November was a busy month for search with a major algorithm update over the Thanksgiving holiday. The industry also had the #TechSEOBoost conference in Boston with the associated live stream, which was a “Christmas is here early” type event if you’re responsible for troubleshooting technical SEO issues. In fact, it was a great month for technical SEO with new tools and documentation released by Google, and great resources from the SEO community to help you ramp yourself up on machine learning and AI. In fact, at the end of this post, I’ve combined all of those resources into your “one stop shop” to get yourself up to speed with machine learning.

Enjoy!

Google updates

Thanksgiving Google algorithm update

For most, this update was an adjustment (positively) for sites that were hit in August and September negatively. Ultimately, many of the ranking adjustments this year have been adjustments to the core algorithm and have been focused on quality signals. Keep in mind that with RankBrain, Google is user testing the search engine results and are making changes based on that data. If your site is a quality website with content that is uniquely useful to the searcher, you will most likely rank well in Google.

This was highlighted in a conversation with Googlers on a recent SEO Roundtable. Here are the bits of the exchange that I think is worth reading:

Pedro Dias, former Googler, was asked about all the obsession around EAT and around following the quality raters guidelines as a way to “fix” any algorithm based ranking changes, and here was his response:

There has been a lot of debate and discussion about this E-A-T and what’s in the quality raters guidelines and so forth. And most of people that kind of mean for these things are thinking of this kind of questions, like the one that just answered about oh do I have to have bylines and or authors in my website, do I have to it. And I think folks sometimes forget it it’s a bit more about just product quality.

John Mueller from Google confirmed with this statement:

It’s also worth looking into what search engines are trying to do in the long run. Which is trying to figure out which pages are good, which pages are relevant for individual queries. …So focusing on the short-term tweaks like how many links you should have on a page, or like how tall your author bio photo should be in pixels. Those kind of things, I think, are very short sighted and it makes more sense to really focus on like what can I do to provide a really high-quality product in a way that users look at that and say well this is really relevant this is fantastic content.

There are currently 440 million blogs and Tumbler alone has over 400 million blogs. According to the Netcraft January 2018 Web Server Survey, there are 1,805,260,010 (over 1.8 billion) websites. That’s a TON of competition. What are you creating that’s different and unique that will make you read and shared?

Google Search Console Domain Properties

Google experimenting with a domain property option in Google Search Console

If you were ever curious if Google can find all your subdomains and associates them with your main domain, here’s another hint that they can figure it out.  Google is able to auto-populate search data for individual properties in one main domain by verifying just a fragment of your domain for subdomains and folders.

User comments on search results?

Google is letting users leave comments on SERPs. The industry panicked a bit with this find, but it turns out that it’s just for live sporting events at the moment. I think we all agree that this would be a nightmare for webmasters (from a management perspective) if it rolled out more broadly than that. This is definitely something to keep an eye on.

Technical SEO

Pages with long download times reduce Googlebot’s crawl budget

John Mueller reminds us that if it takes too long for Google to download the individual URLs from your site, then Google would crawl fewer URLs from your site every day. This is to make sure the servers are not overloaded.

SEO learning resources you can share with your developers

Google developed https://web.dev/ as a learning resource for development teams so they can learn more about how to make the web faster and more accessible.

Google page speed tool updated

The tool now has updated information from Google Chrome’s Lighthouse tool. Finally! The tool that most developers are familiar with (and using) has Lighthouse Chrome data in it.

New lazy loading documentation from Google

Google released new lazy loading tips and guidelines this month. You should ensure the content is loaded within the viewport if you want Googlebot to see the content. In addition, if you want Google to support infinite scrolling or pagination loading, you must provide a unique link to each section that users can share and load directly. Google recommends using the History API to update the URL when the content is loaded dynamically. The new guides are here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/lazy-loading

Google also recommends that developers and SEOs review their dynamic rendering documentation as well: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-rendering#implement

Image optimization tips from Chrome Web Dev Summit

There’s a great Twitter thread here:

Chrome Dev Summit – Image optimization tips (thread) 🧐

1. Convert animated GIFs to videos – add these four attributes [autoplay loop muted playsinline] to make videos behave like GIFs while reducing file size!

— Abby Hamilton (@abbynhamilton) November 12, 2018

Google’s image optimization tool – Squoosh

Along the same lines, Google has released a new tool, Squoosh, to help with optimization image load time. You can read a how-to here.

Chrome might block your on-page ads

Chrome 71 will block any and all ads on sites with “abusive experiences” More here.

Insights from TechSEO Boost (and links to video below)

Need to improve your internal link building at scale?

Check out Kevin Indig, who work at Atlassian to see his process. Just look at his Results from improving internal links:

When we optimized a site with > 40K pages after the TIPR model, we saw organic traffic increase by 160% over 12 months. #techseoboost pic.twitter.com/kE3NJK7Irr

— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) November 29, 2018

You can find his deck here, and you can catch his portion of the recording here.

Using Cloudflare workers for SEO

This presentation from Dan Taylor at the SALT Agency won him the Technical SEO Research award. Here’s more about using Cloudflare to manage your redirects and here about how to use Cloudflare workers to manage your hreflang tags if you can’t get your dev team to help you.

Programming basics for SEO

The video starts here:

Related-
Python for SEOs tutorial, video starts here.

Also, there are great free resources on this YouTube channel. If you’re interested in being able to use Python to perform daily tasks you would look for patterns in your data in Excel. Then, create better graphs to help you find and verify your insights via statistical modeling so that you can effectively modify your campaigns based on data insights.

TechSEOBoost folks also shared their favorite python libraries for data analysis including:

Spacy – http://bit.ly/2E1kHbe

Pandas – http://bit.ly/2E6V8G3

NLTK – http://bit.ly/2E4zi5M

Matplotlib – http://bit.ly/2E1kGnG

GGplot – http://ggplot.yhathq.com/

Extreme full contact Google APIs

The video starts here. Sean Malseed also shared a few custom Google sheets – the first helps you figure out if a particular page is not indexed in Google. Yes, really. Check it out here.

