Ep. 158 - Nov. 11, 2020 - Light Version

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In this episode, we discuss November early turbulence, our new sponsorship with Ahrefs, Core Web Vitals news, a new name for Google Webmasters, and a compilation of great SEO tips and readings.

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Ask Marie an SEO Question

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It’s well worth the $18 per month.

The following topics are covered in the premium version of this episode:

• How to determine whether your spike/drop in traffic is due to current events
• What does it mean when your homepage is outranking your dedicated page for the same keywords?
• Takeaways from Google most recent Search Off the Record episode
• How does Google handle two conflicting canonicals on a page?
• Lightning Talk: How to remove content from Google
• Tips for improving Core Web Vitals metrics and Page Experience signals
• Tips for Black Friday 2020 (plus mistakes to avoid)
• Preparing for Google’s mobile-only index
• Tidbit surrounding sites hit hard by broad core updates
• Is translated content considered duplicate content?
• Some of your Discover data may have been mistakenly classified as video in the GSC Performance Report
• Only time will tell if this link building tactic will prove to be successful
• How to master the art of selling maintenance plans to clients
• YouTube answers common questions on video discovery and distribution
• Some websites will stop working on Android next year
• How to avoid a GMB suspension and thinking about your customers first
• This may be causing issues with your Analytics metrics
• Google expanding bid mode in select category of Local Services Ads (LSAs)
• New alerts for custom elements (useful for those of you in eCommerce)
• My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

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Early November SERP turbulence

We have heard several rumours of updates happening this week. Barry Schwartz has written about a possible unconfirmed update starting on November 3, and intensifying on November 4. He pointed out that several of the SEO weather tools are showing turbulence at this time as well.

Given that the US election happened on November 3, we suspect that most of the turbulence is due to this event. Search patterns will be different surrounding an election. 

There are also other world events that may have changed search patterns as well. We saw a big spike in traffic on November 2-4 for several of our financial clients. Most of the posts that did well are ones that discuss interest rates. A quick check of Google News headlines regarding interest rates tells us that in some areas, interest rates hit a record low this week which would explain why these pages saw increases. 

At this point, we are not putting extensive effort into diagnosing the causes of SERP turbulence seen this week. We may change that though if it appears that a lasting change has happened for many of our clients.

How to log in to the newsletter on our new website! 

You likely noticed we’re sporting a new look here at MHC! Last week, we launched a new site design which involved a migration of our newsletter system. 

Existing users will need to log in again into the new site. In addition to the log-in portal available at the bottom of this newsletter episode, you can find a global login link in the header at the top right of the site.

Once logged in, you can manage your profile here as well (for password/email changes).

The full index of newsletter episodes can be found in the main menu under “SEO Newsletter”.

Keep in mind that while all email and log-in information remains the same, we have been dealing with a glitch where a minority of users need to reset their password in order to regain access. If this affects you, we apologize for the inconvenience. Requesting a reset password link to your email at the log-in screen will restore access to the premium newsletter.

If you encounter any additional issues accessing the premium newsletter, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Lest we forget: thank you for your service

We are publishing this episode on the Canadian day of remembrance and therefore want to acknowledge all of the men and women who fought and sacrificed so much for our country, and future. Lest we forget. 

Today is Canadian Remembrance Day. We want to thank all of the people who sacrificed their lives for our country, as well as those who continue to do so.

Lest we forget. pic.twitter.com/f3JaYKWoYZ

— Marie Haynes Consulting (@mhc_inc) November 11, 2020

Welcoming Ahrefs as a newsletter sponsor!

As most of you know, we opened up our newsletter for sponsorship opportunities. We have committed to working with brands who provide services that we use or align with. That’s why we are welcoming Ahrefs with open arms. We have used their tool for several years and are excited about sharing tips with our readers on how they can do the same. Find some useful information about them below.

We are excited to announce that we have a new sponsor for the next little while – Ahrefs! I, Marie, first became a paying customer of Ahrefs in 2012. Eight years later, my team and I use this versatile tool almost every day.

Over the next several weeks, our goal will be to share with you some of the incredible value that we get from our Ahrefs subscription.

This week we’ll be talking about Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. You can watch this video for an overview of how AWT works.

The exciting thing is that you can use AWT for free by signing up here.

Here are some of the things you can do with the tool:

• Schedule weekly audits for your site.
• The site audits will give you loads of information on potential technical issues with your site along with information on how important each is and also how to fix it.
• With each weekly crawl, the tool will show you what progress you have made in fixing issues.
• There is very interesting and helpful keyword ranking information. We make great use of this for our clients when we are trying to determine which keywords lost or gained rankings during a Google update. In Marie’s podcast episode this week, she’ll share a little more on this.
• You can see estimates of organic traffic trends. We have found these really useful when looking to see if competitors have been affected by Google updates.
• Backlink data is much more useful than what you get in Google Search Console as you can see information on anchor text, nofollow status, estimated page authority metrics, and much more.

