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Episode 82 - May 8, 2019 - Light Version

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In this jam-packed episode, we will cover signs of algorithm activity between April 27 and May 1, the news that Googlebot now uses the latest version of Chromium, the new structured data reports in GSC, the news that Google is going to start indexing podcasts and returning audio results, the importance of sitemaps, and much more.

Marie’s Podcast for this episode

We are now publishing our podcast recording of each episode on the same day as the newsletter is published! You can listen to it below.

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In this episode:

Paid members also get the following:

  • Google I/O reveals a switch in URL display will only alert users when it’s non-secure
  • Some tips on how to interpret the field data from the PageSpeed Insights report
  • Google’s new portal for How News Works (+more E-A-T talk)
  • Manual action with Reddit links as examples? You likely have bigger problems
  • Add this attribute to automatically enable lazy loading on your site on Chrome
  • Work anywhere with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides in new offline mode
  • Tables in Featured Snippets are showing more text
  • Just how valuable are Sitemaps? Hear it directly from Google (SMS Sydney tip)
  • How to best use Google’s structured data testing tool
  • John Mueller addresses concern over thin content blocked by robots.txt being indexed
  • How to make your content more accessible
  • How’s this for link building?
  • Another excellent link building idea (from SMS Sydney)
  • Does keyword placement in page titles matter?
  • Does Google look at the quality of individual subdomains?
  • Looking to change URLs? And just how important are keywords in your URL structure?
  • Infinite scroll on news sites does not mesh well with Google
  • Local SEO: The return of QR codes?
  • Local SEO: Service Area Businesses beware -- hiding your address could be the kiss of death
  • My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

Algorithm Updates

April 27-May 1, 2019

We had a great number of sites in our Google Analytics profiles that saw significant changes in Google organic traffic at this time. From what we can see, all of the sites that saw changes would be considered YMYL sites. A large number of them have issues with thin content.

Here is a client of ours that has been working on cleaning up copious amounts of thin and duplicated content. They were negatively affected by the September 27, 2019 update and appear to be seeing nice improvements this past week. We had initially attributed the increase to changes related to Google’s deindexing bug that started April 26, but starting April 28, it looks like things are improving. It’s not a crazy increase, but hopefully a start in the right direction.

Here is another client of ours that is an e-Commerce health store. This site is working on improving thin content and improving their E-A-T. They were hit slightly March 12, 2019 and are now seeing what looks like a recovery. It’s early though:

Possible trust component?

We did notice that a number of sites that we identified as having issues with trustworthiness saw drops last week. We saw slight drops in a few sites for whom we had recommended filing a thorough disavow. For each of these sites seeing drops, the recommendation was made, but the disavow was not filed. We do feel that link quality is a component of trust.

However, there are other sites that have recently filed good disavows that did not see significant changes at this time.

We also noted some interesting changes in some sites that had trust issues surrounding business practices and reputation. For this past client, we recommended disassociating with a writer who had a history of fraud. It’s a complicated story, but the main point is that we felt that even though this writer was authoritative and seen as an expert, the bad reputation of this main author was impacting Google’s ability to trust the site. They got more authoritative writers who were recognized as trustworthy experts in their industry. We’re hoping this is the start of a nice recovery:

It’s hard to say whether the algorithm turbulence between April 27 and May 1 is a significant update or not. It’s likely not on the scale of the updates that we saw August 1, September 27 or March 12. At this point we feel that this is a general update related to E-A-T. We also think that tweaks may have been made to how Google assesses link quality.

Google Announcements

A set of structured data new reports coming to GSC

Part two of the structured data series has arrived and it covers “what you can do with Search Console to monitor and make the most out of structured data for your site.” Additionally, there’s more new features rolling out to serve you better!

Here are the newest additions:

  • Unparsable Structured Data Report that aggregates structured data syntax errors.
  • New Enhancement reports -- joining existing reports such as Recipe, Event, Job Postings, and more -- include:

To view more on each of these reports, SER published a short article with visuals and steps to find these.

Also now, each time Google spots an issue with your structured data, they’ll send you an email to notify you. However, it’s important that you monitor this periodically as an existing issue that worsens will not trigger an email.

Otherwise, there’s a reminder in this announcement about the structured data testing tool on a URL level called the URL Inspection tool. This is a handy tool indeed which helps flag warnings and errors related to your structured data, and also allows you to find information to learn more about it. Don’t forget that you can validate fixes here as well.

As of the time of publishing this newsletter, we -- along with several other SEOs -- have spotted these reports in GSC.

