Intro
SNYCU Podcast
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News about Google’s Algorithms
MHC Announcements
Google Announcements
SEO Tips
Other Interesting News
Recommended Reading
Jobs
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Ep. 221 - Feb. 10, 2022 - Light Version

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In this episode we recap on Marie’s podcast with Lily Ray, a breakdown of Google’s new blog post on how they use AI, Google’s Inspect URL API and how tools are implementing it, making honest mistakes in search, and lots more!

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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!

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It’s well worth the $18 per month. Want to see a sample premium newsletter episode? View it here.

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

New from Google: support for domain properties
Google shares how they use AI in a new blog post
Google’s Inspect URL API and how you can use it
Do you use Google AutoComplete?
PageSpeed saver Chrome extension
Don’t sleep on Bing Webmaster Tools
Should you worry about server connectivity problems in GSC?
Anchor tags & alt text, what does Google prefer?
What image you should use for product reviews
Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles

You’ll also have access to all past episodes, including this one.

News about Google’s Algorithms

Things were once again fairly quiet on the algorithm front this past week. Barry reported a few spikes in the weather tools on February 6/7th (MozCast, Algoroo, Advanced Web Rankings), however this was not seen across the board and there hasn’t been much in the way of chatter amongst the community regarding major ranking shifts.

More insight will be shared for our premium members.

MHC Announcements

This week’s to watch

This week’s SEO to watch is Myriam Jessier. Myriam is an expert in SEO, analytics, and Google Ads at a boutique marketing agency called PRAGM. You can regularly find Myriam sharing her expertise: she speaks at conferences, works as a marketing trainer, and is just all around super helpful and interesting on Twitter. Just last week, Myriam was the guest host of #SEOchat, and she chose to focus on hreflang as the topic (for the unfamiliar, you can follow along by looking at the recent tweets containing #SEOchat). She also regularly drops helpful tips and tidbits, such as a reminder to use rel=canonical on any page variants you create for A/B testing in order to ensure that your main version of the page receives any benefits the variant pages may accrue.

Did you catch Lily Ray on the Search News podcast?

Last week, Marie had SEO Lily Ray on the podcast to discuss Lily’s articles on the winning and losing sites in Google’s 2021 updates, how some sites affected by Product Reviews update don’t review products, manual actions for Discover and News sites and what they can tell us about the direction search is heading, title tag rewrites and lots more!

The video of the interview is now live. Give it a watch here!

Google Announcements

Google’s migration of messages into the new Search Console interface is complete

Property-level GSC messages that typically hit your inbox are now available in the new GSC interface. For those looking, the Massage Panel can be found within the “Legacy tools and reports” on the left hand side of GSC. Do keep in mind though that it’s not available for domain properties.

We're happy to let you know that we finished the migration of all the messages into the new Search Console interface – look out for more user messages in the messages panel. More info https://t.co/PNVic5UXom pic.twitter.com/VX5QyZXEBz

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) February 9, 2022

SEO Tips

Should you place CTAs above the fold?

This caught us a little off guard! We haven’t heard anything related to call to action (CTAs) being bad for SEO if placed above the fold. John Mueller further confirmed in a Reddit forum that this is not true and nowhere in the Google documentation does it state otherwise. There is absolutely nothing wrong with CTAs above the fold. The only potential issue would be placing them partially on the fold which could break the HTML over time.

As Barry reiterated in his SER article, and in the September 21, 2021 SEO office-hours hangout, this might be related to large CTAs being treated as advertisements where large ads can push down main content. Other than this, regular, normal sized CTAs are fine.

Ask Googlebot: how Google handles honest mistakes

What happens when you have made an honest mistake and break Google’s Webmaster’s Guidelines and Web Spam Policies unknowingly? Google understands that accidents happen be it either reading something online or following advice that breaks these guidelines. In this case Google has systems that try and help site owners in two ways:

If Google can find and recognize the bad practice and isolate it. Google will try and ignore those parts of your site and focus on parts that are good.
Google will give you a manual action and will notify you in GSC so you can take appropriate action and fix the issue.

Google can understand that honest mistakes can happen and has these measures in place. It’s best practice to do research before committing to strategies and learn some SEO basics and read the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines. If you’ve already received a manual action and need help removing it, we can help!

😔 Everybody makes a mistake sometimes…

💡 @JohnMu dives into the two ways Google handles honest mistakes regarding webmaster guidelines and web spam policies in this episode of #AskGooglebot. → https://t.co/iGZBhhhJVs pic.twitter.com/061kYVqf6u

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) February 2, 2022

Other Interesting News

Data loss in GSC Performance Report

Google has added another anomaly on its performance report graph. Starting February 1st, performance metrics suffered a logging issue for Search, Discover and Google News. Google noted that the error was solely confined to reporting and did not affect search rankings.

Stalled crawling fixed on Shopify sites

If you saw drops in your Shopify store’s crawling, you weren’t the only one and all seems to be in order now on Google’s end with crawling back to normal.

Reports of a lack of crawling for Shopify stores last week seem to be the result of a “temporary drop in how Google calculates how much we can crawl,” according to John Mueller. Apparently it can happen occasionally and it normally resolves itself after a few days.

Jobs

Fellow tech SEOs! My team @DeepCrawl is hiring 1-2 Associates
– full time
– remote, but US only
– nice folks, loads of data, interesting problems to solve

Application process = first review is totally blind, no resumes accepted

Open until Feb 16 > https://t.co/pEsppIvXwa 1/2

— Ashley (@BermanHale) February 4, 2022

Our SEO team is growing. If you have between 12 – 24+ months of experience, we have roles open:

SEO Executive > https://t.co/H5fi1qKgBn

SEO Consultant > https://t.co/ul61YH5Mt0

A few things that we offer ⬇️

— Paddy Moogan (@paddymoogan) February 8, 2022

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