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In this episode, we discuss a possible tweak to Google’s algorithms on April 15th, Marie’s thoughts on the product review update so far, Google’s delay on the CWV release, handling empty pages, and a ton more useful digital marketing tips!

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

• April 15, 2021 – Another possible tweak to Google’s algorithms
• Our thoughts so far on the product review update
• Insight from looking at a site that apparently suffered with the product review update
• Google extends the timeframe for introducing the page experience ranking signal (Core Web Vitals) for Google Search
• What’s the recommended approach for handling empty pages? (Google and Bing respond)
• Here’s a clever tip for helping secure a sale!
• Does a wrong date showing in the SERP suggest a site quality issue?
• More on the Soft 404 issue
• The latest mobile-first indexing news
• Interesting comment about sites that have YMYL and non-YMYL content
• Do websites ‘trust seals’ help improve your E-A-T?
• Do you need to optimize your whole site if you only have a small number of URLs that you want to rank?
• How does heavy traffic from countries with slower internet impact your Core Web Vitals scores?
• Is it possible for AMP pages to fail the Core Web Vitals?
• Chrome 90 is beginning to roll out and there are several changes made that will impact how Cumulative Layout Shift is measured
• Rumours that WordPress may treat Google’s new FLoC tracking technology as a security concern
• A new test was spotted within Google Maps
• Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles

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What’s new related to the product reviews update

Over the last couple of weeks, Google has shed some new light on the product reviews update. We have covered our thoughts on the update in the above stories (for our premium subscribers), but here are a few more items of interest:

• The update has likely not been rolled out internationally and as of now, John believes it’s US-based only (though this is expected to change).
• John mentions that this update could be both promoting and demoting — as one site rises or declines, it then shifts the landscape and others are impacted as a result. 
• According to Rank Ranger data, this update was big, but not as big as the December core update. However, in the same SEL article, they say that Sistrix did not see an exceptional level of Visibility Index movement. Steve Pain from SISTRIX said, the real search engine results page movements “are well below anything that would be considered a major update.” Also, “There’s no clear indication that review sites are a major proportion.”

Danny Sullivan confirmed that this update has not finished rolling out yet.

Google help hangout transcriptions and highlights now available for premium subs!

We’ve started posting our hangout highlights and transcriptions to our blog for premium subscribers. These will include each week’s key learning that Marie has dug out of the hangouts, plus the full transcription below. Make sure you’re logged in to access this, as it is only for our premium subscribers. 

As most of you know by @Marie_Haynes' awesome highlight tweets, we transcribe @JohnMu's Google help hangouts.

We've taken this one step further and published our highlights and the full transcription for our premium newsletter subscribers.

Enjoy! https://t.co/Ti8oTyH1bJ

— Marie Haynes Consulting 🐼 (@mhc_inc) April 21, 2021

You can also see Marie’s current help hangout thread here:

It sounds like the product review update can be both demoting and promoting. This makes sense as we've seen several sites that suffered big losses…not just sites with gains.
🧵7/8 pic.twitter.com/JPelCTXiOy

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) April 16, 2021

When (and why) Google removes content from Google search results

Google has made it clear that if content online is something against local laws, it will not be accessible from search. Some of the reasons why content is removed could be for privacy, defamation, or laws put forth in different regions. For topics such as copyright, Google would require the rightful owners to come forward, otherwise more serious issues such as child sex abuse material would be removed immediately. Google will inform you of any content removal via GSC. Other than for lawful reasons, content may be removed if it goes against their voluntary removal policies ie. if personal financial information was published online, or information that could cause harm or identity theft.

In today's blog post, a look at how Google Search balances maximizing access to information with removals that comply with local laws or policies designed to protect: https://t.co/G6jtGvzFSQ

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 19, 2021

How the new regex feature in Google Search Console is helping eCommerce businesses

Regex, which is essentially a tool for pattern matching, can be used for eCommerce sites to suss out unintentional overlap via GSC. In the example below, Lily brilliantly shows how one eComm site has multiple variations of the same product [likely] being indexed. When this is the case, the site owner should then make the decision to consolidate signals and determine which one URL within the similar set is the best to canonicalize to.

The new regex feature in GSC is super helpful for sites with poorly optimized URL structures, like the below e-commerce site, which has multiple versions of the same product (different colors) on different URLs.

Makes it much easier to find opportunities for URL consolidation. pic.twitter.com/tfre1EMdif

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) April 16, 2021

Lightning Talk: Web Almanac 2020, the SEO chapter

Aleyda Solis recently hosted an episode of SEO Lightning Talk where she discussed a few SEO trends including structured data, specifically different types of markups being used. 

To learn more about other SEO trends, we recommend you watch Aleyda’s talk. 

What are the latest trends in Web #SEO? 📈🤔
Are sites ready for mobile-first📱indexing and the page experience🏃update? @aleyda has the data! Watch the latest ⚡️ Lightning Talk ⚡️ for all the main learnings from 🕸️ Web Almanac 2020, SEO chapter!

