Tag: Joost’s Weekly SEO Recap

Weekly SEO Recap: Google directions

Joost de Valk

A couple of interesting small tidbits this week, that all together show the direction (Google) search is heading in. Let’s dive into this weeks news:

Joost's weekly SEO recap

Google bolding answers to questions

Remember the Hummingbird update? Google worked on being able to parse questions better so it knew what you were searching for. This week, some people noticed Google was bolding the answer to their implied “question” in their query. For instance, when searching for “engineer salary”, Google was bolding the answer. I think this is just another sign of Google showing answers, not blue links.

Fetch & render gives a sense of urgency

Google’s fetch & render tool in its webmaster tools suite added a feature last year to also render out the page you’re fetching. Michiel described that in this post in our webmaster tools series. This week it added an urgency to the blocked resources, telling you whether you should go out and fix it immediately or you can put it on the “someday / maybe” list.

It mostly seems to be telling you that the urgency of blocked ads is low. I’m not sure (because I haven’t tested enough) whether this is always the same urgency for the same resource or whether it actually looks on where it is on the page. If it’s always the same it could actually give a false sense of security, as having 3 or more ads on a page above the fold could still get you in trouble…

More HTTPS warnings from Google

Google has been sending out a new type of https warnings, notifying you when the certificate you use on a given domain, doesn’t actually include the domain name. That’s like so much of a “d0h!” moment that I had to read twice whether that was really what they said.

Turns out that right now, according to Google, you get an https ranking boost in the search results when the URL is HTTPS, even when the certificate for that URL is invalid. HTTPS is notoriously hard to get right, but the fact that Google is sending out these messages tells you that they’re wanting to improve something there.

Google News allowing app promotion

If your site is listed in Google News and has an editors picks feed, you can now promote your mobile app to users. If you’re not in Google News, our News SEO plugin might be able to help you get everything you need to get listed. It can also create an editors picks feed for you!

That’s it, see you next week!

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Weekly SEO recap: mobile friendly & snippets

Joost de Valk

We’re working hard on our upcoming Yoast SEO 3.0 release. Multiple focus keywords is slowly proving itself to me as probably the best thing we’ve ever made. It wasn’t the hottest week in search, which is probably a good thing as we’ve had plenty of those recently, but still there’s some stuff to report, ranging from app interstitials to some news about search result snippets.

Joost's weekly SEO recap

App interstitial “penalty” now live

Google had warned us about this and I’ve written about this before, but it’s now live. In Google’s own words (and bolding):

Starting today, pages with an app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page won’t be considered mobile-friendly.

Not the most surprising change of the world, what surprises me is that they specifically penalize app interstitials and don’t seem to penalize newsletter popups as much… I’m no fan of any popup, even though admittedly even for us they work quite well. We only show a popup on “exit intent” though, so when you move your mouse towards one of the top corners of the screen. I’m guessing those will be OK for quite a while longer in Google’s eyes.

Optimize your YouTube videos

If you didn’t have reason enough just yet, there’s now one more reason to optimize your YouTube videos. Google has started showing featured snippets taken from the content of video transcripts. Your own site might take quite a while longer to get those, so using YouTube as an intermediate step might be a good idea here.

Ridiculously long snippets

Google ran a test this week that made quite a few of us question the sanity of some of their engineers. They tested a 7 line snippet. That’s a bit like… Yuck! When I tried to reproduce it I “only” got a 4 line description snippet and even that I’ve always thought is ridiculous.

Don’t hide content in JavaScript arrays

Another post from the SEM Post (they’re doing some awesome reporting), highlights a tweet from Gary Ilyes of Google about not hiding content in JavaScript arrays. It might be indexed, but it also might not be indexed. Rule of thumb: if you think a specific bit of content is useful to users: show it. If you think it’s OK to hide it by default, why do you have it in the first place?

That’s it, see you next week!

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Weekly SEO Recap: RankBrain and Archive Search

Joost de Valk

This week in search we saw the following important events: Google (finally) got a brain; we’re getting search for the web’s history; Google said Penguin will come before the end of the year.

Joost's weekly SEO recap

RankBrain

In a piece on Bloomberg Google talked about using AI for their search results, something that we’ve been speculating as coming for years now. They call this AI “RankBrain” and seems to be somewhat related to Hummingbird. It took a while for me to realize this, but there’s a reason this was revealed on Bloomberg, not on a search marketing conference or a technical conference. This has a profound impact on the business overall.

The “key phrase” of the whole piece, to me, was this one:

If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.

This means it’s a true aim at semantic search. At relating topics. At finding entities and relating them to each other and thus providing you with results that are truly what you meant.