New tools and Resources:

Need to ramp up on how to use Chrome Developer Tools?

This course (while not free) came highly recommended: Chrome Dev tools course: https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/chrome-developer-tools

Ramping up on UX

If you read my blog regularly, you’re aware that UX impacts SEO success. If usability research is new to you, I’ve stumbled on to this amazing list of books and resources to bring you up to speed.

Are you exposing customer data?

Are you exposing customer data via Google Search? SEER Interactive has created a tool to help you evaluate: https://www.seerinteractive.com/exposed-customers-tool/

Google Data Studio: News consumer insight tool

Google has developed a new PR tool that layers on top of Google Data Studio. It provides clear insights on how to view the consumption of your articles and find insights that can really impact news publishers.

On WordPress and working to improve your page speed?

I discovered a great checklist for how to speed up WordPress: https://kinsta.com/learn/speed-up-wordpress/ Enjoy!

How much do you know about digital marketing?

Curious to see how your digital market stacks up? General Assembly has created a 15 min quiz to test your knowledge: https://generalassemb.ly/corporate-digital-training/digital-marketing-assessment

Teaching Yourself Machine Learning and AI

Especially after watching TechSEOBoost this month, this is on my personal learning list and I wanted to share these resources with my readers and clients. With Google using machine learning in its search algorithms, it’s more essential that SEOs learn the basics of AI and machine learning and there’s no reason not with these type of free resources:

Amazon’s in-house AI training

Amazon opens up its inhouse AI training to all. You can check it out here.

Google’s AI training resources

Google wants to educate developers and business decision-makers about the technologies’ capabilities. The courses that make the most sense for marketers are:

• Introduction to Machine Learning Problem Framing (course)
• Data Preparation and Feature Engineering in ML (course)
• The 7 Steps of Machine Learning (AI Adventures) (video)

There is also a Finnish business consultancy Reaktor, which collaborated with the University of Helsinki to put together an in-depth online course series, which begins with “What is AI” and continues to explore both the applications and implications of the technologies.

The curriculum is designed, according to the site, with the student needing no pre-existing knowledge beyond basic math.  Going through the entire series is expected to take 6 weeks or more.

It’s a more general course and you can even get credit for taking the course through the University of Helsinki’s Open University program.
Example courses:

• What is AI?
• AI Problem Solving — which uses a search engine as an example
• The Implications of AI

Additional AI learning resources

Britney Muller at the TechSEO Boost conference also had a great presentation on Machine Learning for SEOs – TechSEO Boost 2018 slides from Britney Muller

SEO Research Worth Reading

Ranking “factors” change for head terms

This is a great article and Search Love London presentation where Tom Capper works through the insights he’s seen with clients that are trying to rank for head terms. The key takeaway is that it seems like Google is evaluating time to SERP and pogo sticking (bounce back to SERP) more than traditional ranking factors for terms with high volume. I’ve actually seen this with some of the clients that I work with – while diagnosing ranking challenges for some of their head terms, it seems as though on-site UX, focus on searcher’s intent and page load speed seems to matter more than other factors. You can read his write up here.

2018 Local SEO ranking factors research released

This is a bookmarkable resource for local SEOs every year that it comes out. One big change this year is the increased importance for views and behavior. It also highlights that as a local business you need to be using Google posts, Q/A, and uploading videos and photos to your Google My Business account. Check it out here: https://moz.com/blog/2018-local-search-ranking-factors-survey

Google patent: Associating a website with a location

Here’s a great analysis from Bill Slawski: Look at a recent patent from Google about how they may associate a particular website with a specific location. which is interesting if you’re a business with local offices. Determining Search Authority Pages and Propagating Authority to Related Pages http://www.seobythesea.com/2007/10/google-determining-search-authority-pages-and-propagating-authority-to-related-pages/

That’s it for this month. There will be more updates will come in the new year but for now, enjoy the holiday season!

 

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me! I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

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3) Follow me for future posts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October was busy for me with lots of new opportunities, existing client work and a family wedding in Maine that we attended. It was a busy month for SEO updates too.

Here are the search updates in October that I thought you shouldn’t miss:

Impact of Google’s 20th Anniversary announcements on SEO

Google celebrated their 20th Anniversary, and there’s a great article here about that announcement that I think every SEO should read.

Here is the takeaway: Google is working to influence (and change/guide) the searcher’s next search and overall search journey.

If you haven’t already, you need to think about developing supporting content that keeps your user on your site – answering the next step in the search journey.

Google Algorithm update – adjusting for brand strength?

A very interesting analysis of the major updates this year and how the themes seem to be that sites which do well had good EAT, user experience, and brand signals. You can’t just write about topics you don’t know well and rank anymore. Especially if you’re a small brand. And if you’re not working to develop a brand affinity with your existing user base, that needs to be on your list for this year.

Google Algorithm update – Stay in your lane and check your online reputation

There’s some great analysis about the September update by Glen Gabe. Marie Haynes has some really great analysis about the update, too, but the big takeaway is that Google seems to be decreasing rankings for sites that are trying to rank for topics that are not within their realm of expertise.

Here’s the relevant quote from the article:

Google is clearly trying to surface results from experts when it comes to YMYL topics and doesn’t want to surface content from someone without that necessary expertise.

So when planning your site content (or auditing your site content). Think about whether you *should* rank for those queries. Do your writers know enough about the topic? Is the content relevant to your readers and site visitors?

Google: Author Authority seems to be a ranking factor

Inside the Google Quality Raters’ Guidelines, you’ll see instructions for the Quality Raters to look for external information about websites and also about “content creators” or, in other words, authors. Gary Illyes shared at Pubcon Austin that E-A-T is primarily based on what authoritative sites are saying about you:

I asked Gary about E-A-T. He said it's largely based on links and mentions on authoritative sites. i.e. if the Washington post mentions you, that's good.

He recommended reading the sections in the QRG on E-A-T as it outlines things well.@methode #Pubcon

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 21, 2018

If you need the 411 about the Rater Guidelines and prefer to learn information via video, you should check out Marie’s talk at BrightonSEO:

Google using different ranking signals for top rankings?

