Ep. 232 - April 28, 2022 - Light Version

Looking for the premium members version? Log in here

In this episode, we discuss a possible unconfirmed algorithm update, Google pulling featured snippets from different sources of information, leveraging your meta descriptions for category/product pages, and the latest SEO news from across the industry.

Marie’s podcast for this episode

If you would like to subscribe, you can find the podcasts here:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcast | Soundcloud

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!

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:

• Webspam Report 2021: How Google fought spam in 2021
• Are meta descriptions a ranking factor?
• Looking to embed Google Trends real-time charts?
• Google Search Console notices for removing intrusive interstitials
• Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles

⎋ SUBSCRIBE NOW

Possible Google search ranking algorithm update on April 20th & 21st (unconfirmed) 

There was a lot of algorithm turbulence being reported in both the webmaster forums and by the weather tools as highlighted by Barry on both April 20th and 21st. 

We are not seeing much chatter elsewhere in the SEO community, and looking at the sites that we monitor we are seeing some fluctuations occurring that may be attributed to seasonality, however nothing significant enough for us to label it a significant update. 

Google updates elements of its system multiple times a day, as you can learn from our guide on Google’s Core Ranking System, and it’s very likely that there is an element of this that adapts in real-time to adjust for relevancy and intent shifts for certain queries. An uptick in these kinds of shifts (as opposed to a meaningful update to how Google ranks content) could easily account for the movements that webmasters and the weather tools are reporting.

Content creation by Contentfly (sponsored)

Need to create high-quality content fast and at scale for your SEO strategy? Don’t waste time and money on overcrowded job platforms. Contentfly matches you with the top 1% of writers so you can rank, build your brand, and accelerate your growth!

Contentfly’s custom-matching process ensures you find the perfect writers for your content goals. They even include free revisions and rewrites, plagiarism checks, and a 30-day, 4,000-word money-back guarantee. If you’d like to give it a try, you can get a trial by visiting contentfly.com/searchnews

Goodbye to the URL Parameter Tool in GSC

Remember folks, the URL Parameters tool gets pensioned off TOMORROW – https://t.co/q8x0KoolHa – so grab those screenshots of any you may have set (or not set…) today! #seo #searchconsole

— dan richardson 🙍‍♂️🇺🇦 (@njsdanrich) April 25, 2022

Friendly reminder that as of April 26, 2022 (earlier this week), the URL Parameter Tool has officially been decommissioned. Barry Schwartz also wrote an article on this for more context if you’re interested.

Google creating its own knowledge panels for some queries

It is no secret that knowledge panels are great in that they further expand user experience while also providing SEO benefits. While (when depending on the entity) the content of knowledge panels is often extracted from sources such as Wikipedia.org, users are now noticing that Google seems to be using AI to write knowledge panel descriptions. 

According to Danny Sullivan, this practice is not new and Google has been using AI to write some content since 2018. The only difference now is that Google is also including the “written by” attribute.   

I just checked a number of cities from across the US (some big, some small) and Google was the author for every one of them. https://t.co/v3gtOLkuVx

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 21, 2022

Featured snippets pulling from additional sources?

A new search result feature that pulls information from multiple websites has been flagged. And as Lily says notes, it’s a major update to SERP features indeed. 

Never seen this before and it seems like a pretty major update to SERP features – showing diverse information from different sites (directly in the SERP)@rustybrick, what do you think? #isthisnew?

h/t @SavannaLGray https://t.co/EId8E1uO75

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) April 20, 2022

Glenn Gabe also points out that these tests appear to have a few different styles but all amount to sharing a featured snippet to provide different perspectives. 

Heads-up if you are getting a lot of traffic from featured snippets. You might be sharing the limelight with others if this test rolls out. I'm seeing a different format being tested that incorporates multiple listings from multiple sites "From the web". Here are some examples: pic.twitter.com/bOQ111rgnA

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 20, 2022

Here is another example of the featured snippet test running now (with "From the web" listing multiple sites).