New from Google I/O: Googlebot now uses the latest version of Chromium

There was a big announcement on the first day of Google I/O, a “new evergreen Googlebot” has been released, which will run on whatever the latest version of Chromium is (currently, Chromium is on version 74).

If you’re wondering if Google will be keeping this updated, Martin Splitt says that the new Googlebot will be updated within a few weeks of each new Chrome stable release:

You may recall that Googlebot as a bit of a delay in between crawling and rendering JavaScript, as Alan Bleiweiss points out:

https://twitter.com/AlanBleiweiss/status/1125863583789662208

According to Martin, there will still be a delay in the evergreen Googlebot, and there is no news to announce yet about merging those two waves of crawl/render into one:

A few people have noticed that their server logs are still showing the same Googlebot user agent as before (Chrome 41):

But Martin has confirmed that the user agent name you’re seeing in your logs is wrong because they didn’t want to affect things for people who may have hardcoded things for the old version of Googlebot -- changes are coming but Google is taking their time to minimize issues:

And as a heads up, some of the tools aren’t showing the new Googlebot, yet. Some of the ones we saw was the Mobile-Friendly Test:

And the URL Inspection Tool:

However, Martin has confirmed that the tools just haven’t been updated yet:

And Gary Illyes pointed out that different teams at Google use Googlebot at different settings, and some have the new rendering engine (and some don’t):

For more discussion on this and what other people are saying, you can check out the roundup post in Search Engine Roundtable.

Finally, if you have a chance to catch it, Martin will be speaking at I/O on Thursday, May 9th, at 1:30 pm (PDT) about how Googlebot crawls and renders websites, so we’re expecting to hear a bit more about this new evergreen Googlebot and the new things it can do!

Google to start indexing podcasts

This is an interesting development. As Dr Pete points out, Google is already doing this with video content in the normal SERPs by providing featured video answers that are often fast forwarded to the exact time that is useful for the user. This will start happening with some voice search queries, where a snippet from a podcast is returned to the user - it is likely however that a lot of these voice queries will still be returned by content drawn directly from the knowledge graph.

This might be somewhat of a polarising issue for SEO and content creators. On the one hand, a lot of content creators revenue source comes from advertising on their site, or at the start and end of their podcast. This could be reduced if just a snippet it getting repurposed for a voice snippet (the same complaint people have with feature snippet/answer boxes).

On the other hand, having a representative from your company replying directly to a user when they ask a question could do wonders for brand exposure. For instance, if someone asked an SEO questions, and the response from Google Voice Search was a clip from the Marie Haynes Podcast, then that would be a cool way to get solidified as somewhat of an expert on SEO in that users mind!

Manual actions disappeared and came back again

We reported last week that many sites had their manual action disappear from GSC. As expected, these have all returned. This appears to be another bug on Google’s side.

As a side note, it appears that Google is handing out more manual actions for unnatural links. We have received more requests for help than usual lately. Several of these sites are theme designers who have used footer links as a way to build unnatural links. We have an article from a few years ago that really should be relevant today about what Google has said is and isn’t acceptable in terms of footer links and SEO.

If you are interested in consulting with our team to help remove a manual action, you can do that here.

Martin Splitt announced a new series called SEO Mythbusting

What an excellent idea! Check out the trailer for a preview of what to expect. There’s some really good questions being asked which make us very excited for this! Stay tuned 🙂

Google SERP Changes

What the heck is going on here?

No word yet if this is a test, but it has been replicated by a few different people, including this one from SEMRush, where they are still seeing an ad but no organic results:

SEO Tips

Interesting tip here from Dan Shure

A client's category page kept returning a 'soft 404' and refused to be indexed. The URL contained /404/ as part of the category ID and once it was updated to a new non-404 number, it indexed immediately. Something to keep in mind, for sure!

Your reputation matters!

How to future proof your SEO

Great tweet here from Greg Gifford. To take this one step further, try to provide exceptional value to users. Check out your competitors and find ways to provide value beyond what they can find anywhere else. If you do this well, they’ll have no reason to go elsewhere.

Can Googlebot sort out your mess? Best to not leave it to chance

Googlebot is usually pretty good at sorting out your website's messes, but if it's important, don't make Googlebot guess what you mean.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1124053970635436043

Don’t sweat naturally earned links

We talk about this plenty and most of you are likely already aware, but here once again from Google -- don’t focus on link metrics that aren’t used by Google!

