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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. Google SERP Changes
  8. SEO Tips
  9. Other Interesting News
  10. Local SEO Tips
  11. Recommended Reading
  12. Jobs
  13. Want More?
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SNYCU Ep. 243 (July 14, 2022)- Light Version

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In this episode, we discuss possible SERP turbulence on July 10, a new listing of Google search updates, SEO tips, news, and plenty more from across the industry!

PLUS: a new blog post on assessing Google organic traffic drops.

Missed our last episode? Check it out here.

 

SNYCU Podcast

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Ask Marie an SEO Question

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Not a premium subscriber? You're missing out!

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

  • Marie’s exclusive thoughts and analysis this week
  • Signed Exchanges launched for desktop sites
  • 8 tips to help you optimize your eCommerce site
  • If Google treats 404 and 410 response codes differently
  • New video indexing report in GSC
  • 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

Possible unannounced update on July 10, 2022?

Barry Schwartz reported talk of a possible unannounced update starting July 10th, 2022. Also, the Semrush sensor shows moderately increased SERP turbulence. We do have a few clients with increases at this time, but given we analyze analytics on Mondays (i.e. July 11 this week), not enough time has passed to be able to say with certainty if something significant has happened.

It’s possible the turbulence seen is related to a reduction in PAA results in the SERPS which we have discussed elsewhere in this newsletter.

We’ll keep an eye on this and report back next week with more of our data!

 

MHC Announcements

Want to know how to assess a traffic drop?

If you’ve fallen victim to a Google organic traffic loss or, wondering how you can stay on top of your traffic assessments, you’ll want to give our guide on assessing Google organic traffic drops a thorough read and a bookmark! 

At MHC, we also provide a thorough traffic drop assessment as part of our service offerings – either as a standalone service or combined with another service depending on your needs. Get in touch with our team to see how we can help you!

 

Missed our last blog post?

Last week, Marie wrote a fantastic article on the pros and cons of SERP annotations and how it relates to creating great content. Show the article some love and check out the awesome thread by Simone De Palma.

 

Google Announcements

Google Search ranking updates

Despite years of Google graciously giving webmasters a heads-up on core update announcements, they’re only just now giving the community a spot to look to track all of these.

You may be wondering how we feel given we’ve been tracking known and suspected algorithm updates since 2012. Well, we think it’s great Google is finally doing this! Google’s resource allows you to look at all the major updates that they’ve deemed important. However, ours differs in the sense that all other notable dates (including suspected changes) are identified which is a much more comprehensive look at the algorithm landscape.

This news generated plenty of buzz across Twitter, with one notable SEO mentioning to never rely on Google as a single source of truth. He then mentioned MHC’s as a great option (thank you Cyrus 😉) . Either way, this is great for the community!

 

Search Console Insights now supports GA4

If you had GA4 set up for your site before, you may know that GSC Insights would not work. Thankfully, they now work as covered by Barry in his detailed article. 

As we transition more into GA4 and away from Universal Analytics, this is a valuable integration and allows website owners to see a lot more data.

 

Track conversions from shopping results in Google Search!

Using auto-tagging, merchants can now track conversions from shopping results in Google Search. All you need to do is sign into your Merchant Center account and turn the auto-tagging settings on. 

 

Google SERP Changes

Reduction in PAA boxes? 

In this article Barry reports that Rank Ranger, Semrush, and seoClarity have all confirmed that there has been a significant drop in the “People Also Ask” results last week and less likely to show up. 

This feature helps searchers find other queries related to the query they’ve entered into the search bar. Not only was this helpful for searchers by providing results to similar queries, but it was also helpful for SEOs and SEMs as it was a source for content ideas and keyword research.

 

SEO Tips

Should you block your search results page from indexing?

John Mueller re-iterates Google’s stance on noindexing search query pages by default. In general, these are seen as quite low-quality pages and lead to unnecessary index bloat. John also notes that he often receives emails from webmasters complaining about their search function being spammed with queries. In some cases can push unwanted /?search=spam.com pages into the index and can be a pain to clean up.

 

Source HTML vs. Rendered HTML

We absolutely love these Search Central Lightning Talks! In this edition, Martin Splitt talks all about how rendering works.

As Martin explains, the source HTML is what a server sends to a browser when a page is opened which then gets turned into the DOM. The rendered HTML on the other hand reflects the DOM (and changes to the DOM) turned back into HTML. 

The video is a quick 9 minutes so be sure to give it a view!

