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Episode 102 - September 25, 2019 - Light Version

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In this episode, we discuss the September 2019 Core Update, Google's major changes including the new metatags and HTML attribute, updated Search Console, starmageddon, as well as a possible algo tweak on September 17th.​

Marie’s Podcast for this episode

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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:

  • September 17, 2019 - Possible small quality tweak
  • The latest on starmageddon
  • Fresher data arrives in your site’s Search Performance Report
  • Snippet controls and new metatags to help you preview your content in Search
  • Google Search Console welcomes a new report
  • Google adds FAQs surrounding the review snippets algo update
  • EU press publication sites will see changes coming in late October 2019
  • Irregularities in Indexation
  • Online community discusses how to inspire trust in your website
  • Using JSON-LD? Here’s where to place your structured data
  • It could be easy to rectify your structured data manual action
  • Can errors and warnings in your schema markup impact rankings?
  • Hreflang is a "per-page annotation"
  • A slidedeck you may find helpful in learning more about .htaccess files and how to use it for SEO
  • How Google looks at ranking in Search Console
  • Advice for recurring events
  • How Google will handle crawling nofollow
  • Is automatically generated content spam?
  • Reasons why syndicated content may outrank the original source
  • This is what the SERPs look like when different industries start to use (and abuse?) FAQ schema
  • If you sell products on Amazon, is the algorithm against you?
  • A light-hearted look back at ASOS product PR over the past year
  • Joy Hawkins tell webmasters how many listings SABs can get away with only one address
  • Fighting spam? You may want to replicate this document
  • Changes ahead to GMB Messaging
  • Darren Shaw's team discovered that uploaded photos/videos are automatically getting pulled into the Posts feed
  • Auction-Time Bidding for Search Campaigns
  • It's ok to have dates in your URLs
  • The forecast for evergreen content
  • My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

Algorithm Updates

Google announces a core update - released September 24, 2019

We love that Google is now pre-announcing significant updates.

In another tweet, Danny Sullivan told us the update started rolling out the afternoon of September 24, 2019 and will take a few days to fully roll out.

As of the morning of publication of this newsletter, Dr. Pete from Moz shared with us that there is some turbulence seen in the SERPS, but nothing too exciting so far.

As usual, the MHC team will be hard at work analyzing the impact of this update. We will report on what we are seeing next week. 

Were you negatively affected by the Aug 22-29, or September 13 Google updates?

We wrote about these updates in past newsletters. We would like to reiterate that this appears to be a significant update in regards to how Google handles links. This week, Marie published a thorough article with several disavow case studies. We found that several of our clients for whom we had filed aggressive disavows saw nice improvements at this time. Also, several of our clients for whom we recommended disavowing, but did not, saw drops.

Each of these sites that saw changes had utilized extensive guest posting or content marketing for link acquisition. We feel that Google is getting much better now at determining whether a link is a legitimate recommendation, or whether it is just there for SEO purposes. It does appear that disavowing links made like this can help improve Google’s assessment of trust for a site.

MHC Announcements

Come visit our booth at Pubcon Vegas

Are you attending the Pubcon conference in Vegas this October? If you are, come say hi to the MHC team in the exhibit hall. We are running a booth and would love to meet our SNYCU readers! You will also have the chance to play to win a one-year subscription! Get practicing, Pubcon is less than two weeks away!  

Marie in Sitechecker interview 

Sitechecker has been completing a series of interviews with SEOs and digital marketers and the latest is with Marie! If you’ve ever wanted to learn about Marie’s career, learn her perspective on the industry and its future, this interview is an awesome read. 

Have you read all of our SEO guides?

As you’ve probably seen in past episodes, the Wix SEO lovers have created guides to help you improve your seo. Here is the full index in case you missed one -- you can topics such as canonicals, internal linking, how to noindex, and more. Feel free to share them if you find them helpful, and tag us @WixSEOLovers on Twitter. 

Google Announcements

Google Search News video series coming soon

John Mueller has been incredibly helpful to SEOs via Twitter and the #AskGoogleWebmasters video, and he’s soon taking on another platform -- this time dedicated to Google Search News!

Keep your eyes peeled on the series which we hope to include in newsletter once they arrive.

25 years of Friends has introduced new easter eggs!

Google is getting in the Friends 25 years anniversary celebration by welcoming plenty of new easter eggs inspired by your favourite characters. Joey Tribbiani and Phoebe Buffay are amongst our favourites, but you can find them all in here.

Google SERP Changes

Get a load of this, Google Search bug shows just the URLs in the SERPs

When have you ever seen this!? Numerous reports were sent to Barry Schwartz regarding this so it was not a one-off. Hopefully it’s short-lived!

Favicons and gray URLs in the SERPs -- this must be a test

Google is showing emojis in suggested search results

We’re not sure if this is a glitch or a future change for the SERPs, but someone tagged Barry seeing this, and when he typed “what” into the search bar, Google generated emojis in the results for him as well. 

SEO Tips

#AskGoogleWebmasters covers AJAX crawling, hash-bang URLs, and moving to a different URL structure

We love our weekly dose of John Mu! AJAX crawling was made 10 years ago in the beginning of JS. Google has since learned how to render pages, so you no longer have to do anything for hashbang URLs - they render them directly. To move to a different URL structure, you need to use JS on these pages to create redirects. 

