Intro
Marie's Podcast
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News about Google’s Algorithms
MHC Announcements
Google Announcements
SEO Tips
Other Interesting News
Local SEO
What Marie's reading this week
Jobs
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Ep. 255 - October 6, 2022 - Light version

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This episode discusses a lot of SERP changes, some of which are making tracking difficult for SEOs. There are really good tips in this episode including a look at a site with increasing rankings in GSC but plummeting clicks and a bunch of keyword research tips.

Marie's Podcast

It’s an off week for podcast, so below is last week’s episode. I talked about the new things announced at SearchOn. Search is changing so quickly. I honestly feel that Google is attempting to completely change how people shop online. If you sell products or write product reviews at all, you should listen to this episode!

Search News You Can Use Podcast: SEO News · What SEOs need to know about Google’s Search On 2022 Event

Not a premium subscriber? You're missing out!

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:

Good tip for analyzing sites hit by recent updates
Marie’s speculation about the importance of the HCU
Ignore anything talking about “link juice”
Overlay algorithm update dates in data studio
GA4 now has enhanced measurement option for form interactions
Does the order of pages on a site: search matter?
The latest on what a title tag length should be
How to easily look at 50K rows of data in GSC
Can speed problems cause reindexing?
Several excellent keyword research tips – including a new one using Google shopping data that blew my mind
Using AI to translate videos and answer questions about it
Interesting case: Celebrity Net Worth being outranked by scrapers
Google doesn’t hate affiliate sites
Interesting read for those using AI generated content
Upcoming changes to medical SERPS?
Bug in Image Search in Creative Commons Corpus
What Marie’s reading – my summary and thoughts on recent SEO articles

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

News about Google’s Algorithms

Is it worthwhile separating out product review content into its own subfolder/subdomain?

This was an excellent question.

Alan did not answer it directly, but instead mentioned that you can use structured data to help Google determine which parts of your content are relevant to products.

Knee jerk reaction would be to recommend adding structured data to describe the page type. Because some systems use urls like /page?id=54321 Google cannot rely on meaning in URL structure.

— Alan Kent (@akent99) September 30, 2022

Danny Sullivan jumped in to clarify that structured data is not a ranking factor.

Structured data isn't used for ranking. Alan was saying it's possible it's used to help identify types of content, just as we use many signals to understand content. That's not the same as ranking, nor would we solely depend on it as not everyone uses it.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 3, 2022

It could be one of the signals Google uses to determine if something is a product review

I have to check but it's possible it's *one of many signals* we might use to determine if something was a product review but it wouldn't be the only thing because, again, not everyone uses it.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 3, 2022

I asked for more information but did not get a reply so far.

I think Lily's main point may have been missed here.
Say a site has product review content that's not great. Could the quality of that content bring down G's assessment of quality sitewide? Would moving it to its own subfolder or subdomain help prevent this?

— Dr. Marie Haynes🐧 (@Marie_Haynes) October 4, 2022

However, Danny implies here that the product review updates are not a sitewide signal.

I don't think we do that, or certainly not solely. I'll check more. It also not a site-wide signal, to my knowledge. I don't think we expressed it that way so segmenting a site just for us, doesn't make much sense.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 3, 2022

We’re hoping for clarification on this as it seems to me that many sites hit by the PRU had a sitewide drop. It is possible though that the issues that caused the site’s content to be considered low quality are present on all pages of the site making it appear like a sitewide penalty.

SearchOn

I agree with Mordy. I think we’re in for some massive changes in how people use Google. I’d encourage you to read his thoughts in this thread:

My big takeaway from #SearchOn22:

Search, as we knew it, is dead.

I didn't say SEO was dead. I said Search, rather, SearchING as we knew it

Not my words. Google's: "To create experiences that are far more natural & intuitive"

Meaning, Search now isn't natural & intuitive🧵 pic.twitter.com/kP1fsYEtsK

— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) September 29, 2022

I liked Kevin Indig’s take on SearchOn

Google's Search On events paint a roadmap for where Search is going in the following 12 months.

Here are the 5 most important takeaways from Search On 2022:

— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) October 4, 2022

We’ll soon have to deal with people searching for images+text.
Google is going to serve more information from within Google maps. Pay attention to GBP!
More shopping features – and this is a priority! Kevin says, “Ecommerce companies need to build stronger image assets and compete on price + delivery.”
More first hand experience and ugc content in the SERPS
“Ecommerce companies will have to embrace eco-friendly signals.”

MHC Announcements

Marie’s upcoming SMX talk

I’m in the midst of preparing my deck for SMX Next presentation. Funny story. They initially rejected my slides because the example I used to show good vs bad content had the word “testicle” in the heading. I will be spending my weekend editing out potentially offensive words and improving my deck now.

I’ll be recording next week. The conference is on November 15. You can register for this virtual event for free.

Book a strategy session with Marie

I have thoroughly enjoyed doing zoom consultation with several of you over the last couple of months. I realized that some of these calls are more helpful to site owners than having me spend a couple of weeks doing a full written report. We’ve been screensharing, looking at competitors, analyzing analytics and strategizing about how to adapt and win as Google’s algorithms change.