There is one post so far that does a good job of explaining what RankBrain could be (in my opinion), and it’s this post by Kristine Schachinger. This satirical piece – on Google getting a heart too – hit the ball home as well though!

Wayback Search Machine

The Wayback machine is a huge project that archives pages and has been archiving pages on the web for ages. You can look up the history of any website on it, for instance for yoast.com. This week they announced that they’re building a search engine, which would allow you to do history keyword search.

I think this will get a whole lot of people thinking about how to get rid of pages in those archives, as it will make your mistakes from the past painfully visible.

Google Penguin is coming

I wrote about Google Penguin extensively recently, and Google has now said that a new version will come before the end of the year. I expect a roll out just before the holiday season, as that’s something Google has done more of in recent years. This will force many people who spammed their way to the top of search engines to scramble and possibly pay for ads. I’m personally curious how this update will affect the search results.

That’s it, see you next week!

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Weekly SEO recap: Facebook search, Yahoo! & Google

Joost de Valk

This was quite the week in terms of search engine events. Yahoo! & Google doing a deal, Bing losing a key person, Google in yet another lawsuit, etc. etc. etc. And while all that seemed so important Thursday afternoon as I was writing this post, Facebook dropped the bomb of improving its search dramatically. Let’s dive in!

Joost's weekly SEO recap

Yahoo! has a search deal with Google, again

Yahoo!, which got its results and ads purely from Bing for quite a while, now has a deal with Google too. It said:

In October, the Company reached an agreement with Google that provides Yahoo with additional flexibility to choose among suppliers of search results and ads.

Google could serve these results for Yahoo! in a specific set of countries / regions:

Yahoo may use Google’s services on Yahoo’s owned and operated properties (“Yahoo Properties”) and on certain syndication partner properties (“Affiliate Sites”) in the United States (U.S.), Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Middle East, Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Peru, Australia and New Zealand.

Notice anything in that list? Hell yeah. Europe is missing. Let me put on my tin foil hat for a wee bit and say that maybe, just maybe, Google and Yahoo! knew that doing this in Europe would raise some serious anti competitive alarms with the European Union. Where have we heard that story before? Anyway…. The most comprehensive coverage of this story is to be found on SearchEngineLand.

Yahoo! has its own mobile algorithm?

You’d think Yahoo! has enough choices now, as it can chose between Bing and Google to serve its results. But apparently, it has its own mobile algorithm and serves its own mobile search results. This explains, at least in part, why Yahoo! is still crawling the web. I’m curious to see where this goes… Could be big, as Yahoo! is one of the few companies on the planet right now with the cash and the knowledge to actually build a search engine that matters.

There are a few other companies that could do search and do it well though… One of them being Facebook.

Facebook search gets real

Facebook just dropped a very splendid little bomb. It improved its search capabilities dramatically. This video speaks boatloads about their ideas for this.

I can’t stress enough how important this is. Google already has a problem with the amount of mobile searches people do, this will only decrease that number of searches. Because people don’t search less on mobile, they search elsewhere.

Facebook has a ton of data to search through. According to the Verge, Facebook has 2 trillion posts in its index. Personalized search (search adapted to your behavior, friends, etc.), which for Google has been something they’ve needed to grow into over the last few years, is something that comes very natural to Facebook. In fact, it would probably suffer if it had to make un-personalized search results.

This has a profound impact on how you share on Facebook: no longer can you just write something interesting. No, you should really make sure that your target keywords are shown in your Facebook description and in the title of your article as it’s shared on Facebook.

Bing suffers a loss

Bing is the little kid crying in the corner on all of this of course. They’ve also just lost one of their finest. My good friend Duane Forrester, their head of webmaster relations, is dropping the mic (his choice of image, obviously).

In this picture, taken at SEOktoberfest this year, Duane is the guy on the right, next to my wife Marieke:

Duane is the guy on the right, next to my wife Marieke.

Duane was the last man standing in terms of search engines talking to webmasters. Google’s Matt Cutts has been on extended leave for what seems like forever now and Duane was one of the very few that had actually seen the inside of running a search engine and also had true SEO experience. I hope Microsoft replaces him with someone capable.

Luckily I know I will see Duane again at SEOktoberfest next year and I wish him all the best in his new endeavors!

Other Google updates

The NY Times reports that Deutsche Telekom (the parent company to T-Mobile) is starting a new antitrust case against Google in the EU. This adds on to the already quite big stack of complaints against Google in Europe.