Stay tuned in future episodes as we explore Ahrefs and its offerings even more.

Core Web Vitals and other UX signals will be integrated into the algorithm in May 2021

On Tuesday, Google announced that page experience signals will be included in their Search rankings as of May 2021:

We're announcing that page experience ranking signals for Google Search will launch in May 2021. This will combine Core Web Vitals and previous UX-related signals.

Learn more: https://t.co/OrrR8LDl1a

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 10, 2020

Google Webmasters now has a new name

Goodbye Google Webmasters, hello Google Search Central! We're changing our name, consolidating documentation, and refreshing how we look–including a new sidekick for Googlebot. Read our blog post for more info: https://t.co/ujUDqp9g50 pic.twitter.com/U5T3fovUJM

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 11, 2020

This post left us wondering what Google was getting on about when they announced that Googlebot now has “a new sidekick”. The article discusses that the Googlebot mascot will now be joined by a spider bot. The combo of the two can now, “jump great distances and sees best when surrounded by green light.” What?

Most likely Google is just being goofy here in announcing a new mascot to go along with their rebranding away from using the antiquated term “Webmasters”. However, we can’t help but wonder if Google is giving us some kind of clue as to how things have changed in regards to how they crawl the web now.

We think things may get confusing though now as GSC will now stand for both “Google Search Console” and “Google Search Central”.

Using machine learning to streamline reporting workflows

This is pretty epic. Using Machine Learning to streamline reporting workflows.

A step-by-step for getting Lighthouse scores with a custom function (directly in Sheets).

-> How to Show Lighthouse Scores in Google Sheets by @RichardFergie via @sengineland https://t.co/xmxnlHxVMW pic.twitter.com/2p9t8kSLAx

— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) November 10, 2020

If you use Google sheets to manage information about your websites. Richard Fergie provides a detailed description on how to implement this custom function. 

Mordy Oberstein discusses tips for Wix

As we mentioned in a previous episode, Mordy now works for Wix and often provides tips and asks for feedback. In this thread, he tells users how to edit their robots.txt file. It is editable despite what people often think, so check this thread to learn how! 

What I didn’t know about #WixSEO #1:

To start off this series of Tweets we’re going to talk about robots.txt

If you Google something around editing robots.txt & Wix you might get a Featured Snippet that tells you it can’t be done.

You 100% can edit robots.txt with Wix. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/vtka4K6h5I

— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) November 3, 2020

If you have any questions that you’d love to see Mordy and Wix answer, share them below:

Last call! 📣

I'm collecting feedback/questions to share with the @wix product team!

If you have questions/concerns about Wix #SEO this is your chance!

See the form👇 https://t.co/7BzIZaeN3H pic.twitter.com/5jjxikHZk1

— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) November 9, 2020

Tell Google why you’re missing the URL submission tool

John wants your feedback! If you miss the URL submission tool, John wants to know what you were using it for and why you miss it. No, there is no confirmation that it’s back, but this is a great opportunity to state your case! 

I've seen folks looking forward to the URL submission tool being back. I don't have any new news, but I'd love to find out more about why you're missing it.

Let me know which URLs you're missing the tool for, and how you generally used it. Thanks! https://t.co/okrv0YdETL

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) November 9, 2020

BrightLocal’s local flux tool is showing a steady week until Monday, where there is a spike in the readings. We’ll keep an eye on whether this continues throughout the week or settles down.

As we mentioned in the algo update section at the start of this episode, it is certainly possible that this turbulence is related to Google’s algorithms changing in response to recent current events. We will be keeping an eye on this.

Hijacked GMB listings are on the rise

Heads up! There has been a surge in hijacked GMB listings where other users are gaining access to GMB accounts and changing vital information like phone numbers to benefit their business.

Local U noted that there has been an increase in random users attempting to “claim this business”. The best way to manage this is to simply delete any requests from users you don’t recognize and to always keep the amount of users who are managing your listing(s) to a minimum

How Google tests new content in the search results – Kevin Indig
https://www.kevin-indig.com/how-google-tests-new-content-in-the-search-results/
October 31, 2020

Kevin put together some fantastics tests, with graphs, showing exactly how Google treats new pages overtime. Google is constantly adding millions of new pages to their index. This article helps explain why SEOs notice regular updates to the algorithm but can have difficulty pinpointing the exact change that was made. 