I’m experimenting with offering this as a regular service. You can use this link to book a strategy session with me to discuss your website.

There will be more coming! I am hoping to start doing some group webinars to discuss Google updates, improving quality and more. If things go as planned, we’ll have some large group sessions that all premium newsletter subscribers can join, and also some smaller groups where we can really get into analyzing sites. There will be a fee for the smaller groups. I’ll have more info on that in the weeks to come.

Google Announcements

GSC is missing data in the performance report for Sep 21

Google Search Console performance report is missing some data on September 21st https://t.co/P2bkAMGS3U pic.twitter.com/D18ebkvLj8

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 4, 2022

This was apparently a reporting error on Google’s side. I have not noticed this outage for any of my clients, but if you are analyzing GSC data, and already were confused by the many updates, this is not going to help!

Problems with GA’s GSC query report

Google Analytics Search Console's query report is showing "not set" for query data in UA3 – Google is investigating https://t.co/XEupgkN4O9 hat tip @anillzenginn pic.twitter.com/aGQnqAcY5K

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 6, 2022

SEO Tips

Are unique images important for ranking?

John says no, unless you are trying to rank in image search.

If you're focusing on web-search, go for it. Using stock photos is totally fine. If you're trying to show up in Image Search, stock photos make it a bit harder (since we would try to just show one of the copies), but in many areas, searching visually is rare.

— ⛰ johnmu is not a cat ⛰ (@JohnMu) October 4, 2022

I do think that for some queries, unique imagery can be a way to add value beyond what competitors have. Given the upcoming changes with MUM and the increasingly more and more visual changes we are seeing in the search results, I think that having unique images could be one of the unmeasurable machine learned ranking factors for some queries in the near future if not already happening.

Why would GSC show improved average rankings but decreased clicks and impressions

This is from one of the site reviews I am currently working on. They suffered a massive drop in traffic on May 16. This was before the core update. Although May 16 was not announced as an update, many sites saw massive drops. I wrote an article about it.

There’s great discussion in the replies to this tweet (plus the likely answer):

Digging in deep this morning to a site hit by the May 16 update (before May core on the 25th).

Interesting pattern in their average keyword rankings for most pages. There's a big improvement in average ranking (orange) while clicks and impressions plummet.

Guesses as to why? pic.twitter.com/GT38QdYpqX

— Dr. Marie Haynes🐧 (@Marie_Haynes) October 5, 2022

Other Interesting News

Please contribute to the state of technical SEO report

Calling out all brilliant newsletter writers in our industry, PLEASE include our State of Tech SEO survey in your next edition, bought to you by @airadigital & @techseowomen 🙏🏽
The more responses we get, the more helpful the results will be for everyone!https://t.co/warWTZuyVf

— Areej (@areej_abuali) October 3, 2022

Is Google reviewing manual actions in batches?

We had three sites get their manual actions lifted this week after waiting for a while.

.@DylanAdamek1 had three manual actions lifted yesterday. Two were submitted in July and the third had been waiting for six months.

— Dr. Marie Haynes🐧 (@Marie_Haynes) October 5, 2022

Local SEO - Google Announcements

Search console may miss tracking activity from the 3-pack

Local SEOs if you are using Search Console to track activity from the 3-pack you could be looking at some seriously wrong data. Check out this test I recently did and feel free to chime in – https://t.co/z2J7Cr8acF pic.twitter.com/HbnDlIzgRS

— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) September 29, 2022

If you do local SEO, it’s worthwhile clicking through to read Joy’s testing on this as described on the Local Search Forum. It looks like these clicks may not be tracked in GSC.

Increase in GBP suspensions lately

In the past couple of weeks there has been a spike in the number of Google Business Profile suspensions https://t.co/vB54Qyr49S via @LocalSearchLink and @JoyanneHawkins pic.twitter.com/Q4FrJYvgzP

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 3, 2022

I've been seeing extreme sensitivity on listings, where they're getting suspended from what are normally minor edits. I hope this is addressed, or the reinstatement backlog is going to grow even longer. 🙄 https://t.co/6o2MIzcGKP

— Amy Toman 🏖😎 (@BubblesUp) October 3, 2022

What I'm reading this week

This section has changed! Premium readers get my summary and thoughts on the articles I’m reading this week:

Winners & Losers of the September 2022 Core Update & Product Reviews Update
https://www.amsivedigital.com/insights/seo/winners-losers-of-the-september-2022-core-update-product-reviews-update/
Lily Ray – September 28, 2022

What is semantic search: A deep dive into entity-based search
https://searchengineland.com/semantic-search-entity-based-search-388221
Olaf Kopp – September 29, 2022

Long tail SEO keywords: Leverage your market niche for better visibility
https://www.wix.com/seo/learn/resource/long-tail-seo-keywords-for-better-visibility
Myriam Jessier – October 4, 2022

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.

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