I’m waiting for the next court case now, the one in which Google and its sibling company Youtube are said to be abusing their market dominance to bring more paid subscribers to YouTube. Because that also happened this week; YouTube became a competitor to Netflix.

Finally, it looks like Google let loose a few more Pandas this week.

That’s it, see you next week!

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Weekly SEO Recap: AJAX crawling and Panda

Joost de Valk

After this week’s launch of our first Basic SEO training, it’s now time to sit back and relax. For about two minutes. The next milestone is our upcoming Yoast SEO release which we’ve determined, because of the sheer amount of new features in it, will be called Yoast SEO 3.0. Luckily, the search engines took it reasonably slow on us this week, so this recap was easy to write. As I was writing it, it turned out I was giving more advise on dealing with Google Panda, but that can never be a bad thing I guess.

Joost's weekly SEO recap

Google discontinues AJAX crawling

Several months after hinting at it, Google has stopped encouraging people to use their AJAX crawling guidelines from 2009. I have to say, this is done better than Google normally treats its APIs. Sites built using the methods from 2009, including the use of so called _escaped_fragment URL’s will still be indexed, but Google recommends that when you change (parts of) your site, you remove the need for these.

Google has a history of dropping support for API’s at far too short notice for normal companies to comply, so this is actually a rather good gesture. What annoys me is that they don’t announce a specific cut-off date. All they say is:

If your current setup is working fine, you should not have to immediately change anything. If you’re building a new site or restructuring an already existing site, simply avoid introducing _escaped_fragment_ urls.

Some corporate websites out there have been built using this AJAX crawling system and won’t go away or be changed for years to come. A specific cut-off date would be very useful for sites like these, even (or maybe even: especially) when that date is 2 or 3 years in the future.

Google Panda: delete content the right way

It was if the devil was playing with it. On October 6th, I posted about Google Panda and how we suggest sites deal with that. In this post I included advice to delete low quality pages. Two days later, Gary Ilyes of Google, tweets the following in response to Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post:

Of course, people were confused since I’d just said something “else”. He later went on to clarify, after several SEOs were pressing him. That’s when it became clear why he said what he said:

“We see too many people cut the good”. That’s why he says don’t delete. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If someone still might find content useful, don’t delete it. But that’s very similar to what I said.

So how do you fix your Google Panda problems?

I don’t want to reiterate what I said in this post about Google Panda, which you should read if you’re into this, but let’s make sure it’s well understood. Fixing your site’s Google Panda issues is about several things:

  1. Improve content that’s not good enough but might be useful.
  2. Remove content that will never be useful or that you can’t properly maintain.
  3. Improve your site structure so that content that might be useful can be (more easily) found.

It’s not one of those three things, it’s all of them. I’ve seen plenty of sites that had content that was auto-generated, auto-generated tag pages, search pages, etc. Those are pages that no one is ever going to find interesting. You can’t keep those pages, you really should delete them.

That’s it, see you next week!

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Weekly SEO Recap: Google app indexing & rel=author

Joost de Valk

Joost's weekly SEO recapAt Yoast, we’ve been ridiculously busy getting ready for all the product launches we’ve got coming up, like our new eBook and our upcoming Basic SEO training course. Luckily, we also still have time to look at the news because Google has been rather busy and there was other stuff to tell too, regarding new Apple releases.

Google Panda & Penguin

So… Google Panda 4.2 is apparently “still rolling out“. This makes it harder for people like us to diagnose whether a site got hit by Panda, but luckily not undoable (the signs are usually relatively clear for the trained eye). You’d hope that more info would come with that, but there was nothing else.

Google Penguin on the other hand seems to be truly becoming “real-time”. Gary Ilyes of Google said at SMX that he “hoped” it would be ready by the end of the year.

I have to say that it’s getting harder and harder to trust specifically Gary when he says things because it’s been kind of hit and miss. We’ll have to see what comes of it.

Google wants your app data

In other Google news, Google seems to understand that it’s slowly missing the boat. They now say that they’ll give a ranking boost if you use app indexing. They’re afraid that if they don’t get everyone to include app-indexing, which allows Google to index the contents of mobile phone apps, they won’t be a complete search engine anymore and platforms like Facebook might beat them at some point.

The problem with remarks like this from Google is knowing whether it’s actually true. It’s very easy for them to say that they’ll give you a ranking boost, it’s now up to the global SEO community to prove whether they did or not.

Rel=author making a comeback?

In what I’d clearly call the weirdest news of the week, Gary Ilyes also said you shouldn’t remove your rel=author markup. I was personally involved in getting that markup on millions of sites (by adding it to our plugins and to WordPress core). I took it out the day Google dropped the author highlight. I’d be happy to add it back in, but I’ll need some more info before we do, so I’ve reached out to an engineer at Google to see if he could comment.

