request. A DMCA request is when someone requests the removal of content or a web page due to copyright violations. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it is used to have hosting companies, Google and web site owners remove content that infringes on copyright.

What is the scam. In this case, the fake machine generated lawyer is emailing sites claiming DMCA copyright infringement and instead of having the site remove the content, they are asking for a link instead. The email says first starts off threatening, as most legal notices sound, but it ends saying “our client is happy for their image to be used and shared across the internet. However, proper image credit is due for the past or ongoing usage.” The proper image credit should be done with “a link to” the site “within 7 days.” “Otherwise, we are required to take legal action,” the email continues.

In short, the scam is to threaten copyright legal action for a link to a site.

Here is a copy of the email:

Fake lawyers. It gets even more creepy, as this reporter dug into this issue, they investigated who Arthur Davidson Legal Services was. The law firms site looked legit but the domain name was only registered this year but the site claims the firm has been around for many years. He then dug into the profile of Nicole Palmer and learned that she never existed, that she was made up by AI, by a generative adversarial network, a deep learning model that can be trained to create faces, art, or anything else. This is her photo, notice how the earrings and other aspects don’t exactly line up:

It is just pretty wild how far scammers will go to manipulate the Google search rankings.

Why we care. Just beware of such legal threats, do your research to ensure the firm exists, the lawyer who emailed you is real and that this is not a scam. I can see many folks just reading the email, quickly adding the link attribution credit and emailing back saying this was done – without asking for more details or without verifying this is a real issue.

Online scams are only going to get more sophisticated and look more real with AI and machine learning at their disposal. So we all need to get more sophisticated in questioning everything we see, every email we receive and every request that is made from us.

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