A fascinating analysis and study from Search Love London looking at the factors that impact the top Google page one rankings and how they might be different than the lower rankings. If you have a site chasing head terms with high volume, you should check it out:

Google may move info from the Quality Raters’ Guidelines into their webmaster guidelines

I missed this tidbit from a Google help hangout in early September. Thanks to Deep Crawl for their help hangout summaries for finding this!

In 2013, we published our human rating guidelines to provide transparency on how Google works and to help webmasters understand what Google looks for in web pages. Source

Google: More content is not better

I have seen various sites that need to hear this tidbit from Google’s John Mueller:

Just putting out more content doesn't necessarily make a site better.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 21, 2018

Google: Send examples of other sites outranking you when you are the original source

The question came up during a recent Google Webmaster Hangout. If this has happened to you, you can send your example to @johnmu.

But…does Google “know” SEO?

This is an awesome article to read if you work in SEO. It highlights examples of where internally Google did not use SEO best practices on their own products.

Didn’t get across the pond for Brighton SEO 2018?

You can find all of the slides and videos from that show here

Moz has acquired Stat!

This month, Moz has acquired GetStat, which will be an exciting partnership for SEO ranking and management tools. Read more about the announcement here.

Google is the dominant search engine ….by a mile

Here’s some recent data from Sparktoro highlighting that especially in the US, Google is the top engine with basically no competitors. Just look at the percentages:

Google Assistant can help sell your product for you.

Based on this recent Google announcement, developers will be able to add a feature to their Google Assistant Actions that allow in-action purchases of digital goods. They have also streamlined the purchase process. Once Assistant users purchase a digital good, they can now use the Google Sign-In for the Assistant tool to leverage their Google accounts to sign up for each purchase Action via voice or a few taps. Users can also go through the entire purchase journey via voice alone.

Google rolled out an update captcha

They’ve rolled out reCAPTCHA v3. The best part is that users no longer need to solve challenges. (Personally, I’m excited about this, as I’m HORRIBLE at solving them for some reason – especially the photo-based ones). Watch this video to learn more:

Log file analysis 101

This is a great 101 session by Moz about what log files are and how to use them.

GTM Copy Paste Extension

New to me, but we now have a free Chrome Extension that helps you copy GTM tags, triggers, and variables from one account to another.

Google Assistant is testing of AI-based Duplex technology in select cities

Google announced that Pixel users in New York, Atlanta, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area will soon be able to experience the new feature in the Google Assistant, powered by Google Duplex technology, aimed at restaurants. As a user, you’ll be able to get your Google Assistant to book a table for you. This technology was originally announced at Google’s I/O ’18.

Interesting insights about Baidu

If you are working on ranking in the Chinese search engine, you might find the tips from this tweet useful:

Small takeaways I got about Baidu:
– noindex is not used
– canonical is not used
– hreflang is not used
– .cn ccTLD is almost a must to rank well
– only way to remove pages from Baidu index is to serve a 404 and submit the pages through Baidu Webmaster Tools

brb. crying. 😭

— Masaki Okazawa (@saksters) October 26, 2018

Surprising results from SEO A/B Tests

Not only is this a fascinating read if you’re working on A/B SEO test for clients, but he provides a link to a DIY SEO split testing tool they created and that is available for free.

 

And that’s it for this month. Good luck limiting your Halloween candy consumption! And if you focus on technical SEO, remember that next month there’s the Tech SEO Boost event in Boston, with a free live stream. Stay tuned for updates.

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me!  I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

1) Leave a comment

2) Share it with your network

3) Follow me for future posts

Again, another month has gone by and I’ve rounded up the search news and research that I think you can’t miss.

Google (as usual) has made some changes over the last month, they celebrated their 20th year in business, rolled out new features, and have given us a hint of where they are going.

There’s also been some great SEO research released this week. You should check it out.

Google Search Updates

Google has a just rolled out a number of updates coinciding with its 20th birthday. Those features include featured videos, collections, and activity cards.

Here are the details:

Featured Videos

Based on their AI-powered search, Google will show you videos based on your search that will play one after another in the search result. You can tap on the video you like to play the full video.

Activity Cards

Google is focused on displaying search “options” based on your entire search journey They know that searchers look for answers over time and to aid searchers in those journeys, they will be displaying cards at the top of search results, which show the pages you’ve visited, as well as previous queries.

Collections

If you like the content you see in your activity card, you can save it. Based on things you’ve saved and your history, Google will recommend new content for your collections.

Enhancing Topics

Google is working to providing additional information around your queries that help you understand the topic or take action on the information. If you search for “pug,” for example, you’ll see a card where you can find little things to tap, like names, training details and how to buy or adopt a pug.

Discover

Google will now show recommended content based on saved preferences in search (they were already doing this in Google Assistant).

Preferences for Language

Google will now let you select the type of content that you’d like to see by language. For example, if you like recipes in Spanish, it will only show pages with Spanish-language recipes, but if you like your news in English, news articles will be in English.

Image Search

Images will now have tags that will help you sort those items – coming to desktop.

Google Lens

You’ll be able to identify certain objects within an image to view images relating to what you’ve selected.

Pathways

Designed for job seekers, this will allow people to learn new skills related to the job they desire. Training programs and available jobs in your area will be featured here. Google is testing this in Virginia.

To see what these items will look like, here are tweets from Danny Sullivan about the upcoming changes:

Search is a journey, where we know people are picking up over time. New Activity Cards are launching that help you pick up where you left off. pic.twitter.com/ZUDZvhgKJQ

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 24, 2018

 

Collection cards that group things you've saved will come later in the fall. pic.twitter.com/ob93ZXAFuV

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 24, 2018

 

 

A new dynamic way to quickly change results is coming, such as how you can toggle to quickly change about a dog breeds. This is powered by the Topic Layer, a way of leveraging how the Knowledge Graph knows about people, places and things into topics. pic.twitter.com/EgtvKhKS88

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 24, 2018

 

 

Google Stories

Google is also rolling out a “stories” feature – aimed at using artificial intelligence to create stories of content that will be housed in search and images.

