Ep. 175 - March 18, 2021 - Light Version

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In this episode, we discuss a possible update March 11-12, huge featured snippet changes, knowledge graph updates, Google on user-generated content, pagination best practices and so much more!

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

  • March 11-13 was likely another significant unannounced Google update
  • Are Google Knowledge Graph updates connected to algorithm updates?
  • Google discusses user-generated content
  • A discussion about pagination and best practices
  • How to improve your site’s internal linking with a variety of tools
  • Recommended advice for handling unplanned outages
  • If you are often outranked by scraper sites, this could be why
  • Google Maps has added some new features
  • These posts are being reported
  • Mike King’s free tool for determining content disparities between desktop and mobile
  • Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles
You’ll also have access to all past episodes, including this one.
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Algorithm Update News

Huge featured snippet changes could have been responsible for some recent algo turbulence

Mozcast reported that there was a significant drop in the number of featured snippets Google was displaying starting on February 19, 2021. The good news is that the number of featured snippets seems to have recovered to normal levels as of March 11, 2021.

featured snippet change

As we noted in our list of known and suspected algorithm updates, February 20 (one day following the drop in featured snippets,) was a date that we labelled as a significant but unannounced update. After seeing this featured snippet data, we wondered if perhaps what we thought was a quality update was actually just the result of these featured snippet changes.

In some cases, this is true. Glenn Gabe shared some examples of sites that saw a reduction in traffic coincidental with a loss in featured snippets between February 19 and March 11, 2021.

Mordy Obertstein noted cases where featured snippets were lost and then the same URLs had them return.

We do have several clients that show the same pattern – losses starting February 19 that have started to recover starting on March 11. Many of them have not returned to previous levels however. Some sites with significant February 19-20 losses have not made any recovery yet:

february 19th changes

The above site did not see a loss in featured snippets at this time. They actually increased the number of featured snippets they are ranking in over the last few months. Something else is responsible for this site’s losses.

We believe that Google is indeed testing something with featured snippets, which is not unusual. Lily Ray saw that some of her clients who had lost featured snippets on February 19 had them return as part of a double featured snippet on March 11. However, the next day, these had returned to single featured snippets.

If your traffic has taken a downturn at some point in the last few months, it will be challenging to say exactly what the problem is. We do believe Google is actively tweaking the featured snippet algorithm, but this is just one of many significant changes that we have noted over the last few months.

You can go here to see our list of known and suspected algorithm updates of note.

Google Announcements

Changes made to the Google Search Console rich results report

It looks like Google made some changes this week to the GSC rich results report. You can find details of these changes here.

SEO Tips

Core Web Vital scores could be impacted by third-party browser extensions

Third party browser extensions can impact your CWV scores negatively. Since it’s a metric based on user experience, it can affect your CWV scores. This is something unfortunately you may not have control over but it’s worth it to keep it in mind when analyzing your scores. 

Local SEO

We actually have something to report this week! It looks like there was a huge update Wednesday March 10th that carried into Thursday and resolved by Friday according to Brightlocal’s RankFlux tool.

local flux spike

Barry noted the spike as well and says he’s never seen the tool with a reading that high. It is always possible that it is a Google bug that is causing this, so it’s best to stay calm and see what happens. In this case, everything is back low and all areas were impacted, not one specifically. 

At MHC, we are no longer doing in-depth investigation of local updates. If you were affected, we would recommend reaching out in the Local Search Forum.

Local SEO - Other Interesting News

Potential bug seen within Google My Business

What a week for local SEO. A weird bug appears to be showing in GMB where it asks you to add a logo… despite already having one. Joy replied saying this is indeed a bug and may not be resolved until the end of the year. 

SEO Tools

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Recommended Reading

Subdomain vs. Subfolder, Is One Better Than the Other for SEO? – Patrick Stox
https://ahrefs.com/blog/subdomain-vs-subfolder/
March 9, 2021 

Patrick Stox from Ahrefs revisits the age old SEO discussion, subdomain vs. subfolder. Over the years, a number of studies have come out showing gains and losses when migrating to a new subdomain structure or vice versa. Patrick walks us through a number of ways that these types of studies can be flawed and/or biased.

 

Why Mobile-Only Indexing Will Cause The Biggest SEO Shake Up Of 2021 – Mike King
https://ipullrank.com/why-mobile-only-indexing-will-cause-the-biggest-seo-shake-up-of-2021
March 11, 2021 

Fuelled by his contributions to the year’s Web Almanac (you may recall this mega ‘state of the web report’ done annually), Mike’s most compelling insight came from the discrepancies between internal links on mobile vs. desktop pages.

He discussed his SEO tool Parito (mentioned above in SEO Tools) that is able to help you diagnose content parity issues as seen by your source code.

 

The proportion of mobile searches is more than you think – What you need to know – Johannes Beus
https://www.sistrix.com/blog/the-proportion-of-mobile-searches-is-more-than-you-think-what-you-need-to-know/
March 9, 2021 

In this article, Johannes Beus deep dives into why we should pay more attention to the difference between mobile phone and desktop searches. One of the biggest findings is how different the user behaviour is on the two devices (desktop and mobile). You’ll want to tune into this one. Interesting for sure!

 

Debugging layout shifts – Katie Hempenius
https://web.dev/debugging-layout-shifts/
March 11, 2021 

The DevTools debugger for layout shifts is handy, but as Katie Hempenius outlines in this guide at web.dev, the Layout Instability API it is built on provides more flexibility and the ability to collect more information if you’re inclined to run the script yourself. For specific guidance, Katie’s article is quite technical but extremely thorough and detailed.

 

What I Found After Experimenting with Google Discover for Two Months – Mordy Oberstein
https://moz.com/blog/google-discover-experiment
March 10, 2021 

Mordy Oberstein spent two months trying to understand how Google’s Discover Feed works, and wrote about it in this super interesting Moz article. Essentially, for two months, five days a week, Mordy tried as many things as possible with his search behaviour to try and influence what showed up in his Discover Feed.

Jobs

https://twitter.com/danleibson/status/1369694977173856259?s=21

Want More?

Premium members also get the following:

It’s well worth the $18 per month!

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

  • March 11-13 was likely another significant unannounced Google update
  • Are Google Knowledge Graph updates connected to algorithm updates?
  • Google discusses user-generated content
  • A discussion about pagination and best practices
  • How to improve your site’s internal linking with a variety of tools
  • Recommended advice for handling unplanned outages
  • If you are often outranked by scraper sites, this could be why
  • Google Maps has added some new features
  • These posts are being reported
  • Mike King’s free tool for determining content disparities between desktop and mobile
  • Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles
You’ll also have access to all past episodes, including this one.
I

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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


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