Ep. 220 - Feb. 3, 2022 - Light Version
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In this episode, Lily Ray joins Marie on the Search News podcast, we cover product review websites, the launch of new GSC Inspection URL, Marie’s thoughts on Discover and Google News manual actions being handed out, and lots more!
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The following topics are covered in the premium version of this episode:
- Does Google’s definition of a “product review” website extend to sites reviewing places and things?
- Importance of subfolder URL structure depth
- Do cross-domain rel=canonicals benefit other domains?
- Discover and Google News Manual Actions being handed out
- Thread about crawled – currently not indexed
- Tips on getting your SEO audit implemented
- How to optimize an on brand SERP
- Location of internal links on a page – does it matter?
- Reminder for information behind tabs and accordions
- GSC logging issue
- Untitled results sending users to spam
- The Google My Business API is being depreciated
- Data Studio template to analyze keyword performance
- How to download URLs from archive.org
- Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles
News about Google’s Algorithms
For once, things were quite quiet this week in terms of news about changes to Google’s algorithms. There wasn’t much industry chatter, nor did MHC see much significant change in the way of movement for the sites that we monitor.
We did want to highlight part two of Lily Ray’s “winners and losers” series on the sites that saw the biggest traffic changes in 2021. Last week Lily covered the winners, and this week she looked at the losers.
Again, we recommend reading the report from Lily in full, but here are some notes on what we found interesting!
The July Core update appeared to wipe out rankings in the US for a number of non-US ccTLDs.
This was interesting to us. We can think of a number of instances when serving the non-US site for one of these sites could be helpful – for instance, if a searcher was looking for a product not for sale within the US, but that could be shipped from overseas. Lily doesn’t provide any more details about what replaced these SERPs or which keywords dropped.
In the YMYL sphere, specifically the medical sphere, Lily highlighted that Healthline saw a number of drops. In most cases the SERPs where they dropped were replaced with sites that had niche relevant E-A-T for that medical topic instead of generic medical E-A-T. It is quite exciting to see Google seemingly getting better at making these distinctions (however they still have a long way to go!).
Sites that primarily provide user generated content saw significant declines, as did a number of generalist review sites with the Product Review Updates and some core updates. There wasn’t a lot said about this item but it’s definitely an interesting discovery.
MHC Announcements
This week’s to watch
This week our SEO to watch is Alex Buraks, who is the Head of Growth at DiscoverCars.com. Alex is active on Twitter and posts these really helpful threads that have quick tips, interesting observations, or advice on how to use SEO tools. Alex’s recent thread is a mini case study on how NeedWallet leverages updating content to help drive growth is a great example of the type of content Alex tweets about.
Google Announcements
New GSC URL Inspection API coming at you
Google has just launched the new Search Console URL Inspection API and here’s what it’s all about.
This new GSC API allows an external program to interact with GSC in order to provide reports at a URL-level. The objective of the tool is to help SEOs and site owners to easily detect and resolve problems in a much more efficient way.
In Google’s official documentation on this new API, they provide examples of ways in which users can utilize this new program. You can implement on-going monitoring for important pages: “For example, checking if there are differences between user-declared and Google-selected canonicals, or debugging structured data issues from a group of pages.” CMS and plugin developers can also add ongoing monitoring to detect and debug issues.
Google’s documentation provides information on how to enable the API.
There are usage limits. Per GSC website property, you can check 2,000 queries per day and a speed quota of 600 queries per minute.
We’re super excited to utilize this new feature! We think it’s going to be very efficient.
📢 Today we’re launching the Google Search Console URL Inspection API, a new way for developers & SEOs to debug and optimize their pages 🔎 https://t.co/ckRPcFRPNJ pic.twitter.com/u7DCE66bc3
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) January 31, 2022
SEO Tips
Good reminder to look at SERP landscape
If you are worried about your position on SERPs, keep in mind that Google features new intended search results that often eliminates one ranking position, by giving it to the same site.
While it might look like you have more competition, it is possible that it is just the same competitor ranking for more than one position.
When analyzing ranking/traffic changes, it's important to remember that Google's new indented search results basically eliminate 1 (or more) available position from the 10 blue links.
So, it may not be that you have new competition, but that your competitor now gets 2+ results. pic.twitter.com/LoEs3OvRAm
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) January 25, 2022
Marie’s thoughts on why these manual actions are interesting
These manual actions could have important implications for SEO beyond Discover and News.