📺 → https://t.co/Cd1Go6hTm6 pic.twitter.com/kwytAb8JbT

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) April 15, 2021

You may have noticed a recent drop on traffic for your Web Stories

As of the evening of April 15th, Google mentioned that they might have experienced some issues serving them. As a result, it caused some Web Stories to not be surfaced in Google Search for trending topics. We’ve yet to see this resolved yet but we’ll do our best to keep any eye on things!

Pinterest launches a content claiming portal

This is great, and also makes a lot of sense! Pinterest now has a tool where you can claim your content if others are using it. It is only being tested with a select group of people now, but once it rolls out, you’ll be able to submit an application to have the content yours only, website only, or blocked. This could be great if, like Glenn said, you are being outranked for content that is yours, plus you can enforce linking of the content to your claimed website. Seems like a great new tool. 

Wow, this is big. If your own content is being taken and uploaded to Pinterest, and that outranks you in Search, this could help -> Pinterest Launches Content Claiming Portal To Help Creators Reclaim What's Theirs (Limited Access) https://t.co/7XJ4FTGJlM via @tldrMarketing pic.twitter.com/HYRZVChCSw

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 20, 2021

Google testing the ability for searchers to add Google Posts that may show up on a business’s GMB

This was announced in March but seems to be visible now. Saijo from TLDRmarketing noted that Google is testing something else out in Google Posts by now allowing “Visitors” or past customers to submit “Photo Updates” which can be filtered in the SERPs by visitor or by owner. We’ve seen the option to submit visitor images before but the filtering option is certainly new.

What are the Makings of a High-Quality Link? – Paddy Moogan
https://moz.com/blog/high-quality-links
April 16, 2021

Paddy has a great understanding of how link building has changed over time and where it is headed. In this talk he covers in detail what makes a high quality link via three main topics; link relevance, diversity and authority.

Question Answering Using Text Spans With Word Vectors – Bill Slawski
https://www.seobythesea.com/2021/03/question-answering-using-text-spans-with-word-vectors/
March 8, 2021

Bill Slawski provides another great breakdown of a new patent from Google regarding how the search engine may utilize text spans with word vectors to answer users’ questions.

5 Top Crawl Stats Insights in Google Search Console – Tomek Rudzki
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/crawl-stats-google-search-console/402037/
April 16, 2021

Did you know that Search Console has a crawl stats report? This article from Tomek pulls out five key insights from this report that can help you find anomalies that may potentially be causing you SEO issues.

Perfecting On-Page SEO for Ecommerce Product Pages – A Cheatsheet – Paddy Moogan
https://www.aira.net/blog/perfecting-on-page-seo-for-ecommerce-product-pages-a-cheatsheet
April 15, 2021

Looking for an excellent product page that has it all? In this article you’ll find an image depicting the ideal placement of product images, item descriptions, customer reviews, and more! Each feature has a brief explanation along with a resource to learn more and a real world example. 

Review Topic Clusters as Local Business Content Strategy – Miriam Ellis
https://moz.com/blog/review-topic-clusters
April 19, 2021

Most local SEOs would agree that reviews can greatly impact local search rankings and in this Moz blog article, Miriam Ellis discusses two critical insights behind what reviews mean to customers and the varied use of review content.

If you’re not sure what ‘topic clusters’ are then we recommend giving this article a read as it does a good job of defining this concept in simple terms.

Hey y'all, we're looking to hire a FT #SEO Specialist. If you, or anyone you know, are interested, check out the job req. Thanks! https://t.co/VncTQ3aS9E

— Crunchy Links (@crunchylink) April 19, 2021

I'm hiring a Director of SEO for @poweredbysearch. Rare opportunity to:

– Be part of our exec team
– Own P&L + hire, grow, and mentor SEO's
– Work with the best B2B SaaS companies globally

Lots of autonomy + mastery opps.

DMs open. RT's appreciated ♥️https://t.co/zH2vp75OkI pic.twitter.com/nVhB73VTPO

— Dev Basu 🇨🇦/🇮🇳/🌎 (@devbasu) April 21, 2021

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:

• April 15, 2021 – Another possible tweak to Google’s algorithms
• Our thoughts so far on the product review update
• Insight from looking at a site that apparently suffered with the product review update
• Google extends the timeframe for introducing the page experience ranking signal (Core Web Vitals) for Google Search
• What’s the recommended approach for handling empty pages? (Google and Bing respond)
• Here’s a clever tip for helping secure a sale!
• Does a wrong date showing in the SERP suggest a site quality issue?
• More on the Soft 404 issue
• The latest mobile-first indexing news
• Interesting comment about sites that have YMYL and non-YMYL content
• Do websites ‘trust seals’ help improve your E-A-T?
• Do you need to optimize your whole site if you only have a small number of URLs that you want to rank?
• How does heavy traffic from countries with slower internet impact your Core Web Vitals scores?
• Is it possible for AMP pages to fail the Core Web Vitals?
• Chrome 90 is beginning to roll out and there are several changes made that will impact how Cumulative Layout Shift is measured
• Rumours that WordPress may treat Google’s new FLoC tracking technology as a security concern
• A new test was spotted within Google Maps
• Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles

⎋ SUBSCRIBE NOW

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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