SEO News You Can Use: Surprise! Amazon Changed Search Algorithm to Boost Its Own Products

SEO News You Can Use

This likely won’t come as a surprise to many of you, but Amazon has adjusted its own algorithm to benefit, well, Amazon. According to a report last week in The Wall Street Journal, Amazon adjusted its product-search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for the company.

That’s according to people who worked on the project for Amazon, according to anonymous sources cited by the newspaper.

The sources told The Wall Street Journal that late last year Amazon optimized the secret algorithm that ranks listings to boost items that are more profitable for the company instead of primarily showing customers the most-relevant and best-selling listings when they searched (as had been the case for more than a decade).

Of course, the world’s biggest online retailer didn’t publicize the adjustment. Apparently, according to the newspaper, an internal battle has played out between executives for years over whether to make this move or not. The battle pitted Amazon executives who run the retail side (based in Seattle) vs. Amazon’s A9 search team (in Palo Alto, Calif.). The sources told the WSJ that the search team opposed the move.

More SEO News You Can Use

Google Updates Reviews Rich Results: Google is hoping its recent update to Reviews Rich Results improves RRR for users and safeguards against abusive implementation and self-reviews. The “name” property also is now required. So, you’ll see fewer stars under the search result snippets.

Breadcrumb Structured Data Reports Accessible: Google announced Thursday that breadcrumb structured data reports are now available on Google Search Console. If you’re having breadcrumb structured data problems, you’ll be notified via email. You can access the report under the Enhancements section. Are you taking advantage of breadcrumbs SEO?

Yoast WordPress Plugin Updates: Yoast recently released version 12.1 of its WordPress plugin with some updates that should help you. Your custom favicon is added to the mobile snippet preview and new schema filters are available.

Google Adds Timestamps For YouTube Videos: Google has rolled out another YouTube video update, adding timestamps as a feature. So this should help people when the content they’re searching for is contained in a video. Google will show you what’s in the video along with timestamps so you can go directly to that part you’re wanting to see.

BrightEdge Study: Paid and Organic Search Still Strong: A new study from BrightEdge shows that organic and paid search still deliver much more traffic to websites than other channels. The study showed that paid and organic search are responsible for 68% of all trackable website traffic. Five years ago, BrightEdge found that organic search delivered 51% of site traffic. That number grew to 53% this year. Also, BrightEdge says that more than 75% of B2B traffic comes directly from organic and paid search.

Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.

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