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Episode 81 - May 1, 2019 - Light Version

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In this episode, we will cover signs of a possible small quality update, more Google bugs affecting indexing and (disappearing) manual actions, whether Google is cracking down on footer links, the news that Google will not migrate the disavow tool to the new GSC, and much more.

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In this episode:

Paid members also get the following:

  • Google says they have no plans for moving the disavow tool to new GSC. Here are our thoughts!
  • Is Google cracking down on footer links?
  • EU Google is prompting users to search on alternative directories or search engines in some instances
  • How Google is using Q&A when they think they don’t have the right content in the SERPs
  • Does GSC count the links at the bottom of a result in the SERPs as an impression?
  • Interesting case where traffic and impressions spiked and then dropped again
  • Does Google compare lastmod dates from sitemaps to the publishing date of page content?
  • Curious how find out the age of someone’s content? Here’s a neat tip!
  • Google SERPs can provide free keyword research
  • Easily create PDFs from your Google Docs
  • What does Google think about two sites sharing the same checkout flow & site template?
  • John Mueller opened up for feedback on the disavow tool
  • Is Firefox blocking Google Analytics and other trackers?
  • New Local feature: Auto suggested answers as you type in Q&A
  • My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

Algorithm Updates

April 26, 2019 - Possible small quality update

This was not a significant update. However, quite a few sites that we monitor were either slightly up or slightly down at this time.

This is hard to assess completely though as this potential update falls on the heels of the big deindexing bug that we have discussed for the last couple of weeks.

This client of ours who had been seeing a nice increase after having us help restructure their url structure is now seeing a bit of a decline which is not seasonal in nature. It is interesting to see that the decline starts on April 5, which is the same date on which Google started to randomly drop pages from their index.

The indexing bug is apparently fixed though and this site is still seeing drops. These do not appear to be seasonal.

We have a few other clients with similar patterns...a drop that starts with the deindexing bug and then continues. These are not seasonal changes.

We have a few theories on what could be going on here, but none of them are really concrete. It is possible that the deindexing bug actually was not a bug and that many pages that should not have been indexed will never return to the index. It is also possible that this is not even connected to the deindexing bug and that it is the result of a Google algorithm update.

It is interesting to note that John Mueller says that traffic drops following the deindexing bug are probably not related to the bug:

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1121809504826531842?s=20

We don’t have answers at this point, but we will keep investigating!

Google Announcements

Yet another Google indexing bug

The Google Webmaster team has been busy resolving plenty of issues recently, but rest assured, they’re working on a fix. Important to note, this bug seems to be new and entirely unrelated to the previous indexing issues.

No timeframe has been provided, but at least there’s some transparency!

Did your manual action disappear? Looks like another Google bug

If you received a manual action from Google recently, you may notice that it is gone from GSC now.

We are currently working on several manual actions. All but one of them disappeared yesterday. We are now seeing this in the manual actions viewer in GSC:

At first, we wondered if the manual action had expired. This does happen from time to time as all manual actions have an expiry date.

However, one of the penalties that we were contracted to remove had only been administered this week. It would be quite unlikely for it to expire after just a few days.

We are seeing other people reporting on this issue as well. Here is a Google help forum thread that says that there are a few people asking about what happened to their penalties.

Does this mean that these penalties have been removed? Most likely not. We think that this is a bug on Google’s side and that the manual actions will come back. However, we have also entertained the idea that Google has become so confident in their ability to ignore unnatural links that they have decided to get rid of manual actions altogether. This seems unlikely to us though.

What should SEOs do who are working on penalty removal?

If you are working on penalty removal for clients and these penalties have all disappeared, client communication can be challenging.

We are telling our clients right now just to wait and see what Google’s response is. If for some reason the manual action does not return, we are advising that we still go ahead with a thorough link audit as the links that caused the manual action have a strong possibility of causing Google to put less trust in ALL of your links, which can impact the site’s ability to rank.

GSC reports back on track. Does this mean this April de-indexing bug is fixed? Perhaps not...

Barry Schwartz is seeing the GSC reports seem to be up to date again, suggesting the recent bugs have been fixed. Glenn Gabe noted that he too is seeing similar things:

As of this Tuesday, this is the official update provided by Google:

However, just when we thought everything had settled down, Barry brought this to light early this morning:

It turns out that while the deindexing bug may have been fixed, GSC data for that period of time is missing. Instead Google has stated that “data from April 9-25 was replaced with the data from April 26, when data began to be available again”. As Barry highlights, this effectively stops site owners from monitoring how severe the effect of the indexing bug was for their site.