When Google gives out a manual action, it means that they have detected issues, but they can’t deal with them algorithmically. When I first started removing manual actions in 2012, the majority of links I had to remove and then eventually disavow were directory links, forum signature spam, and the other types of links that Google eventually learned to deal with algorithmically via Penguin.
A couple of years ago I wrote about what the QRG says about scientific consensus and theorized a little on how or whether Google could determine what content was good and bad in this area. For Discover and News, it is very important for Google to display content they can trust. EAT matters immensely here.
Google does not want to rely on manually penalizing sites in this area forever, so I believe they are likely finding ways to determine these things algorithmically as well. And as Google gets better at doing this I predict we’ll see future updates to organic search that do an even better job at surfacing content that is trustworthy for YMYL queries and demoting content that contradicts expert consensus or is misleading.
At MHC we have not had any clients reach out as of yet to our manual actions removal team for these Discover or News penalties. We will let you know if that changes!
Other Interesting News
Google has changed errors and issues reporting in GSC
If you use HowTo structured data on your site, pay close attention. On January 31, Google informed us that they’ve changed the way GSC evaluates and reports errors in Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data. For anyone with these implemented, you may see a change in the quantity of errors and their severity reported.
Google updates their documentation on Safe Search
There haven’t been any changes to Google’s Safe Search guidelines, but they have changed the documentation to have all SafeSearch information in one place. You can find the new document here, for all of the guidance, troubleshooting and guidelines.
Recommended Reading
We Studied 81,000 Page Titles – Google Rewrote 61% Of Them – Cyrus Shepard
https://zyppy.com/blog/google-title-rewrite-study/
January 27, 2022
Who can resist reading about more Google title tag rewrites. Especially when we now know from Cyrus, that 61% of them were rewritten (of the 80,959 examined across 2370 sites from across the globe). Spoiler alert! In order to dramatically decrease the chance of Google rewriting your title, matching the H1 to the title tag seems to be an effective strategy. This was a neat tidbit to say the least. Find more in the article.
How to Create High-Converting Content in 2022 – Ross Hudgens
https://www.siegemedia.com/creation/high-converting-content
January 18, 2022
Creating content is great but, the ultimate purpose of it is to generate an outcome. It could be that you want more people to sign up for your newsletter or blog, driving more leads, or perhaps more conversions. In this article, Ross Hudgens walks us through a step-by-step guide on how to create high-converting content. In fact, we often see many of these elements in our own audits!
Google’s Broad Core Updates And The Difference Between Relevancy Adjustments, Intent Shifts, And Overall Site Quality Problems – Glenn Gabe
https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-broad-core-updates-difference-between-relevancy-adjustments-intent-shifts-overall-site-quality/
January 31, 2022
In his recent article for G-Squared Interactive, Glenn Gabe provides insights into the major differences between relevancy adjustments, intent shifts, and overall site quality problems for site owners experience shifts after broad core updates. If you want more information on what to expect when a new broad quality update rolls out, check out Glenn Gabe’s article.
Core Web Vitals Data Study w/ CrUX & 5.2M Pages – Ahrefs – Patrick Stox
https://ahrefs.com/blog/core-web-vitals-study/
January 31, 2022
Core Web Vitals were a huge talking point with technical SEOs last year despite Google telling us that these signals would not be particularly strong! Patrick Stox has conducted a detailed deep dive into how sites were performing on these metrics and whether or not their rankings were impacted.
Jobs
Siege Media is hiring Senior SEO Analysts, Content Marketing Specialists, Graphic Designers and more!
We're 100% remote. Benefits include 100% health insurance coverage, 50% 401k match up to 6%, and unlimited PTO.
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— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) January 25, 2022
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The following topics are covered in the premium version of this episode:
- Does Google’s definition of a “product review” website extend to sites reviewing places and things?
- Importance of subfolder URL structure depth
- Do cross-domain rel=canonicals benefit other domains?
- Discover and Google News Manual Actions being handed out
- Thread about crawled – currently not indexed
- Tips on getting your SEO audit implemented
- How to optimize an on brand SERP
- Location of internal links on a page – does it matter?
- Reminder for information behind tabs and accordions
- GSC logging issue
- Untitled results sending users to spam
- The Google My Business API is being depreciated
- Data Studio template to analyze keyword performance
- How to download URLs from archive.org
- 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.
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