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Episode 80 - April 24, 2019 - Light Version

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In this episode, we'll cover the rolling out of AMP Real URL, the Google News indexing issue (now resolved), more images appearing in the Google SERPs, whether a no-index in your robots.txt file is recognized by Google, how to handle disavowing a redirected URL, tips from John Mueller on recovering from quality updates, and much more.

Marie’s Podcast for this episode

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In this episode:

Paid members also get the following:

  • AJAX/XHR calls have been added to Google's list of things which will use up your crawl budget
  • Better protection against Man in the Middle phishing attacks
  • The progression of Google’s Knowledge Graph search cards
  • Disavow Question: Backlink on Site A redirects to Site B. Which site should you disavow?
  • Why robots.txt noindex is not officially used by Google
  • Marie Kondo your URL parameters
  • Tips from John about how to recover from quality updates
  • Redirects with different 3xx codes? Think again
  • Have you rebranded with a new site but you didn’t redirect? John Mueller weighs in
  • Event spam can be done easily
  • Review gating – A surprising response
  • JSON-LD Schema Generator For SEO
  • Ex-Googler says Google tolerated non-search spam
  • My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

Algorithm Updates

We did not see any activity in our clients’ traffic patterns this week that would suggest a significant algorithm update.

Google Announcements

Official announcement of AMP real URL

Google is officially rolling out instant-loading AMP pages from your own domain.

It used to be that there was a separate AMP cached page from your main mobile page, and this was what made the AMP version load so quickly. However, there was user confusion because they were served the AMP version of a page but it showed a URL that started with "Google.com" (or whatever cTLD was relevant to the user) rather than showing the actual URL of the domain the page was from. In addition to user confusion, it also made it difficult to know if the page was authentic and secure and the domain's "green lock" showing information about that domain's security certificate was unavailable for the AMP versions of pages.

So now, Google is rolling out "AMP Real URL", which will allow the AMP version of pages to still be served from a cache and maintain their fast speeds, but it will also retain the original page's URL and all the benefits and transparencies that go with it. If you're interested in the technical nitty gritty of how this was achieved, here is a blog post from last November detailing what Google's solution to this was:

If you don't want that much info and are just curious what this means for you, check out the blog post as there's a lot more information there!

Also worth mentioning, the AMP plugin WordPress has will now support AMP Stories:

Google’s Daniel Waisberg talks enriching search results through structured data

This here is the first part in a series on structured data. As such, Daniel breaks down structured data in terms of its definition, quick stats from businesses who have adopted it, as well as how to use it. He keeps things light which is great if you’re not overly familiar with the topic!

Google News indexing issues has been resolved

The weird indexing thing with Google News content has now been solved. It only affected a limited number of publishers, and content that wasn't getting indexed normally has now either been re-indexed or will be over the next day.

Chrome is testing a new extension menu

Note: You'll need to install Chrome Canary if you want to test it out!

Google SERP Changes

More images appearing in the SERPs

As of April 13, images in the top 10 have jumped from approx 24% occurrence to a 34% occurrence.

We have to wonder, could this be an indication of permanent changes? And how does this tie in with John Mueller saying images are gaining importance on the web or Gary Illyes’ Reddit AMA where he mentioned that Image search is the most overlooked areas for SEOs these days? Well, if images are surfacing more frequently in the SERPs, this may be a clear opportunity to get moving on image optimization!

Vote for movie attributes. How cool!

Martin’s final episode of the JS SEO series: Dynamic Rendering for JavaScript web apps

As we mentioned, this is the last of recorded episodes but that also means it’s time for new content! What would you like to see covered in future episodes? Have your say!

Local SEO - Google Announcements

Suggested posts from Google My Business

This is only available in some countries, though the announcement doesn't specify which ones. The announcement can be found here, as GMB noticed that the link provided in the original Tweet was incorrect.

Here is what it looks like in action:

Short business names rolling out on GMB

Short names are here! Google started its rollout which will allow businesses to create a custom, short URL that can be used for easy access to their business profile on Google.

How does it work? A verified business can select a short name (aka a short link) in the form of “g.page/[yourcustomname]” and users can use that identifier to find your Business Profile via your browser's search bar. At 5-32 characters in length, Google hopes the short name will create a create a tidier URL that businesses owners can take ownership of and be confident when talking directly with customers.

Things are still in the early stages, however, this will grow to become more useful over time. Learn more from Google or check out BrightLocal’s article which breaks down some of the finer details along with some Q&A.

Local SEO - Other Interesting News

Google My Business suspensions are causing reviews to vanish

Over on the Local Search Forum, Joy Hawkins mentions that as businesses get suspended on and then reinstated, their return sees the loss of all of their reviews (sometimes well over a thousand!). If you are one of the businesses in this situation, please be advised that this is a known issue from Google, and that this is unintended. Hopefully we can learn more about this asap!

SEO Tools

Local Sponsorship finding tool

If you do SEO for small businesses, this tool from ZipSprout may be incredibly useful for you. It is designed to be a way to easily find sponsorship opportunities for small businesses.

