Coming to you from warm & very sunny Seville, where I’m currently attending WordCamp Europe along with some colleagues, this is another weeks SEO recap! There was some nice news about Google tests that came out this week that I’d love to share with you. Also, a case study on a project I was actually involved in myself.

Google tests. A lot.

Last week, while writing the SEO recap, I tweeted a screenshot showing that I was part of a Google experiment: Google was changing the red line in search results to blue. It was picked up by Barry Schwartz and turned into a headline on his blog and later on SearchEngineLand. Google also is testing a slightly different green for URLs… Another one: Google removed emoji’s from the search result pages this week too. And a final one: Google testing a new mobile interface. I think these articles show two things: we as an SEO community pay a ton of attention to even the tiniest details and Google test a LOT.

oDesk becomes Upwork

oDesk recently rebranded to Upwork, moving their domain from odesk.com to upwork.com. I myself was part of a team of SEOs working on this migration, which I think we can say is a success. Andrew Shotland wrote about it on SearchEngineLand, and Lisa Oda, the head of content marketing at Upwork, wrote about it too.

Having now done several of these migrations I can honestly say they’re not for the faint of heart, but it’s slowly getting easier to get them right. Don’t change your domain name on a whim though, Andrew’s post linked above actually has some very good pointers.

That’s it! Nothing “pressing” left, although I do expect updates to happen soon, maybe next week!

 

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Google tests & oDesk becomes Upwork on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!