It’s part of their focus around making search more visual.
Google will be first rolling out stories about people—mainly celebrities and athletes—in what this article says, is to ‘[provide] a glimpse into facts and important moments from their lives in a rich, visual format.”

Google Carousel Snippets

They look like this and allow users to move horizontally through the results:

Here’s the takeaway: There are now 6 times the number of snippets on a search engine result page.

Do you need to rank on page one to be surfaced in these snippets? Here’s the latest from GetStat research on these carousels:

Normally, 97.88 percent of snippets source from the first page, and 29.90 percent typically pull from rank three alone. With bubble snippets, only 36.58 percent of their URLs came from the top 10 ranks. And while the most popular rank position that bubble snippets pulled from was on the first page (also rank three), just under five percent of them did this.

You should check to see if your rank tracking software is tracking these new type of snippets, if not, you might want to consider GetStat.

The next 20 years of Google

https://www.blog.google/products/search/helping-you-along-your-search-journeys/

Google is celebrating its 20th birthday and released a post that highlights its focus on a growth in image search, and query-less searching – powered by their Knowledge Graph, Intent engine patent, AI, and their Natural Language Processing powers.

Side note: to appear in this new query-less searching, you need to help the engine understand your content – writing to searcher’s intent, using structured data markup, and write in a way that the search engine’s NLP can understand. New to structured data? Here’s a great guide. Google also has a new step-by-step tutorial. There’s a great article here by Briggsby that goes into thinking about NLP when creating copy: https://www.briggsby.com/on-page-seo-for-nlp

Google introduces a new search engine for datasets

If you are an organization that has freely available datasets, there’s a new structured data format for you as well as a new Google search just for datasets.

Google Human Rater Guidelines are Google’s Ideal Search Results

‘You can view the rater guidelines as where we want the search algorithm to go,’”They don’t tell you how the algorithm is ranking results, but they fundamentally show what the algorithm should do.”

Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president of search, assistant and news, told CNBC.

Buried in this article is also a mention that Google still uses PageRank in its algorithm (in case you thought that they were not using it anymore).

The Google Chrome team is thinking about killing the URL

Wow. This is something to watch. Article here.

Beyond the security reasons outlined in this article, I would also encourage you to read Mobile Moxie’s three-part series about mobile first indexing and how that will impact URLs.

Be Unique and Better than the Rest

So what do you do if you have a site that is as good as the top 10 in Google, but you’re not breaking through and ranking on page one? That was the question posed during a recent Google Webmaster Hangout, and I think John Mueller’s response is worth reading:

…for a large part it comes across as your site being kind of as good as a lot of the others out there. …I think that’s a good step.

But on the other hand at the same time because it’s kind of as good as all the others, from a user point of view, why do we especially need to have your site in there as well?

If we go to the search engineering teams and say, well the ten search results we’re showing now are pretty good but here is this other one that is just as good. They don’t really have any incentive to say okay we’ll swap out those search results and use this one because it’s just as good as the other one.

So the more you can really kind of take a step back and try to find an angle that significantly sets your site apart from all of the others so that when we go to the engineering team we can say well these ten results are pretty good but this one is the one that should definitely be number one for this kind of query.

Then that’s something they can take into account and say, Oh, yeah you’re right, this is really clearly the best out there and we need to make sure that it’s on top.

We’ll take some time to figure out what is actually happening here in our algorithms to treat this site, this content that it’s producing appropriately.
And those are things of course when you’re in a niche like this that is very competitive, that that’s very hard to do but it’s not impossible.

So I really recommend trying to take a step back and thinking about what you can do to significantly take your site to the next level.
Which might be new content that you produce, new angles that you kind of look into. Maybe less content that’s already out on other sites… all of these things to really kind of make sure that your site is really unique and not just similar to the other ones.

 

OK enough about Google for a second.

Are you a brand?

Then your biggest opportunity is Amazon.

Amazon has more product searches than Google

Amazon has dethroned Google in product searches with over 54% of all product searches now happening on Amazon instead of Google.

And it turns out that once you get to Amazon, 90% of the product views are actually the result of an Amazon search. And once they get that search result, it turns out that over two-thirds of the clicks are on the first page.

 

Grab the full details from this whitepaper.

Need to ramp up on Amazon SEO? I would recommend this podcast episode.

New tools and Updates

Lighthouse Reports for Multiple Pages

Dying to run the Chrome Lighthouse Audit tool on more than one page at once? Now you can! Check it out.

ScreamingFrog 10

You can now schedule crawls, crawl headless, how much of your site is indexed and internal PageRank score. There are also cool crawl visualizations. 

Check out this visualization:

Ubersuggest is back

It’s back and it’s free keyword research. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

That’s it for September. Let’s see what October brings!

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me!  I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

1) Leave a comment

2) Share it with your network

3) Follow me for future posts

Here we go. There is only one update for August, and I’m realize that I’m posting it in September.

This is not because there weren’t any updates (in fact, there was a big Google “broad core” algorithm update). There’s a great SEO community discussion about the update on this Twitter thread that I think is worth reading.

There were no update posts because I spent a week in the hospital with my youngest daughter (she’s OK now) and the entire family got hit with hand, foot, and mouth disease. It was quite a whirlwind of sickness. We’re all on the mend, and ready for a new month.

Here are the updates:

Google specific updates:

Changes to Google’s structured data recommendations
Google has made a couple changes to their structure data recommendations for non-AMP article pages, and now recommends that you add datePublished and dateModified to those pages.

New Rich Snippet layouts announced

Gary Illyes from Google announced that there are new rich snippet layouts coming to the SERPs. The new features function for FAQs, Q&As and ‘How to’ sections, and will display in a similar fashion as how Reddit and Quora pages currently display in the SERPs.

Google updates rich snippets for comparison queries
The announcement is here.  It’s a quick read but really useful. Here’s what the new rich snippet will look like:

 

 

Google releases study of daily habits with Google Home
The Google announcement is here and the results are not that surprising. If you are a news site, you should have voice optimization on your roadmap if it’s not already implemented. If you’re not entirely sure how to optimize for voice search then check out my post based on my presentation at the Voice Summit.