5, count them *5*, sources in the featured snippet versus focusing on one. Below is the test and the current form side by side. Crazy. 🙂 pic.twitter.com/OHtz871Wkp

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 20, 2022

Suddenly you may be forced into sharing some coveted real estate.

Redirecting AMP URLs to non-AMP URLs?

Recently, a Redditor on r/TechSEO mentioned that they were having an issue with an AMP page. The page in question was being ranked well by Google but when the AMP feature was disabled, Google would redirect the URL to the homepage. The user was looking for alternatives to have the AMP URL redirected to the correct one.

John Mueller commented saying the current redirect set-up would fix itself with time but the site owner wouldn’t be able to change the redirect in the meantime. If they wish to speed up the process, John suggested taking a look at Google’s documentation on how to update cached pages. 

Crawling Mondays: SEO testing

A new edition of #CrawlingMondays is here 🤩 dedicated to SEO Testing 👩🏽‍🔬 with the amazing @e_mpotter
and @nickswan:

* Top Types of SEO Tests
* Main Mistakes when Testing
* Building blocks of good SEO Tests
* Top SEO Testing Tips

More 🔥👇https://t.co/dvZGEK3r8C pic.twitter.com/XArKcyFdLn

— Crawling Mondays 👩🏻‍💻 (@CrawlingMondays) April 24, 2022

In Aleyda’s latest Crawling Mondays episode, she invited two SEO testing experts onto the show, Emily Potter and Nick Swan, to provide tips on running successful SEO tests. 

A few of our main takeaways:

• An effective SEO test needs to start with a sound, descriptive, and detailed hypothesis, as well as a willingness to potentially iterate on this hypothesis for follow-up experiments. The hypothesis should be oriented around influencing one of the three levers to improving SEO results: improving existing rankings, expanding on the number of keywords for which you rank, improving click-through on existing rankings, or a combination thereof.
• The next step is selecting pages and a methodology for measurement (split test, time-based test, etc). A split test where a control group can be deployed to control for seasonality (or algorithm turbulence) is always best, but it’s not always possible for all websites due to limited amounts of traffic flowing into pages. Sometimes it requires bravery in regards to the URL selection; Emily and Nick note that there can be a hesitance to test on pages that are highly trafficked or convert well, but these are also the pages that provide the most meaningful testing data.
• There is also a level of patience that is required over the duration of a test, particularly for lower-traffic websites that need to leave experiments running for longer. Making changes during a test, or ending one prematurely, can muddy the waters and leave us with misleading or meaningless data.

Google Analytics real-time reporting bug won’t be fully fixed

As our team enjoys monitoring real-time stats when an exciting new piece of content goes live, we’ve noticed a problem with a few of our clients’ Google Analytics reporting: The real-time stats will show figures of active users that are clearly too low relative to the daily traffic data for the site.

Barry has been tracking this bug since early April and has provided us with the most recent update from Google. Their response indicates it won’t be fully resolved and the impacted sites should make the move to GA4, where the real-time reporting won’t be an issue.

Fake DMCA requests using AI-generated lawyers to demand links

It looks like some black-hat link builders are now using AI-generated images of people to give the impression that a real lawyer is seeking image attribution. Fear can be a big motivator and when less experienced webmasters learn that they may have used an image without properly indicating who owns the rights, they often will provide a backlink. If you receive a DMCA infringement notice from what seems to be a legitimate lawyer, be a bit skeptical and take a deeper look as it may be a black-hat looking for a link. 

This cool technical SEO audit checklist needs beta testers!

Daniel K Cheung has set out with his sights locked on being included in Aleyda Solis’ LearningSEO.io resource – which is excellent by the way! Although it’s not released yet, he’s looking for testers. 

The current checklist is built with WordPress/WooCommerce in mind and it explores a series of tools available to webmasters and supports documentation. Interested? Connect with him on Twitter.

The day has come. I'm finally making my own technical SEO audit checklist.

