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In this episode, we discuss Google manual actions returning, new version of GSC crawl stats report, insight into passage based ranking, link building tips and more great info to help you with your SEO needs.

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It’s well worth the $18 per month.

The following topics are covered in the premium version of this episode:

• Minor turbulence in the SERPs in November
• Announcing the new version of the Google Search Console Crawl stats report
• Google insight related to passage-based ranking
• Excellent tip related to link building
• Better switch to HTTPS if you haven’t done so already
• Expert tips for growing your blog
• Google’s new series (#AskGooglebot) discusses rendering and crawl budget
• How to rank and drive traffic in Google Discover
• How to use Screaming Frog to collect Core Web Vitals at scale
• What to know about orphaned pages
• Is it normal to see old domains with redirects in site queries?
• Black Friday statistics 2020
• Beware: Google’s auto-applied recommendations are catching advertisers and agencies off guard
• The difference between where ‘surfaces across Google’ (free listings) appear vs. ‘local surfaces across Google’ (local free listings)
• The latest on the “call history” feature in Google My Business?
• Screaming Frog announcement
• My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

⎋ SUBSCRIBE NOW

Listen to Marie discuss diagnosing a traffic drop at SEJ’s eSummit

Marie will be speaking at Search Engine Journal’s eSummit this January! Her talk will teach you how we diagnose a Google organic traffic drop, and how you can do it yourself. It’s not one to miss! 

Did you know Marie is speaking at @sejournal's eSummit?

It's happening January 12-13 and @Marie_Haynes will be discussing how to diagnose the cause of a drop in Google organic traffic!

Register here:https://t.co/jrTH7GnIjV pic.twitter.com/QHsL5Jdrhm

— Marie Haynes Consulting (@mhc_inc) November 24, 2020

Have you heard of Ahrefs’ Link Intersect Tool? If you do outreach for link building, this tool can be very helpful. 

While we don’t actively build links to our content on MarieHaynes.com, let’s say that we were trying to do outreach to ask more people to link to our post on Google Algorithm Updates. It’s perfectly within Google’s guidelines to ask site owners to link to you and for many sites, it can be helpful to do link building in this way. If you can get truly authoritative sites in your niche to link to you, these links really can help improve rankings.

We searched for “google algorithm updates” and the top three sites ranking right now are SEJ, Moz and SEL.

Hitting “Show link opportunities” gave us a list of 8500 websites that link to all three of those sources, but have not linked to our post. If we were doing outreach to try and get sites to recommend our content on algorithm updates, this list shows us websites that actively recommend algo update posts and possibly could link to our content as well. 

This is also a great link building tip for small businesses. For example, you can quickly see which websites have linked out to the top 3 ranking dentists in your city, and then determine whether you could get links from those sites as well.

Google confirms that manual actions have returned (from what appears to have been a ‘tiny’ bug)

Everything should be back to normal. It affected only a tiny number of sites, so thanks for reporting it!

— Daniel Waisberg (@danielwaisberg) November 23, 2020

Our team was pretty puzzled when some of our clients suddenly had their manual action status disappear in Search Console. While manual actions can expire, it was odd to see several clients have manual actions all expire on the same day. We weren’t sure if this was necessarily a bad thing… but figured it had to be a bug. Daniel Waisberg from Google confirmed it was indeed just a “tiny” bug.

In this week’s podcast episode (embedded in this newsletter article), Marie will be speaking on some interesting things we noted about what happened once this manual action was lifted for some of our clients. 

Unveiling the new Google Webmaster Blogs

As a part of their change from the Google Search Central, Google has also moved the Google Webmaster Blogs in order to consolidate them into one place. This is the new Google Search blog where you can find posts all the way back from 2005 under the archived menu. No changes are needed on your end, just a new link! 

We moved! Check out our new home for the Google Webmaster blogs, including posts dating back to 2005: https://t.co/YQrX5HRSPz

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 19, 2020

Fun fact courtesy of Gary Illyes surrounding crawling

Fun fact: changing a site's underlaying infrastructure like servers, IPs, you name it, can change how fast and often Googlebot crawls from said site. That's because it actually detects that something changed which prompts it to relearn how fast and often it can crawl.#cattax pic.twitter.com/1meuxbdbKi

— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) November 23, 2020

If you want Googlebot to crawl your site faster, Gary Illyes suggests changing the underlying infrastructure. These changes alert Googlebot that something is different within the site, which prompts it to relearn its components. 

Google has published two Google Search Console guides (one for beginners, one for advanced)

You’ve seen the series of GSC training videos that Daniel Waisberg has released over the last year. Now you can find these within Google’s Search Central’s documentation for beginners and advanced SEOs. There’s plenty of useful content within these hubs and let’s be honest, a little refresher on Google’s documentations never hurt anyone!

ICYMI, last week we published two Search Console guides in the new @googlesearchc website:

(1) Beginners https://t.co/nhiCk5eQkk

(2) Advanced https://t.co/UXS7pysy4W

— Daniel Waisberg (@danielwaisberg) November 16, 2020

Publisher Ads Audits is now part of Lighthouse and can help improve ad speed and quality

Chrome DevTools now has the ability to outline Lighthouse metrics for your ads thanks to the general release of Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse v1.3.0.