Mac OS X 10.11: el Capitan

Safari Pinned TabsWhen a new OS X comes out, experienced Mac users will often go straight to Ars Technica for their review of the newest version of OS X to see what’s new. You should too. I read it and the pinned tab feature was the one that made me think “hah, I might need to do that”. So I added a pinned tab icon to Yoast.com this morning, and then wrote a quick tutorial on adding one of these so called mask-icons just now.

Not exactly SEO, but branding is incredibly important for your long term search rankings too.

That’s it, see you next week!

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Weekly SEO Recap: local and iOS9 search

Joost de Valk

Joost's weekly SEO recapI’m at the airport in Munich while writing this, going back home after a week with the brightest minds in SEO surrounding me at SEOktoberfest. Luckily, there was plenty of news to discuss :)

Local search

If you’re doing local search optimization and want to know a bit more about it, Moz’s local search ranking factors research piece is always a good one to read. It’s been updated for 2015 and should give you a ton of info.

There were some changes in local search this week too, with Google returning the phone numbers & addresses to the local pack and Google testing a simple “claim this business” link in maps for unclaimed listings.

Apple iOS 9 and Siri

I missed out on mentioning this piece by Danny Sullivan about all the small changes Apple did to search in iOS 9. This week I figured out that there’s a bigger change in all this. In the new Safari, if you search, you will sometimes get a top hits result like this:

apple-search-brand-search

Those “Top Hits” aren’t coming from Google, but from Apple Search. That’s quite the change as it means that Google will now miss out on many, many brand searches. This can have a significant impact both on PPC campaigns and on organic search clicks. This might then have an impact on how the value of both is perceived.

Your right to be forgotten

Your right to be forgotten, the right for you to tell Google it shouldn’t show specific links when searching for your name, is now a global right. This happened because of a court case Google lost in France, which is only the next court case in a series of court cases that Google seems to be losing throughout Europe.

That’s it, see you next week!

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This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: local and iOS9 search on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

Weekly SEO Recap: antitrust ranking factors

Joost de Valk

Joost's weekly SEO recapI write this knowing that next week I’ll be in Munich with many friends of the SEO industry for SEOktoberfest, a conference unlike any other. We’ll talk shop with some of the best and brightest minds in our industry and to say I’m excited is an extreme understatement.

Google loses antitrust case in Russia

These headlines are coming more and more. This week, Google lost an antitrust case in Russia. This follows on similar cases in India, Europe and many countries throughout the world. It’s not all that surprising, given Google’s power, that governments everywhere are becoming nervous. We’ll see what all these cases together end up doing to how Google organizes itself and how it behaves. Google’s recent change to its corporate structure, creating Alphabet Inc, should probably be seen in light of these issues too.

In other legal news, Google was the suing party in a case against another firm impersonating Google in their robo-calls.

Structured markup and HTTPS as a ranking factor

We wrote about this not too long ago, saying structured markup is not a ranking factor. Obviously, Google reserves the right to start using it for ranking. I would say that too, if I were Google, and I wanted to get more people to add that kind of markup to their pages. We’ll believe it when we see the first research that confirms that they’re using it for ranking. This piece of user-research did show that having snippets on position 2 beats being in the first spot. What I did find curious was they incorporated an author image in the research, something that basically doesn’t exist anymore in the normal search results.

In a similar vein, Google said that HTTPS acts as a “tie breaker“. This is what I’d describe as a “weak ranking factor” at that point. Even if it is only a tie breaker, you should probably still do this for a myriad of other reasons: consumer trust, more reliable analytics data, etc. My thoughts on this are essentially the same as in January 2014.

Over-optimization a common issue?

In a recent hang out, Google’s Gary Ilyes once again stressed the important of quality content:

… what I see often is people try to rank for queries they don’t have high quality and great value content for, and that’s the problem. Sooner or later the algorithms will catch that, you don’t have to overthink it, it’s simple content analysis and they will adjust the rank for the site, and that’s it.

Of course, this is much in line with our own thinking on the topic. If you’re in doubt about your content strategy, our book Content SEO is a must-read. In that same hang-out, Gary also discussed the slowness of the Panda roll out, though we’ve seen reports that Google rolled back parts of Panda as well, we discussed those last week.

That’s it, see you next week!

