Table of Contents
  1. Intro
  2. SNYCU Podcast
  3. Not a premium subscriber? You're missing out!
  4. News about Google’s Algorithms
  5. MHC Announcements
  6. Google Announcements
  7. SEO Tips
  8. Google Help Hangout Tips
  9. Other Interesting News
  10. SEO Tools
  11. Recommended Reading
  12. Jobs
  13. Want More?
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Ep. 216 - January 6, 2022 - Light Version

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In this episode, we discuss the December SEO news you might have missed over the holidays, possible Google algorithmic turbulence between Christmas and New Year’s Day, link-building tips, and the latest site quality advice from Google webmaster hangouts.

SNYCU Podcast

Marie’s Podcast for this episode

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

  • More in-depth coverage of the latest algorithm turbulence in late December
  • Do links to 404 pages count?
  • Leveraging attainable keywords to create internal links
  • Some techniques to help you attain better rankings (a thread)
  • A case study on why boilerplate text may have notable implications
  • Top 2022 News SEO predictions from an industry expert
  • Google discusses mentions and off-site brand sentiment
  • Is there any reason to worry about crawl budget on a smaller site?
  • Why you shouldn’t conduct a site migration and drop AMP at the same time
  • Is Googlebot crawling your URLs with utm parameters?
  • Google’s change to the way it evaluates and reports errors in product structured data
  • 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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News about Google’s Algorithms

It has been a few weeks since our last newsletter as we took a much needed break from SEO over the winter holidays.

However, that doesn’t mean we have not been keeping an eye on the SERPs and chatter in the industry about possible algorithm news! 

Over the festive season, it is very hard to decipher whether or not any major changes to the ranking system have occurred due to the massive shifts in how people search. With that said, we do think Google has previously rolled out updates at this time – notably the Maccabees Update in 2017. This year, Barry noted a little bit of volatility in the weather tools and forums around the 27/28th. 

There was a very interesting thread from John Mueller on Christmas Eve regarding the different challenges that Google encounters when sorting text within their search systems. John noted that while most of their algorithms work across most languages and countries, not all do. 

This is due to the different challenges that some languages can present.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1473948742483169284

As Glenn Gabe pointed out, this applies to updates as well, with some newer algorithms such as the product review update currently only affecting English language content (for now). Other languages will be impacted at a future date. 

Speaking of the product review update, Glenn has released his write up for the update, which we highly recommend you read in full.

For more in-depth coverage of the latest algorithm news, consider a premium subscription.

MHC Announcements

This week’s marketer to watch

This week, our marketer to watch is Amanda Natividad. Amanda, currently the VP of Marketing at SparkToro, has some really great tips on content marketing and building a personal brand online. Amanda’s recent tweet thread includes five questions to ask yourself in order to align your goals and take control over your personal brand’s narrative. What a great way to kick off 2022 in an authentic and purposeful way!

Google Announcements

In case you missed it, that strange Google Search Console email notification was by accident

If you saw a concerning “minor issue announcement” banner in GSC, this was supposed to be an internal test of the notification functionality that was mistakenly visible externally. No need to worry!

https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/1475931803508776974?s=21

SEO Tips

Link building roundup thread

If you’re looking for more information on link building going into the new year, this thread Debbie Chew put together is full of amazing articles, podcasts, studies and twitter threads. Some of our favourite mentions are:

  • Paddy Moogan’s “3 Key Types of Link Building Metrics & How To Use Them Successfully”: Don’t ignore nofollowed links for rankings purposes. In 2019, Google announced that they will treat nofollow as a “hint.” 
  • Maeva Cifuentes’ “9 Link Building Strategies”: Curate industry statistics to improve conversions on email outreach. 
  • Tim Soulo’s twitter thread on link outreach: Content quality is not likely to improve your conversions. Oftentimes people want to know what’s in it for them. This means you need to be weary of Google’s link scheme guidelines.  

There is a ton of amazing content in this thread that will help you understand what is (and isn’t) working in the current link-building landscape.

Missed all the December news? John Mueller has you covered

Just a quick reminder about Google Search News for December 2021! What better way to start your year off than some John Mueller content. In his recent video, John covers:

  • Some reminders for the November core and the December product reviews updates.
  • Search Central’s new interactive checklists that allow you to quickly find relevant content.
  • Potential options for a recent security issue (log4j vulnerability). Some site owners have chosen to remove parts of their website in the meantime while the issue is resolved. If you’re thinking of doing the same, John has some useful tips.

