WebDev

Recently I wrote about how to Publish your content in Google News on Android, iOS and news.google.com. Looking further I checked if there is such an option in other search engines like… Bing.

Bing is also offering aggregated News in Bing News along with serving this through integration into the Windows operating system.

Users can get their personalized content through Bing and Microsoft Start, Windows, Edge and Office.

Setting a hreflang meta tag on your multilingual website shall be as simple as a piece of cake. Just put the relevant meta tag on your website, refer to the translated version and on translated version refer back to the original one.

Looks as simple as that. End of story? Wrong!

My post about Bing Jail gained a bit of attention (a lot!). With the traction, there is hate, but I could expect that as well. There was a bit of conversation in the comments on Hacker News which gives me valuable feedback.

This short, post scriptum post is not an explanation but rather my experience on the following days. My site reappear in Bing search for one day to be manually removed (blocked) the day after where Bing Support, who surprisingly responded, start looking into the case.

My personal site has been recently penalized by Bing, or if you prefer different naming for it - secretly blacklisted or shadowbanned. Don’t know exactly why but by the end of January 2023 I lost every indexed page that had been in Bing.

Recently I have been annoyed when my weekly WebPerformance Report email from WebPageTest shows a failure on Compress Transfer.

This failure, reported in red was done by just one small file… favicon.ico.

Do you have a website or blog where you publish new things, either daily or from time to time?

Do you know that you can publish them in Google News?

Recently, when I read one of the articles on 9to5mac noticed, that after their post they got this neat feature.

An option to follow their site through Google News.

It gives them an additional way to get more visitors but also convinces them to stay connected with their content.

My first impression was… I want this as well on one of my websites, so I start exploring how to do that. When I did that, I have been surprised at how relatively easy it was without any extra work from myself. By utilising the website RSS Feed and going through initial configuration and approval (that took approximately 2-3 days) my first site was live and posts were updated when published.

This is another reason to say that RSS is not dead and it still matters.

Here is how I did that and how you can do it as well!

Do you write on your website a series of frequently asked questions (FAQs) and try to answer them? Do you know that putting text on a website is not enough to gain traction? Even if your questions and answers are unique and could be desired by users, they may never find their audience.

Playing with the SEO aspect may help, but if we concentrate only on the surface – visible part, we will still be missing out. What is important is what beneath, just in the background. This is how we can simply describe what is Schema.

Structured data (Schema) is presented on a website in a way that is not visible to an ordinary visitor but processed, when found, by search engines.

Schema is very important and will be even more this year (2023), as mentioned directly by many people at Google.

To get your question-answers into search engines you should put your interest into the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Schema.

Here is how I did this on some of the websites that I made with Hugo.

Through the “interesting” days, when people started migrating into Mastodon, I found quite interesting toot from one of its users where he mention adding Mastodon discoverability for any domain using WebFinger Protocol.

I have been quite interested in how to implement this on my end, as I prefer people to discover me with my long-standing email address, rather than the newly created username on the selected mastodon server.

As my website is hosted on Netlify I decided to check if I can implement this. Here is how it goes.

As you are aware, when you create your post with images and publish them on your website, sooner or later they will appear on Google.

Your article will land in Search Results and images will be shown in Google Images.

Sometimes you are taking a lot of effort into your images and restricting their use by providing specific disclaimers or copyright information on your website.

The problem is that Google does not always know that and when you search for an image, that is sourced from your website, the image may be copyright restricted.

The user, who is searching through, will not know that as well and he may come into trouble. This may result in a fine that may need to be paid to the rightful owner.