 

Chrome Data Saver becomes Lite mode

As of last week, Data Saver has taken on a new name. This feature comes with more benefits in addition to data savings. It means faster loading pages (sometimes considerably faster!), and less memory consumed. Lite mode is available only on Chrome for Android at the moment, and in the coming months you can expect more information to be published says Google.

Here’s a little more on this from Glenn Gabe:

Eric Schmidt stepping down from Google

Eric Schmidt has been an important part of Google for over 18 years now. He tweeted this week that he will be stepping down from his role as CEO of Google (now Alphabet). He will now be a “technical advisor” to Google/Alphabet.

Google SERP Changes

 

Featured snippets facets now using images as well

Image collage design spotted within some featured snippets

SEO Tips

Some guidance on when to use structured data

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1122838609596436481

Google Analytics shares the difference between what GA tracks for bounce rate & exit rate

 David Sottimano released the new version of his SEMrush API Library for Google Spreadsheets

Just a heads up, it's open source, and feedback is welcome!

Annoyed by seeing "Your Site on Google" statistics?

Here's how you can stop seeing it -- but an FYI: it's non-reversible!

You can opt out of featured snippets for a page...FYI, you do lose ALL display snippets when you do this!

Other interesting News

Office for National Statistics pulled into Featured Snippets

Awen Jones is a data analyst at the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS) and noticed that ONS data has begun to get pulled into Featured Snippets. She gives an example of interactive population data being used and has linked this to a doubling of impressions (reported by GSC) as well as an 8% increase in views to that landing page.

Quora is now integrated with Google Tag Manager

Bing Ads renamed to Microsoft Advertising

Earlier this week Bing announced that Bing Ads has evolved into Microsoft Advertising. This change will see ‘experiences and materials’ updated in coming months to reflect Microsoft Advertising and more advertising products with Built-in AI to better connect your data to your business. Find more info on the Bing official announcement.

Massive upgrade to Twitter Data Export

Ahrefs gets a new dashboard

GoDaddy took down 15,000 subdomains used for online scams

After a two year investigation, GoDaddy has now shut down 15,000 subdomains from sites that were hacked. These subdomains contained shady product promo pages selling snake oil products. It is estimated that these pages had millions of visitors.

If you are a GoDaddy customer that was affected by this, you will notice that your GoDaddy password has been reset.

Google Easter Egg: The Thanos Infinity Gauntlet

How cool!

Also, if you’re wondering, Danny Sullivan later confirmed that it’s not sponsored, but rather Google is just having some fun.

MozCon 2019 Community Speakers Announced

I am truly honoured to be among the amazing lineup of speakers at this year's MozCon! Here are the details of my talk:

Google has admitted that they measure the concept of "Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness" in their algorithms. If your site is categorized under YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), you absolutely must have good E-A-T in order to rank well. In this talk, you'll learn how Google measures E-A-T and what changes you can make both on site and off in order to outrank your competitors. Using real-life examples, Marie will answer what E-A-T is and how Google measures it, what changes you can make on your site to improve how E-A-T is displayed, and what you can do off-site to improve E-A-T.

Check out the full lineup of speakers over at Moz.

Local SEO - Google SERP Changes

New icon appearing in the local search called 'On the menu'

It’s been reported that a new icon is starting to appear in the map pack and local finder called 'on the menu'. There's speculation that this may get triggered to appear by having a menu that's pulled into the knowledge panel. Below you’ll find a preview of the change and you can check out the discussion in the Local Search Forum as well.

Local SEO - Other Interesting News

Is it possible that Google is gearing up to start monetizing GMB?

Andrew from Optimisey wrote an article sharing his thoughts on a new survey that was recently sent out to some GMB users, which he feels is hinting towards the monetization of certain features in Google My Business and Google Maps. The survey appears to have first been brought to light by Sean Bucher, and as of Tuesday, April 30th, the survey is still live:

Monetization has been an option for a while now with their Promoted Places in Google Maps, which allowed a business to brand their location icon with their logo, however, as Andrew notes, this may be the beginning of a shift towards a “subscription future”.