There’s much more included in this video! (Note: If you’re a dedicated SNYCU subscriber, you may have already seen it covered).

The top templates, checklists, and flowcharts compiled by Aleyda Solis

Aleyda Solis, unequivocally one of the best and brightest in the SEO industry, has provided us with a massive collection of resources for SEOs to draw upon. Over the past year, she has focused on creating SEO templates, checklists, and flowcharts for SEOs to learn from and make use of in their SEO campaigns. This is definitely worth checking out and bookmarking!

Google Help Hangout Tips

John talks the importance of content and overall site quality

Once again, content quality and indexation were a major topic of discussion! John Mueller has made it clear in the past that every single indexed page is factored into Google’s assessment of site quality. He reiterated it again in a recent hangout.

With such a wide range of factors at play when Google assesses site quality, this is part of the reason why site changes can take so long to make an impact. Just as Glenn said back in his 2019 post, user testing can help you think about quality from the lens of real users.

The same timestamp/question also surfaced another good topic of conversation around multiple language versions. The key takeaway: If Google can assess one language version as high quality and one as low quality, this too can have negative effects across the whole site:

“The main issue here is less about these being translated versions of the content but more that for some things we look at the quality of the site overall. And when we look at the quality of the site overall if you have significant portions that are lower quality, it doesn’t matter so much for us like why they would be lower quality if they’re just bad translations or if they’re terrible content or whatever. But if we see that they’re significant parts that are lower quality then we might think overall this website is not so fantastic as we thought. And that can have effects in different places across the website.” 

John then added, “In short, if you have a very low quality translation that’s also indexed and that’s also very visible in search, then that can definitely pull down the good quality translation as well or the good quality original content that you also have.”

Google tracks all updates internally and admits to some difficulties

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a book of all the algorithmic changes Google makes? Well, according to John Mueller in the latest help hangout, Google does store all these changes. The problem is it isn’t always as helpful! There are a lot of moving parts in search and sometimes it can be a little hard to pinpoint changes and the causes of fluctuations in rankings.

Be sure to check out the full article that our friend Barry Schwartz covered in Search Engine Roundtable. Remember, at MHC, we compile a comprehensive list of Google algorithm updates and our thoughts on what we feel may have happened. If you haven’t already bookmarked it, what are you waiting for? 🙂

Other Interesting News

Chrome 97 has begun rolling out

Curious to learn about the latest additions to DevTools? The blog post has a series of highlights, including the new Recorder panel, a refresh to the Device Toolbar, improved code debugging, and more. The Chrome Developers post has more!

Yoast will be soon be available on Shopify

It seems Shopify has a feature or third party app for everything nowadays. This impressive roster now includes a fan favourite in Yoast! The staple WordPress SEO plug-in is now available for Shopify merchants.

SEO Tools

The Redirectinator: A URL Redirect Monitoring

An oldie but a goodie! 

There are many ways to tackle redirect mapping and monitoring with many different SEO tools, but The Redirectinator’s Google Sheet is nicely formatted so you can easily spot problem areas with your redirects — including a good/bad result, http status codes, and number of hops per redirect — while making it easy to share with clients and across teams. There is also a built-in functionality for authenticating logins for staging sites if you’re in the preparation stage before a migration.

Recommended Reading

Hook, Line, and Sinker: A Model for Crafting Successful, Viral Content – Rand Fishkin
https://sparktoro.com/blog/hook-line-and-sinker-a-model-for-crafting-successful-viral-content/
January 3, 2022

Rand’s latest post broadly examines why overachieving content pieces hit their mark (and why similar, but unperforming pieces face a different fate).


Local SEO Statistics that Tell Our Industry’s Story – Miriam Ellis
https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-industry-story
December 27, 2021

There are more than 25 interesting statistics about local SEO in this piece that essentially all point towards the fact that local search and localism are going strong.

Jobs

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:

  • More in-depth coverage of the latest algorithm turbulence in late December
  • Do links to 404 pages count?
  • Leveraging attainable keywords to create internal links
  • Some techniques to help you attain better rankings (a thread)
  • A case study on why boilerplate text may have notable implications
  • Top 2022 News SEO predictions from an industry expert
  • Google discusses mentions and off-site brand sentiment
  • Is there any reason to worry about crawl budget on a smaller site?
  • Why you shouldn’t conduct a site migration and drop AMP at the same time
  • Is Googlebot crawling your URLs with utm parameters?
  • Google’s change to the way it evaluates and reports errors in product structured data
  • 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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