 

Google may look at 5 million factors in ranking
Bill Slawski is looking at a newly filed patent from Google which outlines that they may look at 5 million factors in ranking. As you know, SEO is complicated folks.

New research, patents and case studies:

Why ongoing promotion of online content is important
An aha moment for me when I saw Bill Slawski’s tweet based on a Google patent, and I suggest you all give it a good read: https://twitter.com/bill_slawski/status/1032651819430830081?s=09

 

Can you hack the Chrome back button to get usability metrics on competitors?
Check out what @DejanSEO was able to accomplish —before Google took it down.

Modifying your site’s architecture for an SEO win
This is a great guide by Cyrus Shepard that walks through the ways you can modify your site’s architecture to increase your SEO rankings and traffic. I’ve tried a few of these with clients in the past and have seen similar results.

New tutorial on how to land a video featured snippet “suggested clips”

Here is a great how-to if you are a publisher with a lot of instructional “how to” videos and you think you can position your content to claim this top spot.

Google patent: using Biometric parameters as a ranking signal
Seeing this patent overview by Bill Slawski made me smile. It covers a patent where Google might use your eye movement while looking at search results on your phone (by using your camera) to evaluate whether or not the search results are solving your searcher’s intent. See the image below:

When Google got into wearable computers with Google glass, I remember folks were curious as to why Google was getting into the wearables market, my answer was based on my understanding of wearable computer development and my over a decade of SEO experience- Google was conducting a huge eye tracking experiment to improve their search results. As it turns out, it wasn’t a conspiracy theory – it was true.

News Content Specific Updates:

Is Google News biased?
This was prompted by Trump’s tweet regarding Google being biased. In response, Barry Adams wrote a great article about how Google News works. The answer isn’t entirely cut and dry. This is a must read if you’re a news publisher.

Criteria for being included in Bing NewsDon’t forget that there IS another search engine here in the US!  If you want to grab traffic from the Bing news feed, then here are their requirements. And if you meet their requirements, you can submit your site here.

Free quality rater feedback for news publishers

This is the top gem that I discovered last in August. As covered by Glenn Gabe, there is a Newsguard system (which comes with a Chrome plugin) that uses real journalists to evaluate your site across the same standards as Google does for their EAT criteria in the Human Rater guidelines. Check out the post and plugin.

Estimate your Dark Social traffic
Did you know that when users share your content via email or Facebook messenger, or WhatsApp, you won’t see that traffic in your Google Analytics reports? It can’t be attributed and will show up as “direct”. The amount of this “dark” social sharing is potentially huge, and now there a free tool to help you estimate how much of your direct traffic is actually dark social.

Content Pruning SEO Case study
This post looks at how QuickBooks nearly doubled its traffic by pruning its content – almost deleting half of its content.

New tools (and features):

Checking page load speed in bulk
Did you know you can use DeepCrawl to collect speed and performance metrics from Chrome for every single page on your site in just one crawl? Well, now you can if you’re using Deepcrawl and have turned on their JavaScript rendering. Here’s the Deepcrawl guide on how to make it happen. You can also do this in ScreamingFrog, and the instructions are here.

LittleWarden

You can set up this tool to check for any changes on a website – the robots.txt or server responses, page title changes etc. It’s great if you have a lot of people working on the site that impacts SEO.

SERPsim

SERPsimm is a cool bulk SERP simulation tool. You can upload a URL and it will show you what that URL looks like in search and then you can share that snippet with your writers. Here is an example:

eariously.com

I just signed up for this beta. You add a URL and it will read articles to you. I’ve been waiting for a tool like this. It’s kind of like Pocket’s Listen, but it works for any URL.

Moz’ NEW Link Intersect Tool
If you’re doing link building for a client, you really need to check this out. Moz had a great tutorial that walks you through how to use the tool.

Simulate your SERPs on Mobile and based on location
Finally, a free tool to do this that isn’t Google Ad Planner. Check it out.

And that’s it from me. I’ll be busy this fall training a ton of new and old clients on SEO best practices. If you’re interested in joining, drop me a note!

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me!  I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

1) Leave a comment

2) Share it with your network

3) Follow me for future posts

There was great SEO research this week in addition to Google announcements, updates and changes in Google Analytics.

So, let’s get to it.

SERPs without an organic opportunity
Spotted in the wild: A SERP with 13 “other” links besides URLs. A good reminder to check your SERPs before picking a keyword to target:

Here's a SERP with 13 *other* links, before the first *organic* result.

Good luck with rank tracking that: pic.twitter.com/4UQLV4Lbi8

— Martin MacDonald (@searchmartin) July 18, 2018

Google Human Rater Guidelines are updated

This is a pretty significant update and is focused on cracking down on hate speech online and fake news sites. It’s also greatly increased its requirements for quality content. You can see the full guidelines here.  Here are the big takeaways:

• Titles that are exaggerated, shocking or misleading will result in the page having a low rating.
• They’ve added “user safety” to whether your site qualifies as a Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) page. YMYL pages have higher content quality requirements.
• They are having raters track down the reputation of the website creator or the creator of the main content. This will put a greater emphasis on sites needing to have author information and author bios on their articles, especially for those sites that do not use bylines on their content when it isn’t clear on the site itself who authors the articles.
• For media sites, Google is expecting raters to track down the site’s editorial policies.
• There is now a  greater emphasis on the “purpose” of the page (the word “purpose” is in the guide over 250 times). Here’s the key question that I think content writers should focus on: “Consider whether the page has a beneficial purpose or use to being on the site. What would a visitor to the site gain {from that page}?” If there is no beneficial purpose, the page is given the lowest rating.
• Ads or supplementary content that distract from the main content would also result in a low rating.
• “Abandoned” websites or unmaintained websites (broken functionality, stale content) are also given the lowest rating.

Link building to tough pages
As you know, inbound links are part of the ranking algorithm but some pages are tough to promote. Here’s a great guide about how to think (and add) elements to your sales pages that could help you garner links and citations to those pages.

