SNYCU Ep. 215 - December 23, 2021
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In our final episode of 2021, we have the latest on the December product reviews update, a previously-unannounced local search update in November 2021, a recent (now-resolved) Google issue with the indexing of new URLs, and much more.
Happy holidays, SNYCU readers!
SNYCU Podcast
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The following topics are covered in the premium version of this episode:
- More in-depth coverage of the latest algorithm news (December product reviews and November 2021 local search updates!)
- Link GA4 and GSC properties
- Have you had limited access to Google Search Console lately?
- A clever way to get more out of FAQ schema
- How to improve your SEO content strategy with keyword clusters
- See your rewritten titles
- Track brand mentions and potential backlinks within Semrush
- Issues with Google reviews
- Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles
News about Google’s Algorithms
The first item to cover is Google’s November 2021 local search update that the industry is dubbing, “The Vicinity Update.” It appears that Google forgot to actually announce the update as intended! It ran from November 30th through to December 8th.
Our November 2021 local search update has concluded. It began Nov 30 and ran through Dec 8. It involved a rebalancing of various factors we consider in generating local search results. General guidance for businesses remains the same as covered here: https://t.co/uyXFfmUEIR
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) December 16, 2021
We have a lot of updates all the time and don't announce them all. We do try to announce those that are likely to be noticeable. That was a miss in this case; we'll work to do better going forward.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 16, 2021
The best writeup we have come across so far on the update’s impact comes courtesy of Joy Hawkins over at Sterling Sky. She was the first to notice a number of the changes in the SERPs around December 6th that we initially reported on in last week’s newsletter (episode 214).
In other algo news, Glenn Gabe was kind enough to share some more examples of sites that he’s seen impacted by the product review update:
PRU Update: I'll cover this in my post re: the PRU, but the Dec Product Reviews Update volatility isn't just impacting rankings, SERP features are being impacted too. I've seen sites completely lose FAQ snippets, some *SERPs* entirely lost FAQs, & sometimes replaced w/jumplinks: pic.twitter.com/RexE3SjfDZ
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 17, 2021
It is interesting to hear that SERP features are being impacted as well as ranking positions. This was certainly another shakeup in a review sector that can be quite volatile.
For more in-depth coverage of the latest algorithm news, consider a premium subscription. Marie’s podcast this week will also review all of the significant Google changes in 2021 and how they impacted SEO.
MHC Announcements
No episode next week
Just a friendly reminder that the MHC team is shutting down and logging off for the holidays. We will be gone December 24th to January 4th. With that said, there is no newsletter episode next week. Wishing you all a happy and healthy holiday season! See you in 2022!
This week’s SEO to watch
There’s a good chance you’ll already be familiar with this week’s SEO to watch, Areej AbuAli (@areej_abuali), who is an in-house SEO and founder of the incredible Women in Tech SEO (WTS) community. Follow Areej on Twitter for insight about technical and on-site SEO, developing and growing an online community, as well as perspectives on agency-side versus client-side SEO. In fact, Areej just published an enjoyable article featuring her thoughts on what she has learned about starting, running, and growing a community of like-minded individuals focused on sharing their knowledge of SEO and learning from their peers. We’re huge fans of the work Areej and the WTS community as a whole has done in elevating and empowering women in SEO.
Google Announcements
Issue with newly published URLs (now resolved)
On December 16th, Google announced an ongoing issue with their serving system in Google search that impacted a few sites. Specifically, newly published URLs had trouble appearing in the SERPs as normal.
There's an ongoing issue with our serving system in Google Search that's affecting a small number of sites.
We're working on fixing the root cause. Next update will be within 12 hours. ^gi— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) December 16, 2021
If you noticed this issue, it shouldn’t be a problem anymore because Google announced a few hours later that day that they had resolved the issue.
We fixed the issue with our serving system. Newly published URLs should show up in search results at normal rates. There will be no more updates. ^gi
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) December 16, 2021
When Google made this announcement, we had wondered if perhaps this was connected to the issue that many sites were having with content getting stuck in “discovered, not currently crawled” in GSC.
Hearing more reports of people struggling to get content indexed. If that's you, could you reply with details?
*New site?
*Just new content (all?) not indexing?
*Are these pages in discovered/not indexed?
*What kind of content is on these pages?
*Any links to these pages?— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) December 7, 2021
We have heard a few anecdotal reports of people having better success with indexing new content since Google’s announcement, but we feel that most likely they were talking about a specific incident where large publishers like the WSJ and NYT were unable to get new content in the index for one particular morning.
Google Help Hangout Tips
Google looks at language on a per page basis
In a recent hangout, John Mueller was asked if a US site would be considered less comprehensive or authoritative to Spanish users if they only translated half of their content to Spanish as opposed to all of it.
John replied by confirming that Google looks at the language of each of your pages individually. Just don’t mix languages on the same page and keep internal linking in mind.