"Updates to the Chrome DevTools version will land in Chrome Stable with the Chrome 89 release" ->
Introducing Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse v1.3.0

"It's a tool to improve ad speed & overall quality through a series of automated Lighthouse audits." https://t.co/sTOe9cAQ6W pic.twitter.com/2nmJUb42mz

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 20, 2020

This week’s local flux from BrightLocal shows us similar trends to last week, with certain days peaking above others. We haven’t heard of anything related to an algorithm update, but with Black Friday Cyber Monday this week, it seems like a normal fluctuation.

Spike in GMB suspensions continue

There have been reports of several GMB listings suspended by Google. This includes account-wide suspensions for multiple listings. Barry says that he has seen so many suspension reports, he can’t even begin to list them all. Jason Brown has seen a lot of these suspensions first hand and says to be careful who you give GMB access to as Google will hold you responsible for this. 

New GMB Dashboard appears to rolling out as of yesterday (November 24th)

Claire previewed this new dashboard last week but most webmasters appear to be seeing this for the first time only yesterday. Barry Schwartz and local expert Ben Fisher have mentioned that this is available on all account types. Here’s what’s new:

So, a tour of this new GMB dash 1) red dot next to ✏️ means there are external edits 2) add a photo/video 📷 3) add post (not present if no posts functionality for that biz) 🧐 and 4) view business profile in search #GoogleMyBusiness #LocalSEO pic.twitter.com/0IAVsM8IHE

— Claire Carlile🕊️ 🌊 🥑 🦥 (@clairecarlile) November 19, 2020

6 Ways to Build Brand Authority With Content Marketing – Amanda Milligan
https://moz.com/blog/build-brand-authority-with-content-marketing
November 16, 2020

This was a great piece and should get you thinking about how to leverage authority better. We often describe E-A-T as a moving target and one that is relative to your competition. They’re surely not slowing down which is all the more reason that carrying momentum is important!

How to Get Backlinks in 2021 [Series Part 2: Prospecting] — Whiteboard Friday – Britney Muller
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-get-backlinks-2021
November 20, 2020

Part 2 of no brainer link building discusses prospecting (aka. the first step of the process and a vital part of ensuring your efforts are justified, on-target, and will be successful). Britney breaks this down to two main link prospecting strategies — 1) finding out what’s worked well in the past, especially for websites in this industry/niche and 2) determining where the content gaps are.

How to Remove URLs from Google Search in a Snap! – Steven van Vessum, Ondrej Koraba, Vojtech Zach
https://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/google-remove-urls/
November 17, 2020

There are many reasons to remove a page from Google’s index, for example, if your site gets hacked, if you are trying to remove sensitive data from being accessed by the public or even if you have a staging URL that is outranking production URLs. Learn how to do it all in this article! 

Why Doesn’t GMB Insights Data Match Search Console: A Case Study of 78 Listings & 1,560 Keywords – Joy Hawkins
https://www.sterlingsky.ca/search-console-vs-google-my-business/
November 24, 2020

Joy Hawkins conducted her own study to see how keyword data compared between GMB and Search Console.

The main key takeaways from this study are as follows; search queries in GMB insights are valuable and click data in Search Console should be used for keyword analysis over impressions.

🔗 Who's the best link builder you know? Tell them that @improveandgrow is hiring an Outreach Strategist❗️

👉 Details: https://t.co/hTDkOKNBu2#jobs #seojobs #lancasterpa #linkbuilding

— Justin Mosebach (@jlmosebach) November 19, 2020

We're hiring! Following recent client wins, we're looking for a mid to senior level organic search strategist, ideally with agency experience / working with eCommerce brands.

Feel free to DM me / recommend if you know someone great, who's looking for an exciting move.

— Kevin Gibbons (@kevgibbo) November 23, 2020

Frontier Marketing is looking for an expert PPC/SEM manager

If you love solving problems, getting into the heads of prospects, communicating with people, split testing, and driving the most qualified people to clients at the best price, then Frontier Marketing wants to talk with you as soon as possible!

This is a full-time position in Flower Mound, Texas, but they will consider VERY qualified remote candidates (more info).

Premium members also get the following:

It’s well worth the $18 per month!

• Minor turbulence in the SERPs in November
• Announcing the new version of the Google Search Console Crawl stats report
• Google insight related to passage-based ranking
• Excellent tip related to link building
• Better switch to HTTPS if you haven’t done so already
• Expert tips for growing your blog
• Google’s new series (#AskGooglebot) discusses rendering and crawl budget
• How to rank and drive traffic in Google Discover
• How to use Screaming Frog to collect Core Web Vitals at scale
• What to know about orphaned pages
• Is it normal to see old domains with redirects in site queries?
• Black Friday statistics 2020
• Beware: Google’s auto-applied recommendations are catching advertisers and agencies off guard
• The difference between where ‘surfaces across Google’ (free listings) appear vs. ‘local surfaces across Google’ (local free listings)
• The latest on the “call history” feature in Google My Business?
• Screaming Frog announcement
• My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

⎋ SUBSCRIBE NOW

Note: If you are seeing the light version and you are a premium member, be sure to log in (in the sidebar on desktop or below the post on mobile) and read the full article here.

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

Marie’s newsletter is a game changer because it manages to cut through the fluff and deliver high-quality information that is not only really important for those that do SEO, but it is presented in a format that is really easy to absorb.

If you are looking for a trusted information related to search that is highly actionable I would strongly recommend Marie’s newsletter.

– Paul Macnamara – Offers SEO Consulting at PaulMacnamara.com