Table of Contents
  1. Intro
  2. SNYCU Podcast
  3. Not a premium subscriber? You're missing out!
  4. News about Google’s Algorithms
  5. MHC Announcements
  6. Google Announcements
  7. SEO Tips
  8. Local SEO
  9. Recommended Reading
  10. Jobs
  11. Want More?
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Ep. 246 - August 4, 2022 - Light Version

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In this episode we discuss the early impact of the latest product reviews update, a look at why some pages are appearing to rank without author E-A-T, an update to the QRG, and a LOT of SEO tips including advice to affiliate site owners, programmatic SEO and earning a knowledge panel without a Wikipedia entry.

SNYCU Podcast

Marie’s Podcast for this episode


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

  • Interesting thoughts on the May core update – do visits from quality raters mean you’re getting hit?
  • Why are these pages ranking well for YMYL queries without author E-A-T?
  • The QRG have updated and there are a lot of interesting changes
  • Perspectives in the SERPS
  • Important advice from John Mueller to affiliate site owners
  • How to earn a knowledge panel without a wikipedia entry
  • This site improved page experience scores dramatically with one small change
  • Should you update your internal links from http to https
  • Internal links case study
  • Google tag manager bug borking preview mode
  • What is the first thing you do when you get access to a new GSC profile?
  • Really useful Google Sheets tips
  • Big changes coming to Youtube shorts
  • Interesting insight into Local Pack headers
You’ll also have access to all past episodes, including this one.
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News about Google’s Algorithms

The latest on the July 2022 product reviews update

As mentioned last week Google announced a new product reviews update was rolling out, starting on July 27, 2022. They told us it would take 2-3 weeks to roll out. So far MHC data is showing very little movement, if any at all.

The Semrush sensor showed that perhaps there was some SERP turbulence related to the update on Wednesday, August 3. 

Glenn Gabe has shared some early data:

 

 

Danny Sullivan was asked whether this update would affect sites in Spain. He said, yes, if the reviews are in English. He also hinted that the product reviews update may affect content in other languages soon.

MHC Announcements

New blog post!

As we mentioned elsewhere in newsletter Marie has written a thorough blog post on her thoughts about the latest updates to the QRG.

We’ve reduced the price on our QRG book!

Many SEOs use this book as a checklist in their site audits to help them assess site quality like a quality rater would. Marie hopes to have a new edition of her guide to the search quality evaluator guidelines out by the end of the year. As such, we’ve lowered the price on this book from $99 to $20!

Google Announcements

Changes coming to GSC!

This week a few SEOs noticed an odd message in the index coverage section of GSC:

 

“Limited functionality: We are making some minor changes in the next few days. During this period you will not be able to issue new validation requests.”

Shortly after Google shared with us that they are soon making changes in the GSC interface:

The changes are further explained in a Google blog post. The new reports will group problems into two groups: critical issues and non-critical issues. The example of critical issues in their screenshot shows invalid items that can’t generate rich results because of missing fields such as “description”, “uploadDate”, etc. Their non-critical examples say, “Items with these issue are valid, but could be presented with more features or be optimized for more relevant queries”. One example is “Date/time not in ISO 8601 format in field “duration”. 

This change doesn’t affect your search presence and will take a few months to roll out. For users of the GSC API, you won’t see these changes until the full rollout is complete.

SEO Tips

How to structure pages for programmatic SEO

We hesitated on whether to include this because often “programmatic SEO” produces large amounts of thin content that is designed more for search engines than for users. Google’s quality guidelines say that programmatically generated content that is intended to manipulate search results is against their guidelines.

Still, if you can use these techniques as a starting point to create good helpful content there may be some value here.

 

Allison’s advice boils down to this:

  • Choose a focus keyword for each page.
  • Use these keywords in your H1, URL, meta description, etc.
  • Make sure you’re not competing against other pages on your site.
  • Where there’s potentially competition between pages roll them up into one and use multiple subheadings (i.e. H1 How to grow tomatoes, H2, How to grow tomatoes in containers)
  • Use paragraphs instead of tables or bullet forms

Tips for Bing ranking and indexing issues

This Twitter thread discussed a site that was deindexed from Bing.

Fabrice Canel from Bing responded with this advice:

First, use the URL inspection tool from within Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Next, read Bing’s guidelines. We’d recommend taking some time to read these guidelines even if you are not having trouble with indexing content on Bing. They are very good! And if after this you still don’t have an answer you can actually reach out to Bing support. We have done this for several sites in the past and quite often the webmaster team at Bing is very helpful via email support.

 

Local SEO - Google Announcements

Really good Local SEO tips from LocalU

We loved these tips that came out of the latest LocalU conference:

Recommended Reading

TikTok as a search engine with Annie-Mai Hodge

https://withcandour.co.uk/blog/tiktok-as-a-search-engine-with-annie-mai-hodge
Jack Chambers-Ward
Aug 1, 2022

You can listen to this as a podcast episode or read the transcript. We really think people should be paying attention to TikTok as a search engine as much of the younger generation prefer to use it over Google for searches.

 

15 Quick SEO Wins (To Improve Your Rankings)
https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-wins/
Si Quan Ong
July 27, 2022

This was a great article with some basic, but helpful SEO tips.

Jobs

Looking for a new SEO job? SEOjobs.com is a job board curated by real SEOs for SEOs. Take a look at five of the hottest SEO job listing this week (below) and sign up for the weekly job listing email only available at SEOjobs.com.

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:

  • Interesting thoughts on the May core update – do visits from quality raters mean you’re getting hit?
  • Why are these pages ranking well for YMYL queries without author E-A-T?
  • The QRG have updated and there are a lot of interesting changes
  • Perspectives in the SERPS
  • Important advice from John Mueller to affiliate site owners
  • How to earn a knowledge panel without a wikipedia entry
  • This site improved page experience scores dramatically with one small change
  • Should you update your internal links from http to https
  • Internal links case study
  • Google tag manager bug borking preview mode
  • What is the first thing you do when you get access to a new GSC profile?
  • Really useful Google Sheets tips
  • Big changes coming to Youtube shorts
  • Interesting insight into Local Pack headers
  • Our tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO articles
You’ll also have access to all past episodes, including this one.
I

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