SEO Tips
The exact number of external links is not a useful metric
John says that there’s no way to measure the absolute number of external links a website has once a website has acquired more than a handful. Although this may surprise some of you, keep in mind that the number of backlinks you’ve received matters far less than the quality of backlinks you’ve earned. Link volume can be a good ‘quick’ indicator when assessing potential differences in authority, but don’t lose sight of what really matters! One really great link should far outweigh the power of a handful of poor links.
There is no way to measure the absolute number of external links a site has – it's theoretically impossible once a site has more than a handful of links. Don't focus on the number of links, it's not a useful metric.
— 🫕 John 🫕 (@JohnMu) December 15, 2021
Get the 411 on canonicalization from Semrush
::: Canonicalization – What, Why and How :::
Want to know about Canonicalisation?
How to handle Duplication?
What to avoid doing?I'm Darth Autocrat, and we're going to look at Canonicalisation:
* What it is
* Why we need it
* How to do it1/22@darth_na #SEOThread pic.twitter.com/bgwbE7i3g4
— Semrush (@semrush) December 14, 2021
Darth Autocrat (@darth_na – who is a great Twitter follow, by the way) recently posted a guest Twitter thread on canonicalization. The full thread is certainly worth checking out, but here are a few points we found interesting.
There are four methods of canonicalization:
- Hard: when the non-canonical URLs cannot be viewed. Typically done with redirects.
- Soft: when the non-canonical can be accessed. This is done with page variants.
- Hybrid: user agent is detected as different content served based on whether or not there is a bot. This is not ideal and should be altered by changing other signals like internal links.
- Wrong: multiple canonicals, robots/noindex,404s and canonicalizing different languages via hreflang.
Don’t canonicalize to URLs that are “dead” (404, 410, noindex). This tells search engines that you prefer the non-canonicals to not be shown in favour of a page that doesn’t exist or can’t be indexed.
Other Interesting News
SearchEngineJournal’s SEO Trends 2022 has arrived
Add this to your holiday reading! SEJ has released its annual ‘predict the year ahead’ trends with the help of several industry experts. We’re eager to dive into this ourselves but here’s a preview of what the SEO Twitter community has voted on:
SEO Trends 2022 launched yesterday! Have you had a chance to look at it yet? What do you think? (Get your copy here https://t.co/3dckum1gQd)
What will you be focusing on and watching for this year?
— SearchEngineJournal® (@sejournal) December 16, 2021
Get your free copy here and don’t forget to read the Marie Haynes Consulting guide on E-A-T.
SEO Tools
Free SEO forecasting templates from a variety of different SEOs
Aleyda Solis on Twitter was kind enough to share a variety of free SEO forecasting templates, guides, and resources that you can use to forecast your organic search traffic, conversions, and revenues in the new year. Check out Aleya’s thread for Google Sheets templates, Google Data Studio templates, Google Analytic templates, ROI predictions, and more!
Are you forecasting your organic search traffic/conversions/revenue for next year?
Here are a few Free SEO forecasting templates, guides and easy to use resources to help you:
🔭 SEO Forecasting in Google Sheets – A template by @THCapper https://t.co/bmYwfZ9oFo
— Aleyda Solis 👩🏻💻 (@aleyda) December 10, 2021
Recommended Reading
Does Turning On-Page Content into FAQs and Adding FAQ Schema Help SEO Performance? – Daniel Haugen
https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/turn-page-content-into-faqs-and-add-schema/
December 9, 2021
We found this case study to be very interesting to read! When doing our own site audits, we sometimes see clients who have FAQs on their page but don’t have them marked up with FAQ schema. We could simply recommend adding FAQ schema but what benefit would this have on their performance? In this case study by Search Pilot, they did a split test to see what impact FAQ schema would have on organic traffic.
Content Ideation: The Ultimate Guide – Liam Taft
https://www.seoworks.co.uk/content-ideation-guide/
December 7, 2021
Here’s a great content ideation guide that is just in time for the planning of your website’s 2022 content ideation strategy.
Jobs
Heads up, I'm probably going to need to hire a few US based SEOs to join my team at Razorfish in January. If you're interested get me a resume. ryan.jones at razorfish dot com
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) December 16, 2021
Have a very unique opportunity for a hungry, detail-oriented but junior content SEO on the team who gets to work with data science 🙂 https://t.co/nBWk7yJhxW
Pls DM me if interested! Would likely need to work out of SF (relo likely available)
— Jackie Chu (@jackiecchu) December 16, 2021
Want More?
Premium members also get the following:
It’s well worth the $18 per month!
The following topics are covered in the premium version of this episode:
- More in-depth coverage of the latest algorithm news (December product reviews and November 2021 local search updates!)
- Link GA4 and GSC properties
- Have you had limited access to Google Search Console lately?
- A clever way to get more out of FAQ schema
- How to improve your SEO content strategy with keyword clusters
- See your rewritten titles
- Track brand mentions and potential backlinks within Semrush
- Issues with Google reviews
- Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles
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.
.@marie_haynes: “She inspires me as the leading expert in EAT and also as a successful business owner. She puts out one of the best and most in-depth SEO newsletters in the industry.”
— Inflow® (@goinflow) March 8, 2021
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