Reminder: everything following the hash is not sent to the server but processed in the browser, so you can’t use server side redirects.  

Google Help Hangout Tips

Indexing images vs web pages 

In case you’ve seen this, indexing images takes longer than indexing your web pages. So if you’re not seeing the images indexed right away, that may be normal. 

Other Interesting News

Check out how the SERPs are changed to show current events

The process is called QDF and stands for Query Deserves Freshness and is an adjustment Google makes in the SERPs to adjust for current events. With the rugby world cup underway this week, there has been a massive climb for related keywords and ranking.

So how does Google do this? They respond to query changes and make adjustments when a world event correlates. You can see spikes for events like Black Friday as well as keyword changes here. 

A reminder that Google Ads will stop showing the average position metric starting September 30th

Thanks Barry for this reminder! If you use average position, G recommends trying the four new metrics. You can learn about the new average position changes here. 

Local SEO - Tips

Reminder to double check your SAB service area as Google has done automatic changes if you have not manually done it yourself

We included this initial announcement back in episode 99 and it looks like Google has gone ahead an updated all distance-based service areas to the nearest named area. If you have not manually updated this yourself, we’d advise that your check your listing(s) to ensure that Google’s automated changes are accurate for your business.

Local SEO - Other Interesting News

Are coworking spaces against the GMB guidelines?

Joy brought this up as her team often uses coworking spaces for meetings, but can you have your GMB address as a coworking space? It’s a yes and no answer. She lists the circumstances in which it can’t be, but if they don’t apply, she also gives recommendations for that. Ultimately, she doesn’t recommend doing this as accounts are often suspended for not meeting the staffing requirements set out within the GMB guidelines. 

What TripAdvisor tells us about review fraud and spam

TripAdvisor released their first Transparency Report, and admitted that just over 2% of the reviews submitted in 2018 were fake. Review spam and fraud are hitting all the review platforms, and it seems more important than ever for businesses to be transparent about their reviews in order to retain their trustworthiness.

Recommended Reading

A Guide to the Biggest SEO Myths on The Web – Bill Slawski
https://www.semrush.com/blog/guide-to-biggest-seo-myths-on-web/
Sept 23, 2019 

This article is a behemoth from Bill Slawski and it’s well worth your time. Bill starts with a really good explanation of how myths come to be, how to avoid logical fallacies when making arguments, and how to spot one when you see one.

 

Google Accelerating Its Path to the Transaction Layer of the Internet – David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal
https://streetfightmag.com/2019/09/16/google-accelerating-its-path-to-the-transaction-layer-of-the-internet/
Sept 16, 2019

In this interview transcript, Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm discuss the changes Google is making towards being the “transactional layer” of the internet. As Mike notes, a key point of this is noting that Google recently changed its mission statement from “Organizing the world's knowledge” to “helping you get things done”. 

 

How to Automate Pagespeed Insights For Multiple URLs using Google Sheets – James McNulty
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-automate-pagespeed-insights-for-multiple-urls-using-google-sheets
Sept 17, 2019

Page speed is important, so much so that Google has confirmed it to be a ranking factor. While many great tools are out there to test page speed on a per-URL basis, there seems to be a lack of tools designed to test multiple URLs (think hundreds or thousands) at a time. Fortunately for you, James set out to find a solution, and over the course of the last year, he’s been able to produce an efficient method.

Recommended Reading (Local SEO)

'My derelict pub still got TripAdvisor reviews' – Mary-Ann Russon
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49725337
Sept 18, 2019

This is an interesting article looking at a pub that despite being closed since 2011, continued to receive TripAdvisor reviews. The reviews spanned from 2014 to 2016 and made claims of eating at the Inn and having poor service. Very interesting read on reviews! 

Jobs

Want More?

Paid members also get the following:

  • September 17, 2019 - Possible small quality tweak
  • The latest on starmageddon
  • Fresher data arrives in your site’s Search Performance Report
  • Snippet controls and new metatags to help you preview your content in Search
  • Google Search Console welcomes a new report
  • Google adds FAQs surrounding the review snippets algo update
  • EU press publication sites will see changes coming in late October 2019
  • Irregularities in Indexation
  • Online community discusses how to inspire trust in your website
  • Using JSON-LD? Here’s where to place your structured data
  • It could be easy to rectify your structured data manual action
  • Can errors and warnings in your schema markup impact rankings?
  • Hreflang is a "per-page annotation"
  • A slidedeck you may find helpful in learning more about .htaccess files and how to use it for SEO
  • How Google looks at ranking in Search Console
  • Advice for recurring events
  • How Google will handle crawling nofollow
  • Is automatically generated content spam?
  • Reasons why syndicated content may outrank the original source
  • This is what the SERPs look like when different industries start to use (and abuse?) FAQ schema
  • If you sell products on Amazon, is the algorithm against you?
  • A light-hearted look back at ASOS product PR over the past year
  • Joy Hawkins tell webmasters how many listings SABs can get away with only one address
  • Fighting spam? You may want to replicate this document
  • Changes ahead to GMB Messaging
  • Darren Shaw's team discovered that uploaded photos/videos are automatically getting pulled into the Posts feed
  • Auction-Time Bidding for Search Campaigns
  • It's ok to have dates in your URLs
  • The forecast for evergreen content
  • 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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