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Episode 101 - September 18, 2019 - Light Version

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In this episode, we discuss a possible algorithm update earlier this month, more on the leased subdomain debate, our thoughts on the review snippet update, and a load of SEO tips and tools shared within the community. We've made sure to include some awesome information from BrightonSEO as well.

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Ask Marie an SEO Question

Have a question that you want to ask Marie? You can ask them on our Q&A with Marie Haynes Consulting page and Marie will answer some of the best questions each week in podcast!

In this episode:

Paid members also get the following:

  • The leased subdomain update may be live
  • Google is introducing "algorithmic updates" to reviews in the rich results in order to help make them more helpful to searchers
  • Bing announcement: Webmasters can now import their verified sites from Google Search Console into Bing Webmaster Tools
  • “In this video” test for videos in Google
  • The average page title character count has declined
  • Tips on how to get links from journalists -- a deck by Carrie Rose
  • When’s the perfect time to get your seasonal campaigns running?
  • Are your top competitors really your top competitors?
  • Do soft 404’s pass PageRank?
  • Greg Gifford’s guide to entities
  • Guide to .htaccess for SEO
  • GSC shows keyword impression and ranking position data based on what people actually see
  • What’s the deal with your meta description length? John Mueller weighs in
  • How to rank for calculator terms according to Ross Hudgens
  • eComm tip for leveraging reviews and photos
  • Create compelling content with rhythm in mind
  • Guide to use in the event that your WordPress site gets hacked
  • Can spun content get you penalized?
  • What it means when you have 404 pages in the index
  • Reminder: Make sure your important content is on the mobile version of your site
  • Bing reiterates their stance on the rel=”nofollow” link attribute
  • Firefox is testing out a browser-based VPN, they're calling it "Firefox Private Network"
  • How to rank well in a nearby city
  • How to use SEMrush to get a link from Quora
  • Plugin recommended by Dan Shure for SEO and JavaScript sites
  • New tool from BrightLocal that can be used to detect local ranking fluctuations
  • My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

Algorithm Updates

September 9 and September 13, 2019 - Probably minor quality updates

We have a number of sites in our profile that are showing significant changes on either of these dates. At this point it is a little early to determine exactly what Google is assessing, but we feel that this is yet another update that has happened as a result of Google getting better at assessing trust for websites.

We feel that part of that trust assessment has to do with link quality. Several of the sites in our profile that are seeing nice gains at this time are ones for which we have filed a disavow in the last few months. Quite a few of these are sites that saw changes starting during the week of August 22-29, 2019 which we have mentioned in our last few newsletters as a likely significant link related update.

We also have some sites that are seeing increases that have not filed a disavow. Several of these are sites in the medical device space. 

Stay tuned for an article from Marie soon that will discuss in great detail what types of sites are seeing improvements and specifically, whether disavowing could help your site as well.

MHC Announcements

Episode 100 recap 

In case you missed our 100th episode we had a lot of fun doing a live webinar with you! This was a huge episode that included Marie’s thoughts on the QRG changes, discussion on health sites and her recent article on scientific consensus, our favourite past newsletter tips, and theories on the new link attributes. 

Don’t forget: we have a new look! 

You may have noticed on our social that we are flashing our new logo! We are excited to have had a rebrand, but don’t worry we are still the same MHC just with a fresh coat of paint. 

Marie’s Whiteboard Friday with Moz 

In this edition, Marie shares her expertise on E-A-T and understanding the Quality Raters Guidelines. You won’t want to miss it! 

Have you spotted the latest hint on the Pacman game?

We’ve made a small adjustment to the Pacman game… can you find it? Be sure to tweet at us @WixSEOLovers when you do. 

Google Announcements

Google Lens AR integration for grocery

The most recent update to Google Lens’ augmented reality experience has been optimized for grocery. “Living surfaces”, pointing your phone at different objects, has teamed with Uncle Ben’s, providing recipes and information when the lens is pointed at an array of Uncle Ben’s products. Look out for the Google AR sticker and test this feature out! 

John Mueller is asking for more questions for Google’s #AskGoogleWebmasters series

This has been an excellent series which we cover quite often. If you have a burning question and want John to answer it, make sure you tweet using the hashtag #AskGoogleWebmasters.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1173508995270815744

SEO Tips

You (still) don't need to disavow nofollow links

When asked about disavowing nofollow links, John expresses that you don’t, not now or ever, need to disavow nofollow links. He also says it is no problem if they have been disavowed already - no harm done. 

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1172050025737834497

Nice disavow case study (not from MHC)

Marie is currently working on an article that will showcase some of the results that we have been seeing at MHC since doing more disavow work. We are seeing some really nice results for some sites!

#AskAWebmaster: structured data and JSON-LD

The ask a webmaster thread is getting punny. This episode’s question is whether you can add JSON at the bottom of the <body> instead of the <head>? John says it can be in either, or injected using JavaScript. 

This led to some funny transcriptions confusing JSON-LD with Jason Aldean, the country singer. We also had this happen months ago at MHC with one of our newer employees unfamiliar with JavaScript. We love a good SEO pun! 

Did you know you can do a filetype search in Google Images?

To add to this, Pedro Dias also suggested that [ext:svg] works as well. If you’d like to brush up on some expert-level search operators, Builtvisible has a handy guide that we featured back in episode 83, or you can check out the guide on Moz. 

Missed out on BrightonSEO? Here are all of your recaps conveniently in one place!

