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In this episode, we wish all of our fellow women in SEO a happy International Women’s Day! Marie covers the page experience update and algorithm turbulence, Google’s web rendering service component and lots more!

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

• Increased turbulence Feb 24 and Mar 3-4: Could it be connected to the desktop rollout of the page experience update?
• Tip for Google’s Web Rendering Service component
• Insight on ‘garbage parameters’
• Types of duplicate content in local SEO (plus some useful tips)
• Google Maps spam reporting system
• Tools to level up your technical SEO
• Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles

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Page Experience Update for desktop has finished rolling out

The Page Experience Update for desktop, announced on February 22, finished rolling out on March 3rd. We haven’t heard too much about how this has impacted webmasters yet, but our suspicion is that this update may have very little impact. The mobile rollout of the Page Experience Update had minimal effect on rankings. As noted below, there was some chatter on February 24, as well as March 4th, which could be related to the update. 

We’ll keep an eye on these dates and report back if we can determine anything of significance.

The page experience rollout is now complete for desktop.

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) March 3, 2022

Is your drop related to Core Web Vitals?

Worried about Core Web Vitals? Listen to @johnmu: If you saw a big drop in rankings, it's probably not from the Page Experience Update. Most sites will not see a big change based on the update. If you see drastic changes, it's more than Core Web Vitals… https://t.co/3QBD3UbEx8 pic.twitter.com/5vJkWHXw18

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 4, 2022

John in a recent hangout stated if you see a big drop in traffic it’s most likely not due to the page experience update or CWV. John suggests that CWV and page experience signals are more of a subtle ranking factor rather than one that could cause a major traffic loss. Google would most likely lower your position but nothing as drastic as going to page 2 of the SERPs. If you do see a drop in traffic, John recommends looking at your site as a whole and spending time focusing on improving site quality to determine what could have caused a traffic drop and how you can improve your site over time.

International Women’s Day

This week we shared a blog post about the women of MHC for International Women’s Day. We also included some of the amazing women we’ve been featuring in our newsletter and more information on them. If you haven’t read the post, here you go!

Happy #InternationalWomensDay to all the women and women's equality supporters out there.

For #IWD2022 we're introducing you to the amazing women at MHC and others in the industry.

We are honoured to be lead by a strong woman like @Marie_Haynes https://t.co/vPDcLPIj1r

— Marie Haynes Consulting 🐼 (@mhc_inc) March 8, 2022

Google has added new UTM parameters for the first time in over a decade

After 15 years, Google is finally adding new parameters to Google Analytics. By using both manual and auto-tagging, users have the ability to add parameters and parameters value to their source traffic dimensions in order to provide information on where their traffic originates. 

To see the full list of parameters being added, check out Google’s announcement.

Google is adding new UTM parameters for the first time in ~15 years to Google Analytics 4🤯

utm_source_platform, utm_creative_format, and utm_marketing tactic are highlighted in the campaign tagging documentation: https://t.co/HZdePd4PPq pic.twitter.com/X5LRzb3EHP

— Charles Farina (@CharlesFarina) March 2, 2022

Ad sales in Russia have been stopped

Amidst the heartbreaking war in Ukraine, Google and Bing have both ceased any ads sales in Russia. Similarly, Microsoft has suspended sales for products and services to Russia. There is definitely a big change happening due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A lot of Russian state-funded media ads have been stopped as a repercussion, and several social media platforms have paused their ties with Russia as well. If Russia is a big market for you, you will likely see an effect on traffic or ad sales.

Double verification may be needed

Verifying your business in Google Business Profiles might need one extra step of verification for added security measures. This new requirement has been recently updated in Google’s verification documents and it’s hard to say whether double verification will be the standard now, but hopefully, this will help with fake business listings in Google Maps either way.

Identifying Entity Attribute Relations – Bill Slawski
https://gofishdigital.com/blog/identifying-entity-attribute-relations/
March 2, 2022

This article comes by way of Bill Slawski and outlines a patent that Google was recently granted regarding the identification of entity-attribute relationships in bodies of text. It outlines how a model can learn facts regarding an entity from the structured data that has been used alongside it, which in turn, can be used for identifying entity-attribute relationships.

BERT 101 🤗 State Of The Art NLP Model Explained – Britney Muller
https://huggingface.co/blog/bert-101
March 2, 2022

“Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers” (BERT) has been around for a few years now, but we still see a lot of SEOs who seem confused about what it is and how it works. That is not surprising, as machine learning and natural language processing are fairly complicated topics! Luckily, Britney Muller has come to the rescue with this explainer guide on all things BERT. 

QRG Clues to How Google Evaluates Local Business Reputation – Miriam Ellis
https://moz.com/blog/google-quality-evaluator-guidelines-and-local-reputation
March 7, 2022

It is no surprise that reputation is vital for local businesses. At this point, most site owners and SEOs are aware that when analyzing websites, quality raters pay attention to a website/business reputation. But what are the reputation signals they look for? Read the article to find out!

https://twitter.com/ChelseaRhane/status/1499117657714356224

Know anyone looking for a college internship in SEO, paid social, paid search, media planning, ad ops or account management?

Razorfish Internships run 6/14-8/12 and Pay $15/hour. Send me a resume (seo at razorfish dot com) before march 20th.

— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) March 2, 2022

We're looking to hire a Content Marketer either freelance or full-time to help us create and manage our content marketing initiatives here at SplitBase. Know anyone who'd be a good fit?

— Raphael – Landing Pages for DTC (@Rpaulindaigle) March 2, 2022

I’m hiring again! I have roles for PT SMB focused SEO as well as enterprise SEO. Seeking people with 2-5 years experience. Must be US based because we have dumb laws.

— John Morabito (@JohnMorabitoSEO) March 4, 2022

Ukrainians looking for work, gigs or something: https://t.co/JW4iNX7Ayr

Filling in another one with those who may offer jobs or gigs for Ukrainian digital specialists: https://t.co/azP2kjvmBs@anton_shulke @jasonmbarnard @aleyda
Thank you so much!💙💛

— 🐝 Olesia Korobka 💙💛🐝 (@Giridja) March 2, 2022

Come work with the lovely team at @brightlocal! ☺️ They're looking for a Senior Content Marketing Manager – see the deets (including salary range🙏) here https://t.co/98jCUFHAs6

— Claire Carlile 🕊️ 🌊 🥑 🦥 (@clairecarlile) March 8, 2022

Who'd like to work for one of the industry #SEOTools as a #TechSEO specialist? It's not doing "client work" in it's traditional sense! It's the testing culture many #SEO aspire to be in!
To apply, use the link below!https://t.co/Se6FfO13yH#DigitalJobs #SEOJobs @clockworkTalent

— Natasha Woodford (@TashaWoodford) March 8, 2022

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:

• Increased turbulence Feb 24 and Mar 3-4: Could it be connected to the desktop rollout of the page experience update?
• Tip for Google’s Web Rendering Service component
• Insight on ‘garbage parameters’
• Types of duplicate content in local SEO (plus some useful tips)
• Google Maps spam reporting system
• Tools to level up your technical SEO
• Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent 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.

.@marie_haynes: “She inspires me as the leading expert in EAT and also as a successful business owner. She puts out one of the best and most in-depth SEO newsletters in the industry.”

— Inflow® (@goinflow) March 8, 2021