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.
Leave a Reply