The main part of the survey is a list of proposed GMB features that Google thinks “may enhance your business’ presence on Google Search”, consisting of 20 different features with an explanation of what each feature would do, as well as questions regarding subscription packages -- essentially, about 50 different packages, each containing 4 of those 20 features -- and the price of each package. We highly recommend that you check out Andrew’s article, as he has a full list of each feature from the survey as well as his thoughts on the impact of each one.

Unsurprisingly, a ton of people were less than happy about this:

And there are some who are thinking this may be Google looking to add upsell options:

However, Colan Nielsen had some sage advice that seemed to resonate with a lot of us:

What do you think? Is Google getting greedy? Is this going to discourage small businesses from hiring SEOs? Or maybe we're making a big deal of what will ultimately become nothing -- as Joy Hawkins mentions here, she heard from Google that this survey was just their latest effort to try to better understand how to bring more value to users:

So, tell us your thoughts, we’d love to hear from you on this!

SEO Tools

For agencies with smaller clients: Here’s a browser extension to opt out of Google Analytics tracking

While we haven’t personally used this and there are alternatives out there to filter out logged in admins and IP's to do the same thing, many SEOs seem to be taking notice of this tool so we thought it would be worthwhile to share!

https://twitter.com/simoncox/status/1122747619904770048

Recommended Reading

SEO Flatliners – The Curious Case Of A Massive 1-Month Algorithmic Demotion From Google (To The Minute) And What Could Have Triggered The Drop – Glenn Gabe
https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/seo-flatliners-one-month-google-drop-case-study/
April 24, 2019

This was a really interesting case study that we highly recommend you read!


What Links to Target with Google's Disavow Tool - Whiteboard Friday – Cyrus Shepard
https://moz.com/blog/links-to-target-with-disavow
April 26, 2019

Excellent WBF here from Cyrus which covers one of the more daunting tasks in SEO – targeting links and using the disavow tool. 


How to Prune your Website Content in an SEO Process – Aleyda Solis
https://www.aleydasolis.com/en/crawling-mondays/how-to-prune-your-website-content-in-an-seo-process-crawlingmondays-16th-episode/
April 23, 2019

This is a great resource from Aleyda Solis on tackling the issue of thin content. 


Here’s what you need to know about image optimization for SEO – Romain Damery
https://searchengineland.com/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-image-optimization-for-seo-316046
April 29, 2019

Image search is one of those areas where a lot of marketers and SEO don’t always direct most of their energies. But as Romain Damery points out in this great post, Google Image search accounts for over 25% of total web  search traffic across the top 10 search platforms.

Recommended Reading (Local SEO)

Restaurant Local SEO: The Google Characteristics of America’s Top-Ranked Eateries – Miriam Ellis
https://moz.com/blog/restaurant-local-seo
April 23, 2019

Miriam Ellis, in this article for Moz, breaks down what the Top Ranked Restaurants do to get into the local pack and opportunities that you can leverage. This is a long one, but if you are in the restaurant industry then this is definitely a recommended read!


How Google Is Making Spam-fighting Even Harder – Dan Foland
https://www.brightlocal.com/blog/how-google-is-making-spam-fighting-even-harder/
April 25, 2019

If you’ve been in SEO for any point of time, you’ve grown accustomed to spam. Some of the biggest culprits? That’s easy, the legal sector and Service Area Businesses (SABs).

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 Want More?

Paid members also get the following:

  • Google says they have no plans for moving the disavow tool to new GSC. Here are our thoughts!
  • Is Google cracking down on footer links?
  • EU Google is prompting users to search on alternative directories or search engines in some instances
  • How Google is using Q&A when they think they don’t have the right content in the SERPs
  • Does GSC count the links at the bottom of a result in the SERPs as an impression?
  • Interesting case where traffic and impressions spiked and then dropped again
  • Does Google compare lastmod dates from sitemaps to the publishing date of page content?
  • Curious how find out the age of someone’s content? Here’s a neat tip!
  • Google SERPs can provide free keyword research
  • Easily create PDFs from your Google Docs
  • What does Google think about two sites sharing the same checkout flow & site template?
  • John Mueller opened up for feedback on the disavow tool
  • Is Firefox blocking Google Analytics and other trackers?
  • New Local feature: Auto suggested answers as you type in Q&A
  • My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles

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Paul Macnamara - Offers SEO Consulting at PaulMacnamara.com

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