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1125750316106780672

User-generated content counts as main content, better be sure it’s contributing positively!

John says that a distributor can outrank a manufacturer. Here’s how:

Think it’s impossible to outrank a manufacturer? You’re in luck! John Mueller says that there is no algorithm that would specifically do this. Essentially it boils down to value, quality, technical standpoint, and authority!

How far along is Google with the mobile-first indexing?

Barry Schwartz asked John Mueller about the progress that Google has been making with MFI recently as things have been a little quiet from Google over the last few months. Here’s what John said:

“We’re moving. So it's a tough problem. So it's coming step by step. I suspect at some point we'll have some more announcements on the next steps that we've taken and where we're headed from here. In general, I think that the team is on track here and we're seeing that a lot of the web is really ready for mobile-first indexing, which is kind of reflected in that over 50% of the sites that we show have switched. So that's I think overall really good sign.”

If you want to get the full story on mobile-first indexing, check out our article full of everything you need to know! If for any reason you’re in the trailing 50% of sites, understand that mobile-first indexing is happening whether or not you like it. It’s time to buckle down and tie up any loose ends. Ultimately, you and your users will be much happier that you did so!

Other interesting News

DuckDuckGo announces Do-Not-Track Act 2019

DuckDuckGo has announced that they are intending to draft a piece of legislation called the "Do-Not-Track Act of 2019". This is intended to legally require websites to honour their users tracking preferences. Currently, "Do-Not-Track" (DNT) is only voluntary, meaning sites still have the option of deciding whether or not they want to respect that signal. There is no current timeline for this, and it's difficult to say whether or not this is even going to make it into law. However, with GDPR almost one year old, and growing concerns about tech companies not respecting user privacy, it doesn't seem too far fetched anymore.

SEO certificates from Moz

Moz now offers a certification program in order to help train people to become more familiar and competent with their tools, as well as teach people what those tools are able to be used for.

Their certification program costs $595, and has five core competency areas:

  1. Understand the Fundamentals
  2. Develop Keyword Strategies
  3. Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies
  4. Build Effective Link Strategies
  5. Create Efficient Reporting Strategies

The certification program is offered through Moz Academy and will take several hours to complete, contain quizzes, and have a final exam. If you pass, you get a printable certificate and a badge you can add to your LinkedIn, however, your certification is only valid for one year to ensure all graduates are trained with the most up-to-date information available.

New Wix SEO Contest

Oh no. Here we go again. Many of you may remember the fiasco that happened the last time Wix ran an SEO contest. They previously ran a contest to see who could rank first for the term “SEO Hero”. Many felt it was a disaster as the top ranking sites were repeatedly negative SEO’d and it took forever for the winner to actually receive their money:

In this case, Light On SEO won the contest with their keyword research tool, at seo-hero.tech.

This year’s contest is a little different. They are going to choose two finalists to compete. These are chosen based on things like the reputation and ranking of the finalists, the quality of their content and years of experience.

One finalist will try to rank a website that is pro Wix (wixseolovers.com) and one that is against Wix in terms of SEO (wixseohaters.com).

The winning team receives $25,000 and the losing team receives $10,000.

I suppose that’s a reasonable price to pay to have a well respected SEO agency tout the SEO virtues of your product. I wonder if they will choose fairly and also have a good agency run the anti-Wix site.

One final ironic note...if you are trying to find out information on how this contest works, it’s super hard to find this information on Google. A search for “Wix SEO contest” only shows results from the last contest:

Even a search using Google’s new date operators doesn’t find the information:

It’s certainly possible that this is a new page and it will take some time to rank. Or perhaps Wix can use some SEO help?

Here are John Mueller’s thoughts on SEO contests.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1126149868861284353?s=20

Local SEO - Google Announcements

Possible bug in GMB Insights

According to one user on the Local Search Forum, a support person indicated that work is being done on the Insights section to make it more responsive and is the reason why some data cannot be visible at the moment (though things should be back to normal asap).

Local SEO - Tips

Stop sending so many emails asking for a review

Local SEO - Other Interesting News

CallJoy from Google

Google has announced CallJoy, a cloud-based phone agent that allows small business owners to automate their customer service. According to Area 120 (which is Google’s experimental projects division and the creators of CallJoy), small businesses receive an average of 13 phone calls every day and nearly half of their calls go unanswered because owners are too busy, so this could potentially help save a lot of time. Once you get yourself set up, you'll receive a local phone number. CallJoy can also block spam calls, and for non-spam calls, an automated greeting will be given in addition to basic business information. You can also get more nuanced. For example, if there is a task which can be done online (such as booking an appointment or placing an order), CallJoy will send that customer a text message with the URL to complete that task. CallJoy has a flat fee of $39/month, and they are currently allowing small business owners to sign up for early access -- priority will initially be given to businesses with a GMB profile already set up.