We hesitated at first as to whether to include this resource in our newsletter as technically a link from a sponsorship could be considered a paid link by Google. While we do not recommend paying for links, we do think that in some cases, it makes sense even beyond SEO for a business to become a sponsor.

What MHC thinks about sponsorship links

For many small businesses, a couple of links from valid sponsorships has the potential to help improve rankings. Our recommendation, should you use this tool is to use it with moderation. The goal here should not be to get as many links as possible, however. If done on a large scale, sponsorships for links could potentially open up the door for a manual action. Really though, you would have to seriously be overdoing this tactic in order to run into trouble.

Recommended Reading

How to rank ecommerce category pages for SEO – John Doherty
https://www.getcredo.com/rank-ecommerce-category-pages-seo/
April 16th, 2019

We absolutely love one of the opening lines in this article: “The best way to acquire targeted ecommerce customers through SEO is by ranking your category and subcategory pages higher in the search engines for their queries.” We couldn’t agree more.


Advanced Google Chrome Bookmarklets for SEOs: A Detailed Guide – Glen Allsopp
https://detailed.com/chrome-bookmarklets-seo
April 18th, 2019

In the interest of full disclosure, this does require a very small bit of coding for making the Chrome bookmarklets, but Glen tells you how to do it and even gives you the code snippet so that you can just copy and paste.


How Do I Improve My Domain Authority (DA)? – Dr. Peter J. Meyers
https://moz.com/blog/how-do-i-improve-my-domain-authority
April 17th, 2019

Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google to determine rankings. However, among a series of other metrics, it can be a good benchmark that helps give you a better indication of how you stack up to your competition (in respect to authority).


We Analyzed 12 Million Outreach Emails. Here’s What We Learned – Brian Dean
https://backlinko.com/email-outreach-study
April 16th, 2019

Disecting 12 million outreach emails to determine what’s working these days, this study looked at a number of key things including subject lines, personalization, and follow-up sequences.


Google turns on “Reserve” for TripAdvisor - Where is the effing off button! – Mike Blumenthal
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2019/04/18/google-turns-on-reserve-for-trip-advisor-wheres-the-effing-off-button/
April 18th, 2019

Mike Blumenthal reports on a new feature in the Google My Business world, whereby companies who have the feature to book their services via TripAdvisor (amongst their other vendors) are given the option to do so from the SERPs themselves (in the GMB knowledge panel).


Bots drove nearly 40% of internet traffic last year — and the naughty ones are getting smarter – Matthew Hughes
https://thenextweb.com/security/2019/04/17/bots-drove-nearly-40-of-internet-traffic-last-year-and-the-naughty-ones-are-getting-smarter/
April 17th, 2019

Automated web traffic from bots and crawlers accounts for a part of total web traffic around the world. A paper published by Distil Networks states that in 2018, automated bots had accounted for 37.9% of all web traffic. Both good bots and bad bots were accounted for in this percentage with 17.5% and 20.4% respectively. Good bots being scrapers for travel sites and bad bots being a denial of service attacks. While the total amount of human traffic was 62.1% remaining.


How Diverse is ‘People Also Ask’? An Intent Analysis Study – Mordy Oberstein
https://www.rankranger.com/blog/people-also-ask-intent
April 17th, 2019

People Also Ask (PPA) is continuing to develop into a fascinating feature that can have serious effects on an individual's search path. In this article, Mordy Oberstein, does a deep dive into this SERP feature and tries to identify exactly how Google determines the correct PPA intent. 


Using Yoast SEO Structured Data with Genesis – Bill Erickson
https://www.billerickson.net/yoast-schema-with-genesis/
April 19th, 2019

Important point here from Bill Erickson: If you’re using Genesis schema and Yoast SEO at the same time, this produces duplication of your structured data that can be confusing or cause conflicts for search engines. 


Searching for facts, directions, local businesses are top digital assistant use cases, says survey – Greg Sterling
https://searchengineland.com/searching-for-facts-directions-local-businesses-are-top-digital-assistant-use-cases-says-survey-315641
April 19th, 2019

A new study from Microsoft is out which has findings based on two surveys -- one from mid-2018 which includes an international sample and another one from 2019 which has over 5,000 US consumers. During that period between surveys, the percentage of consumer owning a digital assistant grew by 22 percent to land at 45 percent on the year.

Recommended Reading (Local SEO)

Local Search Forum Discussion on GMB Posts – Local Search Forum
https://www.localsearchforum.com/threads/has-anyone-seen-improved-rankings-from-doing-gmb-posts-consistently.54147/
April 14th, 2019

There was a really interesting discussion on the Local Search Forum this week about the efficacy of consistently publishing GMB posts. Run by Joy Hawkins and the team at Sterling Sky, The Local Search Forum is a great place to pick up some great nuggets of information on local SEO from some of the industry's experts.

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That's it for this episode! Stay tuned for our Youtube video (my channel is here). If you want to follow me on Facebook, here is my page.

 

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