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. Other Interesting News
  9. Local SEO
  10. Recommended Reading
  11. Jobs
  12. Want More?
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Ep. 250- September 1, 2022 - Light Version

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What is going on with the helpful content update? We discuss everything we know (and suspect) so far. (Some of this is only for premium readers though.) Good tips for eCommerce sites. Several tips for technical SEO, discussion on AI image use for blog posts and more on entities in this packed issue.

SNYCU Podcast

I was honoured to interview Alan Kent from Google for podcast this week. Alan is a developer advocate at Google. He has worked extensively on communication surrounding the product reviews update. I was fascinated by what he had to say on Google’s use of machine learning in their algorithms.

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

  • More on what we know about the helpful content update
  • Google has not released a link focused update in a while
  • Interesting June knowledge graph update
  • Use regex in GSC to find your searcher’s questions
  • A framework for creating technical SEO documentation
  • Should you no index comment pages?
  • Do not redirect 404 pages to your home page
  • Tips for using tools to help with hreflang
  • What SEOs should know about entity classifications
  • Cool stuff about using Dall-E-2 to create blog post images
  • Tips for repurposing content
  • GA4 bug affecting conversion events
  • Google is testing posting read times in the SERPS
  • Google is still moving sites to mobile first indexing
  • Why did this site get slapped with a pure spam manual action
  • Local SEO: new warning that Google has not verified reviews
  • Good chrome extensions for SEO
  • New tool from Mobile Moxie
  • A bookmarklet to see if you are filtered by Safe Search
  • Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles
You’ll also have access to all past episodes, including this one.
I

News about Google’s Algorithms

The latest on the helpful content update

So far, this update is a dud! Lily Ray reported on a few big sites that may have been hit. But this is the only evidence I’ve seen so far.

At MHC, we have a few clients with interesting increases in traffic just before the update, starting around August 22, but none that look like a helpful content hit or win. 

Keep in mind that with the latest product reviews update, it started rolling out on July 27, but we didn’t see much significant movement until August 2. 

I think any of the following are possible:

  • We may see more sites affected soon as Google has not confirmed the update has finished rolling out
  • The update may have no teeth and only go after the spammiest of sites and newly created low quality sites
  • The update may start out mild and as the classifier “learns” via machine learning, more and more sites will be affected

I think that this update is going to cause headaches. If your traffic starts to decline in a few months, you won’t know whether it’s because of the helpful content classifier or not. We won’t have specific update days like we did with Panda and Penguin years ago. I wrote more here on the confusion the helpful content update is likely to cause.

In the premium version I share everything we’ve learned from Danny Sullivan and John Mueller’s tweets this week

MHC Announcements

Hourly consultation with Marie available

I have freed up some time for hourly consultation. If you’d like to do a Zoom call with me to discuss your site, my current hourly rate is $300. You can book time here. If you’re not certain whether you’d benefit most from a Zoom call or a full site review, you can reach out here.

Google Announcements

Tips for eCommerce sites from Alan Kent

There’s a lot to be learned from this newest video from Google Search Central:

A primer on structured data from Google

This was helpful:

SEO Tips

A very thorough checklist for doing technical SEO audits

Thank you for publishing this Shaun!

Insight into GSC’s new Video Index report

Google says they are going to auto-identify if you have a video and alert you if the url is not indexable, it’s missing thumbnails or has the wrong format or file type. They do this through a video sitemap, HTML tags used, structured data or “If a video is the main content of the page”.

Gianna noted that GSC identified keywords on a page that are associated with videos which ended up creating a bunch of false positives.

Other Interesting News

Spam bots are on the rise in GA again

I’ve seen an uptick in people saying they are dealing with spam in Google Analytics again.

We have spoken in previous newsletters about how to deal with these bots, but it is often tricky. In some cases you can set up filters in GA to eliminate their visits from showing and complicating your data, but not always. One good thing to know is that these bots have no impact on your ability to rank.

Local SEO

Does adding attributes to your GMB help with ranking?

In this article, Colan’s conclusion is, “GMB Identity Attributes have a strong impact on ranking for the keywords related to that attribute.” For example, adding, “women-led” as an attribute will help you rank better for people who are specifically looking for businesses of your type that are women-led.

Recommended Reading

Is Indexing the Next Big Challenge in SEO?
https://dantaylor.online/blog/is-indexing-about-to-be-the-next-big-challenge-in-seo/

Dan Taylor – August 27, 2022

This was a really interesting read. We were drawn to it because we’ve seen a huge uptick recently in Google help forum posts from people struggling to get content indexed.

 

Drill your Content Strategy on Topic Modelling with Python
https://seodepths.com/python-for-seo/topic-modelling-content-strategy/

Simone DePalma – August 26, 2022

Simone says that Google uses multiple topic layers when trying to rank content. Topic Modelling is a suite of NLP techniques that identify themes in a group of documents. He says, “In a nutshell, topic modelling is an unsupervised machine learning method that helps us discover semantic structures in a text and learn about topic representations. 

He describes a process that goes into great detail on using Python, Screaming Frog crawl data and LDA topic model training to do this.

Alt Text: What It Is & How To Write
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/alt-text-for-images/461262/

Olga Zarzeczna – August 22, 2022

Good alt text can help your SEO, but also is important when it comes to helping people who use screen readers to understand your content. We feel site owners should be paying close attention to image use on their sites, especially as Google does more and more with MUM and Google Lens.

What is a topic cluster for SEO?
https://samuelschmitt.com/what-is-a-topic-cluster/

Samuel Schmitt – October 2021

Creating a cluster of pages on a particular topic may help you gain authority on that topic. 

Transitioning to GA4: Is this the Right Analytics Move for Your Team?
https://moz.com/blog/transitioning-to-ga4

Sam Torres – July 25, 2022

We all know that GA as we know it is going away. Google says it will be accessible for at least six months following its retirement in July 2023, but then it will no longer be available. If you want to track YOY data, you need to be setting up GA4 now. 

The pros and cons of using AI content writing tools
https://searchengineland.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-using-ai-content-writing-tools-387519

James Hare – August 26, 2022

There is a lot of controversy lately over AI tools that help with content writing. 

 

 

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:

  • More on what we know about the helpful content update
  • Google has not released a link focused update in a while
  • Interesting June knowledge graph update
  • Use regex in GSC to find your searcher’s questions
  • A framework for creating technical SEO documentation
  • Should you no index comment pages?
  • Do not redirect 404 pages to your home page
  • Tips for using tools to help with hreflang
  • What SEOs should know about entity classifications
  • Cool stuff about using Dall-E-2 to create blog post images
  • Tips for repurposing content
  • GA4 bug affecting conversion events
  • Google is testing posting read times in the SERPS
  • Google is still moving sites to mobile first indexing
  • Why did this site get slapped with a pure spam manual action
  • Local SEO: new warning that Google has not verified reviews
  • Good chrome extensions for SEO
  • New tool from Mobile Moxie
  • A bookmarklet to see if you are filtered by Safe Search
  • 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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