Can you get more traffic by cutting up your site into subsites?
Here’s an interesting study about how About.com broke their site into niche websites (with an SEO strategy and staff on board) and saw a lift in traffic across the board.

Google News Publisher removes troubleshooting tool
You can no longer extract part of an article to troubleshoot crawl issues. Here’s the Google News announcement.

Featured Snippets drive clicks for media sites
Here’s a new research study from SearchMetrics which analyzed which industries tend to have more featured snippets and which drove the most clicks. If you’re running a media site, you should really be adding featured snippet optimization to your content strategy, as appearing in those results for media companies delivered more clicks to their sites.

Heads up! Google Image queries are moving in Google Analytics
This is a positive change. Instead of having image traffic to your site buried under the google.com referrer, you will start seeing it at images.google.com. More here.

Did you know that videos rank differently on Google than YouTube?
Here’s a new study by Stone Temple Consulting that goes into the ranking difference between Google and YouTube the post includes a Google Video and YouTube Video optimization checklist. Check it out.

Is Pinterest the image search engine of the future?
There is an often cited prediction: “50% of browsing sessions by 2020 will not be text.” If you saw my presentation on Voice SEO or read my blog post about the voice summit, you know that I think this obviously speaks to the trend of voice search, but also includes IMAGE search which is not given as much focus.

Which brings me to Pinterest. If you’re following what Pinterest is doing, I believe this platform has more opportunity for e-commerce than voice queries for products. This article walks through how a user can use a camera to take a picture of an item (via Lens Your Look) which will then find similar shoppable pins. The Shop the Look will also let you click on various elements in pins to shop for a particular item in that pin’s image.

Do you know how to code structured data?

How confident are you in coding proper structured data markup? This structured data “Homework” tool lets you practice setting up various structured data elements.

Google now adding datasets displays in search
If you have marked up your data set with their schema markup, it will now potentially display in search. The announcement is here.

Yext now pushes local business info directly to Alexa.
The details are here. Obviously, you need to be a Yext customer.

Top reasons to optimize for Bing search
Most people don’t know that Bing search powers Siri. It turns out there are other great reasons to focus optimization efforts for Bing, too. Check out the post.

Getting the most out of your content
GaryVee’s content creation model is a must read for content creators. He walks through how he creates volumes of content for different channels from one original piece.

Google slows crawling if it finds server errors
In a recent tweet, John Mueller explained that if Google encounters 5xx server errors it will slow its crawling, which might result in it not finding your newest updated content.

@JohnMu I'm seeing this happen for most of my client's sites. Is this a similar situation? https://t.co/UJe774DbAi

— Brent Schiffman (@BrentSchiffman) July 9, 2018

Whew! What a busy July!

I hope you found these news updates helpful. Feel free to ping us if you have any questions.

 

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a search news update -My family took a break for the entire July 4th week. We enjoyed the DC museums and, like the rest of the country, tried desperately to stay cool. There were so many updates this week that this post is longer than usual. So buckle in and let’s get to it!

Be careful with Meta refresh redirects – it can lead to indexing issues!
From one of the latest Google Webmaster Hangouts: Google Treats Meta Refresh as Redirect Meaning Wrong Content Might be Indexed. It turns out that Google treats a meta refresh as a redirect, which may mean the wrong page is indexed. For example, a news article page with a meta refresh to a login page will mean the latter is indexed rather than the actual content.

There is a new URL tool in Google Search Console
This is a new feature in Google Search Console that is rolling out – it can be found just below the sitemaps option on the sidebar. It allows you to individually inspect each URL on your site to see what details Google has on it (how it was crawled, how was it indexed, if it is seen as a canonical etc.). Google released a detailed help guide.

Google Search Console: You can add subdirectories
You can now add subdirectories to Google Search Console – which give you a much granular view of any issues on your site and will help you troubleshoot indexing issues by subdirectory. Super helpful if you’re working on a big site.

URL removal tool doesn’t remove the URL from indexing
The URL Removal Tool in Google Search Console instead justs hides pages in search but that those URLs are still crawled AND indexed. @JohnMu explains more here in a Google Webmaster Help thread.

If you are new to SEO & JS, then read this:
Really it’s a great article if you’ve never had to audit a site with JS on it (and if you haven’t yet, you will at some point as developers LOVE to use those JS frameworks).

I love this line:
“Key word: recommend, not implement. It’s 100% our job to flag the issue to our client, explain why it’s important (as well as the possible implications), and highlight an ideal solution. It is 100% not our job to try to do the developer’s job of figuring out an ideal solution with their unique stack/resources/etc.”

I agree! You can be an effective technical SEO even though you can’t recommend EXACTLY how they are going to fix the issue with their development situation.

Click depth matters for SEO
Google’s John Mueller revealed that more weight is given to pages in search results based on how many clicks it takes to get to them from a site’s homepage versus the URL structure.

The question was related to how many slashes in the URL, and in Mueller’s response, he stated that the number of slashes in a URL does not matter. However, he did focus on how many clicks it takes to get to a page from the homepage, and if there was only one click then Google would consider the page more important.

An HTTPs story
I’ve had quite a few clients come to me this year to get my help after a rocky HTTPS transition. If you’re curious about all of the SEO work involved in what seems like something that should be so simple, check out the story from how the BCC news transitioned.

All sites need to be HTTPs – or you’ll lose users

Related to transitioning to HTTPs….37.6% of Chrome users do not continue through SSL warning are Google’s results from a study about users and their interactions with browser warnings.

Updated ‘hreflang’ guidance from Google
You can read the updated guidelines for how to tell Google you have multiple languages on your site (or target different countries) here.

Google has stopped crawling AJAX scheme
If you’re on an old JS framework and haven’t transitioned this means you’re going to be facing even more SEO issues related to crawling and indexing of your site. You can read more about the update here.

 

Publishers: You need to let your users cancel their news subscriptions online
Thanks to a new California law that went into effect July 1, a news site (or other business) now has to let you cancel your subscription online. While it’s just a California law, it also applies to any company (or publisher) with paying customers in the state. More coverage here.

