Google Offering SEO Certification Taught By Googlers: Google announced the new Google Career Certificate scholarships for US businesses. “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,” Google wrote.

First off these are courses taught by Googlers who are experts. If it is anything like the experts I received from PPC “so called” experts they will not teach much other than Googles best practices which always seemed to make Google more money and the client less.

In looking at the course I wasn’t impressed by the curriculum of the Digital Marketing course seems to be teaching based on platforms which the Google announcement included  “Canva, Constant Contact, and Hootsuite; marketing platforms like HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Shopify; and social media platforms like Twitter. You’ll also learn how to use Google tools like Google Ads and Google Analytics.” Note that GSC is not listed so one has to wonder what kind of SEO is being taught if the most important tool in an SEO’s Google toolbox isn’t listed.

IMO, the post title is misleading as the SEO that will be taught would only be sufficient for a junior position if that. It seems to be more about integrating SEO into a digital marketing campaign and I will bet that at some point Google will refute the SEO Certification. It is more of a certificate for digital marketing and even that would not be something I feel the industry is going to be slow to accept as a legit course as the whole course is only for 6 months at 10 hours/week. Even if that is just SEO you would barely scratch the surface!

Google Search Console Caches Inspection Tool Live Test URLs For 90 Days: I have been getting Mobile errors that started in 2019 were fixed but about every quarter a new page will show up with same errors and always passes on live test. This is a bug they can’t seem to fix! It’s as if every time new pages are added this error is automatically tripped based on the initial Mobile issues in the template which were fixed within days of the original alert to the issues. John Mueller of Google has told me to ignore these alerts, but, IMO they have to be followed up to ensure indexing etc.

Google Asked If You Should Avoid Naming Your Company Or Product 404?: John Mueller responded to a twitter question by saying that using 404 in the name is fine, however, if the product was named “404 not found” he might have a problem and in that case the SEO should monitor closely.

Replacing Your Blog With An App Landing Page Will Impact Your Google Rankings: These are the types of questions that shows a complete lack of understanding of SEO by designers. Any page that you drastically change is going to affect ranking and SEO. The right strategy here would be to use the home page as a launch page for the app! I would add the recent posts widget to the home page so people landing on the page can dig deeper into the blog for more information about the app.

Google: No We Are Not Stealing Your Content & Citing Google As The Author: Although it was tweeted that Google was taking these Knowledge Panel summaries from sites that has been refuted by Danny Sullivan and John Mueller. It turns out the excerpts on the sites were taken from the Knowledge Panels that are authored by Google if so designated.