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This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: antitrust ranking factors on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

Weekly SEO Recap: Panda U-Turns, Yandex penalizes and Bing launches new tools

Joost de Valk

Joost's weekly SEO recapNew iPhones! Search news? Oh right… So… About that search news. Panda’s making U-turns, Yandex penalizing sites for selling links, Bing offering new keyword tools and more!

What happened to Panda?

Google announced a Panda 4.2 update that’d “very slowly” roll out a while back, we covered that. It seems as though, according to this post by Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand, the update has been reversed.

It could be that Google’s continuous user testing started giving lower ratings for their search results, indicating that Panda 4.2 was, in fact, not an improvement. Google didn’t comment, but it seems a plausible hypothesis. Looking at some sites myself in SearchMetrics, I definitely see… Weird behavior, visibility going up and coming down again, which could support this hypothesis.

Yandex penalizing link sellers

Yandex has announced that they’ve penalized a bunch of sites for selling links. I’ll spare you a link to the Russian blog post (oops you got it anyway) and give you a link to SearchEngineLand instead. It makes a ton of sense to make these kinds of adjustments, but it’s funny to see them come out of Yandex, who actually announced with some fanfare at the end of 2013 that they would stop using links (for certain commercial queries).

I think it shows how important links are to ranking algorithms and how hard they are to replace. So much that it’s worth cleaning up the signal by making adjustments like this.

Bing launched a new keyword planner

We write a lot about keyword research, as it is, truly, the basis of SEO. So when new tools arrive that help you do keyword research, I always get excited. Even more so when created by Bing as, historically, even though Bing drives far less search traffic, their keyword research tools have always been among the best in the business.

Bing announced a new keyword planner on Wednesday, available in your Bing Ads account. It’s worth creating a Bing Ads account just for that. There are historical statistics in there, suggestions for more keywords etc. etc. Of course, the best tool in doing keyword research is still your brain, but tools like these can help you get new ideas.

Index count in Google Search Console

One of the things you might be keeping an eye on while optimizing a site is the Index Status in Google’s Search Console. It shows the number of indexed pages for a site, and will usually remain static if you’re not doing too much. So it’s weird when that graph spikes or dips suddenly. Recently, it did, this is the graph for yoast.com:

search console status

Turns out that Google had a bug (the dip) and then changed how they calculate this number (the spike). There’s an “explanation” by Google here, but it doesn’t make sense, they just changed it. I’m hoping it’ll stay stable at the “new normal”, as that ways it’s the most reliable.

That’s it, see you next week!

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This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Panda U-Turns, Yandex penalizes and Bing launches new tools on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

Weekly SEO Recap: app interstitials, snippets & knowledge panel

Joost de Valk

Joost's weekly SEO recapNext to Google getting a new logo, there was also actual news this week. Like… Google increased the height of its search box. Yes, really. Shocking, right? There’s more:

Do you have app interstitials? Drop them.

If you run a site that has an app interstitial, a popup asking the user to install your iPhone / Android app before leading them to the page they wanted to get to: stop it. The users never liked it, even though it might have worked, but Google has now decided it’s had enough. Google has even been kind enough to give us a cut-off date: November 1. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise, I wrote about it on June 5, when Googlers had already mentioned this would happen.

This app interstitial “penalty” also is just a continuation and an enhancement of what we referred to as “Mobilegeddon” a couple of months ago. I fully expect Google to become stricter and stricter in what it accepts in terms of User eXperience. It’s nice to see them announce changes like this though! Google says it doesn’t apply to cookie warnings and other popups, so no need to worry about those just yet.

Rich snippets don’t change your ranking

Rich snippets (explained here if you don’t know what they are) have become a prime weapon in the SEO’s arsenal over the years to improve the number of clicks you get from the search results. Recently, John Mueller of Google has said that they don’t impact your rankings. That’s not a reason to stop using them, their goal has always been to increase the number of people clicking on your result more than increasing the ranking, but it’s good to know.

Google adds quotes to knowledge panels

If you search for JRR Tolkien, the author of the famous Lord of the Rings novels, you’ll see some of the author’s quotes in the knowledge panel on the right. These quotes are new, showing one more case of Google disrupting an entire set of websites. This is yet another warning: your website has to add serious value if you want to get Google traffic. Value that Google cannot easily replicate. And even when you do add serious value, like Wikipedia, Google might take away some of that traffic.

If you want to learn more about knowledge panels in search results and don’t shy away from reading somewhat more technical posts, this post by Bill Slawski might be a good starting point. Bill analyzes tons of patents by Google (and a few others) on his blog all the time, leading to some very interesting insights in the world of SEO.

That’s it for this week, see you next week!

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This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: app interstitials, snippets & knowledge panel on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!