Starting with WordPress/WooCommerce sites.

The goal is to have this added as a resource on https://t.co/GwBkBJveRq. pic.twitter.com/HAwvBnJjCf

— Daniel K Cheung (He/Him) (@danielkcheung) April 23, 2022

v1.1 update:

➡️ checklist has 174 prompts
➡️ IFS statements based on response
➡️ have not begun writing instructions 😱
➡️ looking for beta tester volunteers pic.twitter.com/fpRScKkwik

— Daniel K Cheung (He/Him) (@danielkcheung) April 25, 2022

FAQ Blog Post: Easy Copywriting Technique to Get Fast SEO Results – Samuel Schmitt
https://thruuu.com/blog/faq-blog-post/ 
April 10, 2022

This is a walk-through on creating a blog post that is built around answering the most frequent questions that your target audience has. It’s slightly different than a dedicated page for frequently asked questions, as it is intended to be able to provide a much more comprehensive overview of a given topic.

11 breadcrumb SEO best practices for a mobile-first strategy – Jes Scholz
https://searchengineland.com/breadcrumb-seo-best-practices-383690 
April 20, 2022

Breadcrumbs are almost obvious on desktop pages in terms of where to position them and what value they bring. Users can see where they are in the context of a website and trace the path in the site hierarchy. On the mobile view, however, some sites incorrectly implement breadcrumbs or simply do not include them at all. Unless you have a website with a very flat structure or don’t have many nested navigation levels, breadcrumbs can be useful to users and to Google.

Content optimization: The complete guide – Priscilla Tan
https://ahrefs.com/blog/content-optimization/ 
April 19, 2022

This guide on optimization emphasizes how you don’t have to make the same changes as everyone else, but rather changes made should depend on your goals. In this article, Priscilla Tan covers how to optimize content for SEO, conversions, and social shares.

The Visual Future of Local Search – Part 1 – Mike Blumenthal
https://www.nearmedia.co/google-and-the-visual-future-of-local-search-part-1/ 
April 13, 2022 

Google has made a variety of changes over the past few years which seem to have resulted in images and visuals taking up an increasing amount in the mobile SERPs. Because of this, businesses should be keeping this in mind as they create (visual) content and take advantage of the situation at hand. This goes for product images, thumbnails, logos, images in the local pack, etc. 

How to Identify Content Gaps for Local Businesses – Celeste Gonzalez
https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/how-to-identify-content-gaps-for-local-businesses/ 
April 20, 2022 

Blog content for local businesses can be just as important as blog content for larger-scale businesses. Celeste Gonzalez has written a really helpful article for identifying content gaps for local businesses specifically. 

How to get reviews for local SEO: The must-do list – Erin Jones
https://searchengineland.com/get-reviews-local-seo-383712 
April 21, 2022 

We’ve discussed the importance of local reviews before and how powerful they can be. Reviews can provide trust and credibility amongst users and can assist in your SEO efforts (how reviews affect rankings). In the awesome article by Erin Jones, we learn about how you can get more reviews. 

👋 Hey marketers@mycaseinc is searching for a Senior Manager in Digital Marketing

A great role with a leader in the industry. B2B tech, SEM, SEO.

Check out the job description here:https://t.co/nuFdjFWjQT

— Corey Haines 💡 (@coreyhainesco) April 20, 2022

Want to work for one of the fastest growing sites in the world?

I'm looking to hire someone with SEO experience to manage production & optimisation of our search-focused content.

UK🇬🇧 based. £35k.

DMs open – tell me why I should hire you.

Retweets & shares appreciated 🔃 pic.twitter.com/4wIQ3Qy416

— Luke Jordan 🧙‍♂️ (@lr_jordan) April 20, 2022

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:

• Webspam Report 2021: How Google fought spam in 2021
• Are meta descriptions a ranking factor?
• Looking to embed Google Trends real-time charts?
• Google Search Console notices for removing intrusive interstitials
• Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent 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.

.@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