Publishers: A New Knowledge Graph Feature
Spotted in the wild: Google showing “topics they write about” in the Knowledge panel:

A new Google Knowledge Graph feature for publishers showing "Topics they write about" @rustybrick #SEO pic.twitter.com/OkwuWpSDDe

— Ed Watkinson (@edwatki) July 4, 2018

Optimizing your site’s page load speed?
You should check out Deepcrawl’s latest white paper – one of the most comprehensive tutorials on improving speed. Google also has a great guide on how to use its Chrome LightHouse tool.

Google says that it’s not reading Gmail messages
Except that if you’re an app maker, you have access to that data.

Claim your brand mentions and get a link!
Here’s a great tutorial that walks you through the process for contacting journalists and editors to get a link back to your site if your brand is mentioned.

How is your brand doing on social?

Brandwatch has released an update of their Social Index – the ranking of top brands by industry. You can check out the top performers in the https://www.brandwatch.com/the-social-index/public-sector government sector here. Worth a quick look to see what the social media leaders in your industry are doing.

Interested in a full social media competive benchmark? Drop me a line.

How to “do” SEO in a world where organic opportunity is disappearing
There is a great

WhiteBoard Friday from Rand Fishkin about optimization opportunities with Google even with less organic opportunity. Totally worth a listen.

5 Years of Google organic ranking signals
If you’re in SEO a must read from Bill Slawski – THE one in the industry that has been following Google patents for YEARS.

Related, I thought Will Critchlow’s Search Love San Diego presentation about Google’s history and patents was also enlightening.

Claim your organization’s Knowledge Panel
Google now lets you “verify” and claim your own Knowledge Panel. Rusty Brick walks through how he claimed his.

I’ll be speaking at VOICE!

 

 

Last, but not least, I’ve been selected to speak at this year’s VOICE summit in NJ  (which is this month). I’m leading a session about SEO for voice search and I’ll be participating in a panel on the new rules of search and discovery. With over 150 speakers and 50 workshops, VOICE is the 3-day event for anyone interested in how voice search or voice commands will influence everything from development, technology, and marketing.

If you’re interested in attending, you can get 20% off your registration just for being part of my network and using the code TalkVoiceToMe. So, let me know if I’ll be seeing you there, and I’ll make sure to say hi!

Dear Reader,

I’ve been gathering some great stuff to share with you over the last three weeks. I’m now back in the DC area from a wedding in Victoria, BC and from Search Love Boston. 

First – my SEO insight from the wedding: I counsel a few clients on international expansion and whether or not you need to purchase a global top-level domain (GTLD) to rank well in another country. The quick answer is no, not based on the Google algorithm, but allow me to give you an observation:

My dad used to run a sign shop, so I have a habit of always checking out signs wherever I am. I didn’t see .com on any of the signs while in Canada for the wedding. Instead, I saw .ca EVERYWHERE. So, while you could have a domain that is not .ca and rank in Canada, would you get the same type of clicks when everyone there is more familiar with .ca? Possibly not.

Ok let’s get into the news I think you should see:

One of the best histories of Google on the Internet
I was introduced to this presentation by Will Critchlow at Search Love Boston last week, but it’s honestly the best overview of Google patents, algorithm changes, and acquisitions I’ve seen since starting as an SEO. If you’re new to SEO (and haven’t been following the industry for over a decade like I have) this is your fastest way to get up to speed. It will help you take the long view of Google’s growth and help you evaluate Google’s motivations as they make announcements about algorithm changes. Consider this your essential reading for the week.

Tips for SEOs from Google I/O

Missed Google I/O?

There’s a great write up by DeepCrawl about the presentations that will impact SEO. It includes great tips on how to improve page speed and how to use the Chrome Lighthouse tool. Also included are some great insights about PWAs and how Google handles JavaScript. If you’re looking for the CliffsNotes for Google I/O and don’t have time to watch the videos, this is it.

Search ranking factors that matter
If you struggle with how to prioritize SEO recommendations, make sure to bookmark this. This is most readable and accurate search ranking factors post I’ve seen in a long time. It comes with a handy infographic you can post on your wall.

New EU ruling impacts global companies that redirect users.
The European Union has announced it will end “unjustified” geoblocking within 9 months of passing GDPR (which went into effect last month). You’ll have to make changes if a German user types yourdomain.com and you’re using GeoIP redirects to send them to yourdomain.de. There are lots of things to consider checking on your own site.

Managing an Instagram account?

Then you should be up to speed on how its algorithm works. The upshot is that your personalized feed is based on your interest, recency, and relationship. Additionally, they look at how often you open Instagram, who you are following and your Instagram usage.

Using Google for SEO Research
Ahrefs has put together this great guide for advanced search operators that you can use in Google to help you find content ideas, link building options, check indexation, spy on how often your competitors are updating their site, etc. I’m bookmarking this one. You should, too!

37 Different Search Engine Results Pages
I knew the number had grown. This is the reason why you need to look at the SERPs for each topic you want to rank for BEFORE you start plannig what type of content you’re going to create:

There are now 37 different search engine result page (SERP) categories, a number that will only increase over the coming months and years. #SMX #Brightedge pic.twitter.com/fl3l4uR7wB

— Morgan Porter (@mporter1144) June 12, 2018

Google app for Podcasts
Google is preparing to launch their own dedicated Podcast App for Android. Users will be prompted to download the app when searching in Google Assistant.

URL Parameters Tool does not block crawling
Google clarified that the URL Parameters Tool in Google Search Console will give Google guidance on how to handle parameters, but it does not work like the robot.txt file and block crawling of those URLs.