All three days have are broken down by DeepCrawl which covers a wide range of topics including keyword research, web accessibility, site speed, Google Discover, and much more!

Gary Illyes is creating slides for a deep dive -- you can ask him a question if you need clarification 

Google Help Hangout Tips

What happens when you disallow your robots.txt by robots.txt?

If you disallow your robots.txt it prevents indexing of the robots.txt content. Your snippet would still appear in search, however, Google wouldn’t be able to provide context on what it is. John says it probably just doesn’t make sense to do it, so we don’t recommend it. 

Can running outdated software cause quality issues?

Outdated software doesn't cause quality issues, unless it has vulnerabilities which cause a security issue... then THAT can cause quality issues.

Should you worry about spammy image sites that steal your images?

John says Google has ways of catching this. Marie’s opinion; you can disavow these types of links, it won’t harm you.

Do some TLD’s rank better than others?

John clarifies the theory that top-level domain’s rank better than others. This is not true. Subdirectories, subdomains or any kind of domain have an equal opportunity for ranking. 

Other Interesting News

Native Lazyload plugin Version 1.0.1 for WordPress is out

The plugin is currently supported on Chrome. What makes it “native”, meaning faster, is that it doesn’t rely on custom JavaScript making it less substantial and therefore faster. Once activated, your images and iframes will begin lazy loading. 

The next WordPress release is going to include rel=ugc, according to Joost de Valk

Following last week’s announcement from Google, the founder of Yoast says that he’ll be sure that WordPress’ next release comes with a seamless way to implement rel=ugc for on-site comment links.

Local SEO - Google SERP Changes

Google Maps reintroduces pagination

After it being missing from the Google Maps local results, it seems that pagination is back. Barry has posted what people are seeing, showing pagination in the results. If this was a bug, it appears to be fixed. 

Spotted: New layout for Local Services Ads 

Brandon Schmidt noticed a slight change in the LSA’s. It might be worth checking your ad if you have one to see what is being highlighted. You can see what he has spotted in his tweet: 

Local SEO - Other Interesting News

Interesting case of someone selling a product from their building and having a GMB profile  

Lily Ray received a business suggestion which she thought was quite random. It turns out that was a business operating out of a building citing it’s the approximate listing.

Recommended Reading

Google’s Core Algorithm Updates and Copied Content: The Domino Effect of Negative Impact – Glenn Gabe
https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-core-algorithm-updates-and-copied-content/
Sept 9, 2019

In this article, Glenn details a your money or your Life (YMYL) health site that was hit by several core algorithm updates. In addition to other quality issues, he uncovered many articles that were directly copied from other authoritative sources and prior to the traffic drops, had even been ranking quite well for important queries. 

 

Contextual Knowledge Panels at Google – Bill Slawski
https://gofishdigital.com/contextual-knowledge-panels-at-google/
Sept 9, 2019

Contextual Knowledge panels, what are they and how do they work? As Bill Slawski points out, SEO does not come with a user manual and sometimes things are going on at Google and how knowledge panels are populated and when they turn up in search is something we only know certain things about. How Google could be doing this is described in detail in a recently granted patent to Google called “Contextualizing Knowledge Panels”, and it is clear that Google is doing this to some degree.

 

Google Featured Snippet Highlights: Biggest Search Development of 2019? – Brodie Clark
https://brodieclark.com/google-featured-snippet-highlights/
Sept 15, 2019

Brodie managed to transform his article into a featured snippet highlight test with AMP. This past December you may remember that the content shown in a featured snippet triggered that on-page content to be highlighted in orange (for AMP pages). Well, it has since developed into yellow highlighting and also appears to be surfacing more commonly as noted by those in the SEO community. 

Recommended Reading (Local SEO)

Is Rank Tracking by Zip Codes Still Relevant? – Yan Gilbert
https://www.sterlingsky.ca/rank-tracking-for-local-search/
Sept 17, 2019

In the past, zip codes were important for rank trackers as they could search specifically using them. As Google has developed, zip codes are no longer as important. This article dives into the history of zip code use and how to adapt.  For more on this, or what tools you can use to test this out, we recommend reading the full article. 

Jobs

Want More?

Paid members also get the following:

  • The leased subdomain update may be live
  • Google is introducing "algorithmic updates" to reviews in the rich results in order to help make them more helpful to searchers
  • Bing announcement: Webmasters can now import their verified sites from Google Search Console into Bing Webmaster Tools
  • “In this video” test for videos in Google
  • When’s the perfect time to get your seasonal campaigns running?
  • Are your top competitors really your top competitors?
  • Do soft 404’s pass PageRank?
  • Greg Gifford’s guide to entities
  • Guide to .htaccess for SEO
  • What’s the deal with your meta description length? John Mueller weighs in
  • How to rank for calculator terms according to Ross Hudgens
  • eComm tip for leveraging reviews and photos
  • Create compelling content with rhythm in mind
  • Guide to use in the event that your WordPress site gets hacked
  • Can spun content get you penalized?
  • What it means when you have 404 pages in the index
  • Reminder: Make sure your important content is on the mobile version of your site
  • Bing reiterates their stance on the rel=”nofollow” link attribute
  • Firefox is testing out a browser-based VPN, they're calling it "Firefox Private Network"
  • How to rank well in a nearby city
  • How to use SEMrush to get a link from Quora
  • Plugin recommended by Dan Shure for SEO and JavaScript sites
  • New tool from BrightLocal that can be used to detect local ranking fluctuations
  • 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.

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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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