Depending on your level of cynicism, using CallJoy opts you in to allowing Google to collect data from offline searches, OR using CallJoy allows you to do keyword research from actual calls with customers and/or potential customers.

Recommended Reading

XSS attacks on Googlebot allow search index manipulation – Tom Anthony
http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/xss-attacks-googlebot-index-manipulation/
May 1, 2019

We highly recommend that you read Tom's article to get all the details and the full rundown of the history of this. Tom says he has reported this vulnerability to Google back in November 2018, and as of yet, this has not been patched... although Tom suspects this is because Google is planning on releasing a new build of Googlebot soon that would solve this problem.


Trust Metrics at Google – Bill Slawski
https://gofishdigital.com/trust-metrics/
May 1, 2019

This is an important analysis from Bill Slawski regarding how Google establishes different metrics regarding the trustworthiness of a site. Trust is a quality that we believe Google has been getting a lot better at determining and incorporating into rankings more recently. In our experience, a number the major quality updates over the past 6-12 months have, in part, reflected this.


Structured Data in Search – Bill Slawski
https://gofishdigital.com/structured-data/
May 2, 2019

One of Google’s new experimental searches is building on old research. Google has been focusing on understanding and using Structured Data such as Schema and Data in Tables to produce featured snippets and knowledge panels. Table Search is a project that started in 2008 that showed data in a table in the SERPS.


Google may be about to kill affiliate marketing links – Cale Guthrie Weisssman
https://www.fastcompany.com/90344065/google-may-be-about-to-kill-affiliate-marketing-links
May 6, 2019

Cale reports on Google’s latest efforts to go head to head with Amazon in the online shopping space. 


How to Take Your Website Beyond Fast – Brent Csutoras
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-take-your-website-beyond-fast/305465
April 30, 2019

“Web performance is no longer an art, but a science” says Brent. 

Recommended Reading (Local SEO)

How to Deal with a New Client That’s Violating Google’s Guidelines – Brodie Clarke
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/new-client-violating-google-guidelines/304693/
April 30, 2019

This item could’ve been placed in either section of Recommended Reading but we placed it here for the GMB section.


Local Business Websites and Google My Business Comparison Report – Rosie Murphy
https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-business-websites-and-google-my-business-comparison/
May 2nd, 2019

Rosie Murphy from Bright Local has done a fantastic write up about a survey they have completed, speaking with 500 US based consumers, posing questions about their opinions on Google my business and company owned websites. 

Jobs

 Want More?

Paid members also get the following:

  • Google I/O reveals a switch in URL display will only alert users when it’s non-secure
  • Some tips on how to interpret the field data from the PageSpeed Insights report
  • Google’s new portal for How News Works (+more E-A-T talk)
  • Manual action with Reddit links as examples? You likely have bigger problems
  • Add this attribute to automatically enable lazy loading on your site on Chrome
  • Work anywhere with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides in new offline mode
  • Tables in Featured Snippets are showing more text
  • Just how valuable are Sitemaps? Hear it directly from Google (SMS Sydney tip)
  • How to best use Google’s structured data testing tool
  • John Mueller addresses concern over thin content blocked by robots.txt being indexed
  • How to make your content more accessible
  • How’s this for link building?
  • Another excellent link building idea (from SMS Sydney)
  • Does keyword placement in page titles matter?
  • Does Google look at the quality of individual subdomains?
  • Looking to change URLs? And just how important are keywords in your URL structure?
  • Infinite scroll on news sites does not mesh well with Google
  • Local SEO: The return of QR codes?
  • Local SEO: Service Area Businesses beware -- hiding your address could be the kiss of death
  • My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

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Part of the challenge of SEO is staying on top of industry news, trends, and techniques There is so much information out there that it is easy to get bogged down in information overload and trying to disseminate what's truly important from all that noise can be really time-consuming and challenging.

 Marie's newsletter is a game changer because it manages to cut through the fluff and deliver high-quality information that is not only really important for those that do SEO, but it is presented in a format that is really easy to absorb.
If you are looking for a trusted information related to search that is highly actionable I would strongly recommend Marie's newsletter.
Paul Macnamara - Offers SEO Consulting at PaulMacnamara.com

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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