Does the url parameters tool in GSC work like a robots.txt file & prevent crawling? Via @johnmu: The URL params tool lets you do a variety of different things, not just block. In general, we will crawl those urls less frequently, but Gbot is not blocked: https://t.co/lYOq24VPYn pic.twitter.com/2r9mTyWjmG

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 12, 2018

Google provides more guidance on Web Light pages
When your site is loading too slow on mobile phones with slow connections, Google will transpose your site into something that performs better on those connections. They clarified how Web Light works in this post:

We just updated Search Console's new Performance report to include filters for the Web Light search appearance. You can find out more about Web Light at https://t.co/2CjLZAaGTj and check out Search Console at https://t.co/uoaCWUIrap pic.twitter.com/XX2csR1gGp

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 14, 2018

As an FYI, I would look at your Google Analytics reports as their update also clarifies that they don’t execute all Google Analytics tags (like event tracking) on those pages. If you have a huge audience that is getting Web Light pages, this might be the time to improve your page speed.

Google answers questions about mobile first indexing
Google made some clarifications related to mobile-first indexing based on what they were hearing at SMX Advanced this week. Search Engine Land compiled all of the updates into one post.

Soon! A browser that can read the Internet to you
I personally can’t wait for this one. I don’t know how many times I’ve had a burning question while driving, and while I can use Google Assistant to ask a question, I then need to read the answer on screen (dangerous while driving, and not something I do).

It turns out the creator of Firefox is working on a voice-controlled browser that can read to you.

Google launches “Talk to Books”
In a similar vein, Google has also recently launched a “Talk to Books” feature where the AI-powered tool will scan every sentence in 100,000 volumes in Google Books and generate a list of likely responses with the pertinent passage bolded. Of course, this is the brainchild of Ray Kurzweil (in case you were wondering what he’s been up to at Google).

Another EU law that would potentially impact US businesses
Not as well advertised, but the EU is also working on trying to pass a law that would levy a tax against anyone who links to a news article. You would need to proactively get a license what would be active for 20 years after the news publisher published the story. You can read the background here and take action against this law here. They are planning a vote on June 20th or 21st, 2018, so make your voice heard!

Discounts for Voice Summit in New Jersey

I’m speaking at the VoiceSummit.ai next month in Newark, NJ about voice search. If you’re interested in attending, make sure to use my 20% discount code: TalkVoiceToMe. And drop me a note so that we can connect while I’m there!

That’s it from me this week. I hope you have a great week!

 

 

 

Katherine

WOStrategies.com

*Quick note from the author*

You might notice this isn’t a normal blog post. You see, I’ve been emailing my list search and social tips each week for the last year. I realized I should probably share them with a larger audience. I’m also transitioning email marketing systems, so this seemed like a great way to transition from sharing weekly tips via email to a broader audience.  So it here goes – the weekly search and social news I don’t think you should miss from last week:

Meta Descriptions have shrunk
Even though they have been allowing us to use 300 characters since December, it seems as though they are now 150-160 characters. Google tells us that they are dynamic. Here’s more about what to do with the changing meta description challenge.

Google has new recommendations for pre-rendering JavaScript content
This came out of the Google 1/0 conference last week, but if you’re like me and tend to audit sites that use JavaScript for navigation (or to render the entire site), then I have some required reading for you. There’s a great summary which includes clarifying tweets from Google Reps and a video from Google 1/0 on the subject here.

What makes this summary so helpful is the clarifying tweets from Google reps and a video from Google 1/0. The major takeaways from the video and IRL are:

1. Initially, Google will only index the HTML and the rendered HTML may lag for a few days.
2. Meta tags will only be indexed from raw HTML.
3. You need to use a pre-rendering or dynamic rendering solution to get JS indexed
4. (New) Google recommends showing different (fully rendered content) to GoogleBot

Google also updated their mobile friendly and rich result testing tools for troubleshooting JS indexing.

If you’re ramping up on JS crawling and indexing, this is really the most comprehensive tutorial I’ve seen on the web to date.

Google News ends support for Editor’s picks and stand out tag
This is because they are powering those features with AI within the Google News app. Find out more about the announcement from Google.

The 10 Ranking Factors we know to be true
I love the mention of searcher’s intent (and the references!) in this great article by Kevin Indig.

Need to ramp up on PWA & AMP?
Check out this PWA AMP page put together by Aleyda Solis. If you’re looking for a comprehensive list of guides, resources and examples then look no further.

New research on snippets & voice search
The Roast team ran a study looking at the featured snippet answer box and whether it matched the answer Google Assistant read out loud. It was quite detailed as it ran across 22 verticals and ran over 10,000 key phrases over the month of April 2018. Not only that, but they also gathered ranking data on the same day from web search results. Fascinating stuff. You should grab a report.

Why you can’t just trust keyword volume estimates
This! This! This! Read this study!

I spent quite a bit of time explaining this very concept to some of my clients recently. Keyword research is more complicated than it used to be. Check out the data & research and if you’re still confused, sign up for my training, or ping me if you need a full team trained.

GDPR- You need to ramp up now
This is European law which becomes active next month, and even though it’s European law it is really impacting almost everyone. It also comes with hefty fines for non-compliance.

New to what GDPR is and how it might impact you? The best way to ramp is to watch this video and read this scenario of how a user’s request might impact your business. I would also recommend reading this article that walks you through the steps you need to take.

Need to know if a particular page on your site is indexed?
Google always recommends checking Google Search Console (but we know that it’s often a sample), and the site: command is not reliable anymore, but there’s a new tool on the block that is more reliable (and free). Check it out: https://www.greenlanemarketing.com/tools/google-indexation-tester/

Live stream recording from BrightonSEO

Didn’t get a chance to attend BrightonSEO? Maybe because you were moving (like me), or maybe because it was across the pond? Don’t worry – there’s a live stream recording you can check out. If you’re still trying to wrap your head around keyword research or deciphering searcher’s intent, there are two great sessions about those topics. You can get the live stream AND the speaker slides here.

Speaking of SEO Conferences…

I’m heading to Search Love Boston in early June this year. If you’re in the Boston area, let’s make plans to connect!

That’s it from me. I recently moved and really need to get back to unpacking. Once my office is unpacked, I promise to start doing video tutorials again on SEO tips & tricks. Let me know if you have any burning SEO questions you might have as I’m still thinking about which SEO tips I’ll record first.

Katherine