How I created a Topic Cluster and boosted my website traffic by 1000% – Samuel Schmitt
https://samuelschmitt.com/topic-cluster/
November 4, 2020

This is a fascinating case study from Samuel Schmitt, who restructured one of his long-form articles into a topic cluster consisting of a pillar page and a series of subpages. Essentially deindexing and then republishing (over multiple pages) content that was previously garnering some Google traffic can be a little nerve wracking, but Samuel reaped the rewards with over 1,000% traffic growth to the current topic cluster over the previous long-form article. Learn how by reading this article in full! 

5 SEO Tactics to Maximize Internal Links — Whiteboard Friday – Cyrus Shepard
https://moz.com/blog/maximize-internal-links
November 6, 2020

We love to cover Cyrus’ latest learning and this is a great one. In this Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus discusses maximizing internal links. Internal linking is a crucial part of any SEO strategy and should not be overlooked. Excellent work, Cyrus!

Featured snippets: The 9 rules of optimization – Chris Long
https://searchengineland.com/featured-snippets-the-9-rules-of-optimization-342627
November 2, 2020

If you’ve been paying attention to featured snippets over the past year, you may be familiar with the chaos that came with Google’s deduplication of Search results. Featured snippets still can be super valuable, though, and Chris Long has created this list of guidelines to reference when optimizing your content for featured snippets.

New Study: Is Google Biased Towards Particular News Sites? – Patrick Stox
https://ahrefs.com/blog/is-google-biased/
November 5, 2020

In the past few years, there has been speculation that Google prefers some news sites. In their recent case study, Ahrefs was able to find out that when it comes to core updates, the past six years have been roughly equal for both Conservative and Liberal news websites. It’s definitely an interesting read if you’re in the news niche!

Top 10 Changes That Impacted Google My Business in 2020 – Colan Nielson
https://moz.com/blog/top-gmb-changes-2020
November 4, 2020

Plenty of changes have been made related to GMB this year and Colan Neilson of Sterling Sky has selected his top 10 highlights from the past year. If you’re looking for a refresher on what has happened this year on the local front, he starts with the January 2020 issue which saw Google reject plenty of Google Posts (yes, that was less than only nine months ago!). He also discusses the introduction of various COVID-related features (main items here being the temporary shutdown of new reviews, Q&A, and customer submitted photos, along with marking your business as ‘temporarily closed’), the local ranking bugs that many believed were an algorithm updated (SEOs coined this ‘Bedlam’), and more. A lot has happened so far in 2020 and with seven weeks remaining, Google is likely prepping for more “gifts” leading up to Christmas.

So we're looking to expand @ahrefs "content/marketing team…"

.

Who do you think we should try hiring? 🙂

.

Who are the "rising stars" doing awesome things & publishing killer content in the digital marketing space?

.

Plz point me at who we should try hiring to Ahrefs 🙏😇 pic.twitter.com/lbv2eO9qYi

— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) November 10, 2020

Premium members also get the following:

It’s well worth the $18 per month!

• How to determine whether your spike/drop in traffic is due to current events
• What does it mean when your homepage is outranking your dedicated page for the same keywords?
• Takeaways from Google most recent Search Off the Record episode
• How does Google handle two conflicting canonicals on a page?
• Lightning Talk: How to remove content from Google
• Tips for improving Core Web Vitals metrics and Page Experience signals
• Tips for Black Friday 2020 (plus mistakes to avoid)
• Preparing for Google’s mobile-only index
• Tidbit surrounding sites hit hard by broad core updates
• Is translated content considered duplicate content?
• Some of your Discover data may have been mistakenly classified as video in the GSC Performance Report
• Only time will tell if this link building tactic will prove to be successful
• How to master the art of selling maintenance plans to clients
• YouTube answers common questions on video discovery and distribution
• Some websites will stop working on Android next year
• How to avoid a GMB suspension and thinking about your customers first
• This may be causing issues with your Analytics metrics
• Google expanding bid mode in select category of Local Services Ads (LSAs)
• New alerts for custom elements (useful for those of you in eCommerce)
• My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

⎋ SUBSCRIBE NOW

Note: If you are seeing the light version and you are a premium member, be sure to log in (in the sidebar on desktop or below the post on mobile) and read the full article here.

Part of the challenge of SEO is staying on top of industry news, trends, and techniques There is so much information out there that it is easy to get bogged down in information overload and trying to disseminate what’s truly important from all that noise can be really time-consuming and challenging.

Marie’s newsletter is a game changer because it manages to cut through the fluff and deliver high-quality information that is not only really important for those that do SEO, but it is presented in a format that is really easy to absorb.

If you are looking for a trusted information related to search that is highly actionable I would strongly recommend Marie’s newsletter.

– Paul Macnamara – Offers SEO Consulting at PaulMacnamara.com