 

Other Interesting News

New GA4 features rolling out

As we mentioned previously, since we are rolling more into GA4 and away from Universal Analytics, this isn’t entirely surprising. 

Like it or not, GA4 is the new wave! Along with these releases, we imagine that GA4 will be getting a lot more enhancements as we get closer to when Universal Analytics is retired.

 

​​Google testing large images in ads (again) 

It seems that Google is again testing larger images for ads on SERPs  – similar to what happened back in 2019. As we know, ads are not part of organic rankings, but with such a big real estate, this change surrounding ads is as close to a paid SERP feature that one can get and could help sites that are further down SERPs.

 

Local SEO Tips

The types of local justifications and what you need to know about them

“Justifications” are bits of text that explain why Google chose to show a particular business for a user’s search query. Types of Google justifications include:

  • Website mentions. For example: “This website mentions skincare”.
  • Review justification. For example: “Very pretty store, but bad skincare products”
  • In stock justification. These are third-party functions that need to be enabled.
  • Sold here justification. Much like the review justifications, “sold here” can pull information provided by users as well.
  • Provides justification. These are for service-based businesses.
  • Menu justification. For example: “Menu highlight: apple pie” or “On the menu: apple pie”.
  • Post justification. These pull keywords from Google posts and have an exclamation point before them.

If you’re asking yourself “why aren’t my justifications showing?”, double check your GBP setup. Often times the “online services” and “online appointment” attributes will block them from showing in the local pack. But before you remove the attribute, ask yourself if the justifications will provide more important information. You could get a negative review justification in its place!

This lovely article by Erin Jones from Search Engine Land explains that justifications are not a quick fix for a bad website or GBP. Relevant content needs to be provided for your business/local area and be sure to follow local SEO best practices.

 

Google Posts expire after 6 months now

This is rather big news! Google has announced that Google Posts now expire after 6 months. A year or two ago, it used to be the case that Google Posts would expire after 7 days. This now means that your most recent posts exceeding a publish date of 6 months will no longer appear in your Google Business Profile. Google encourages business owners to get in the habit of sharing new updates and information frequently.

 

Recommended Reading

Link Relevance vs. Content Relevance in Link Building – Paddy Moogan
https://moz.com/blog/link-relevance-vs-content-relevance
June 28, 2022

Paddy Moogan from Aira has written a fantastic post about how SEOs should think about their content and link relevance. Google is very likely assessing hundreds of different factors when evaluating an outbound link but in general, we tend to view these as link relevance, which is based on domain relevance, page relevance, and anchor text. And content relevance is about the context of the page on your site getting linked to.

Paddy argues that making the content too broad means it’s less relevant and this content relevance is likely the stronger signal at play. Check out the full article for more!

 

How Stacker.com Earned 1M+ Organic Monthly Visits Through Content Syndication [Case Study] – Amanda Milligan
https://moz.com/blog/content-syndication-case-study 
July 7, 2022

A benefit of content syndication is the potential to improve SEO performance. It’s clear that in this case study by Amanda Milligan from Moz, Stacker.com’s syndication approach provided great success. Often when SEO’s hear “syndication” there is a fear of posting duplicate content (which would have little to no value in Google’s eyes). It’s worth noting that in a large portion of this case study syndicated content is being marked with a rel=canoncial tag to the target domain. 

If you’re unsure if content syndication could be for you give the whole article a read!

 

The Importance of Quality Thresholds and Predictive Ranking – Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR
https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/importance-quality-thresholds-predictive-ranking/
July 7, 2022

If you are a webmaster currently drafting a new keyword strategy, we recommend checking out Koray Tuğberk’s recent article for oncrawl.com. In it, Koray dissects a recent case study of 27 articles and the importance that quality thresholds play in ranking.

Koray mentions a few ways that webmasters can exceed their quality thresholds. These include the use of factual sentence structures, including branded images with unique composition, optimizing discourse integration, and expanding the evidence with variations.

For more information on quality thresholds and how to better implement content for them, check out Koray’s article.

 

Jobs

Looking for a new SEO job? SEOjobs.com is a job board curated by real SEOs for SEOs. Take a look at five of the hottest SEO job listing this week (below) and sign up for the weekly job listing email only available at SEOjobs.com.

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:

  • Marie’s exclusive thoughts and analysis this week
  • Signed Exchanges launched for desktop sites
  • 8 tips to help you optimize your eCommerce site
  • If Google treats 404 and 410 response codes differently
  • New video indexing report in GSC
  • 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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