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After months of the “request indexing” tool being unavailable, the feature returned right before the end of 2020. Many SEO’s praised its return, but that was about it; SEOs went on about their day. We didn’t hear much about how the feature changed or any limitations it might now have.

You can submit about 10-12 a day before it throws you an error. Of course, both search engines also lean heavily on content discovery via clean XML sitemaps - especially when you submit them via your search accounts.

Now for Bing, you can submit 10,000 a day via their URL submission feature or you can submit URLs through the Bing Webmaster API. Botify has a feature where it will submit for you. 

In general, though, you should think about why Google or Bing has not found your content and indexed it in the first place. With the increasing popularity of JavaScript frameworks, there could be something else going on that is limiting the search engines in discovering and indexing your content. And of course, your content also has to be *worth* indexing in the first place.

Now for Bing, years ago we noticed that if a URL was tweeted, it was picked up faster (and Bing says it does use social links as signals), though I’m not sure if that tactic still works today.

So that’s your tip for today - how to manually submit URLs via Google and Bing.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Today, let's talk about Google's question hub.

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google has released https://questionhub.google.com/. By creating a free account SEOs can use the tool for content generation. In their announcement, they said that:

“We collect unanswered questions directly from users to identify content gaps online.”

You sign in with your personal Gmail account (as it’s not available for Google Workspace users, just as an FYI).

And then, you browse the topics or search for topics you’re interested in, and you can then see unanswered questions where you can create a web copy. 

I searched for commercial fishing and found the following unanswered questions:

• Each nation-state can set commercial fishing operation law as far out as what region?
• What kind of ropes are used for commercial fishing?

Or my search for covid 19 brought up these unanswered questions:

• Is the covid-19 vaccine safe for long haulers?
• Are mutant strains of covid 19 checked in every test given out?

I have always thought SEO is more like a public service - answering the public’s burning questions, and now Google makes it even easier by surfacing those that are unanswered.

You can also export the questions into Excel to organize your writing process.

Once you have an answer, you can then click on “answer” and submit a link to your article. 

So that’s your tip for today. Create a Google question hub account and start submitting your answers.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Today I’m going to talk through all of the ways Google looks at your ENTIRE website when it determines what type of search equity your site can expect. I often work with clients where different teams manage different parts of their website, and this tip is for them.

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

I was inspired to create this tip based on Google’s John Mueller’s comment that slow URLs can potentially impact the ranking of other faster URLs on your site. 

If all of your slow URLs are on a subdomain, it might just group those URLs. 

Also, Google has recently announced that  Noindexed Pages Can Impact Core Web Vitals. Frankly, this was my WTF for the month. If you block the page from indexing, clearly you don’t want it included in evaluating your site’s ranking? All the more reason to not generate and try to orphan those pages when possible, so hopefully, Googlebot won’t find them in the first place.

Google has referenced other ways that parts of your site can impact the overall ranking of your site, like:

• Server errors, whether found on your main domain or subdomain.  If found on your primary domain, or If all of those subdomains are on the same server, and a subdomain has server errors, Googlebot will back off so that it doesn't tank your overall site.
• Doorway pages - if Google sees a high number of orphaned pages, that might be what they think you are doing, which could generate a penalty.
• A high number of broken internal links, as it’s a sign of a low-quality website.
• Large amounts of thin content. The Panda algorithm is domain-wide. Google source.
• You are linking to Penalized Sites. This is the "Bad Neighborhood" algorithm. Matt Cutts has said: "Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods.” Now has suggested using the rel="no follow" attribute if you must link to such a site because "Using no-follow disassociates you with that neighborhood."
• Crawl traps - If Googlebot gets caught on one part of your site, they often won’t reach all of your site’s pages. I’ve fixed crawl traps on sites that resulted in ranking lifts across the entire site. 
• Soft Error Pages. Google could treat “soft 404” pages as low-quality pages on your site, lowering your overall domain’s search equity. 
• Unmaintained subdomains that are on the same server as your primary domain. The low maintained websites *could* present a liability if Google sees them as being part of the main domain. Here's the guidance from the Google Human Rater guidelines around web maintenance:
  • "Some websites are not maintained or cared for at all by their webmaster. These “abandoned” websites will fail to achieve their purpose over time, as content becomes stale or website functionality ceases to work on new browser versions. Unmaintained websites should be rated Lowest if they fail to achieve their purpose due to the lack of maintenance. Unmaintained websites may also become hacked, defaced, or spammed..."

This is not an exhaustive list but highlights how neglected parts of your overall website can impact its ranking and search equity. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Let’s talk about the tools that have disappeared, and the new tools that are available.

Google temporarily disables issue validation in Search Console.
They are updating the criteria for the issues provided by the coverage report.

And here are a few that have come back:

'Request Indexing' is now back in Google Search Console.
You can find it under the URL Inspection navigation. Here’s Google’s announcement.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool - Moving to Schema.org in April 2021
SEOs were frustrated that Google discontinued the tool, and it seems like Google was listening. SEOs will be able to find a refocused version of the tool on Schema.org by April. In the meantime, I recommend using schema.dev.

And there are a few completely new tools available:

There is a new crawl stats report in Google Search Console.
This discovery was my SEO nerd excitement moment from last month. It’s hard to find in the navigation, and you can access your report here, but it’s Google log file analysis for your site. SUPER exciting for those that can’t get access to their log files regularly. Here’s more from Google’s announcement.

New Bing Webmaster Tools now has free heat mapping.
The data is powered by Microsoft Clarity and is free to activate inside Bing Webmaster Tools. It only requires you to add the tracking code to your site. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Page Experience Update - How to audit, measure and improve

Page experience and performance (measured via the core web vitals) will be a ranking factor in May 2021. Here are some great resources on how to audit, measure, and create an improvement plan below.

How to audit your site’s Web Core Vitals 

This presentation by Rachel Costello from SEO Nerds Switzerland’s Meetup is excellent.

The deck is here, and the recording is here.

Her tips include:

• A list of areas you should check and add to your audit and tools to check those items.
• She also mentions URL Profiler, which you can use to query the Mobile-Friendly test API and Google's Safe Browsing API at scale. 

And as you're digging into solutions to improve your Core Web Vitals, loading CSS Asynchronously might help. Here’s the 411. And there’s another great article here on Search Engine Land that walks you through finding improvement recommendations.

Tools to measure + Case Studies to Persuade Others

Check out this sheet of tools from Aleyda Solis to help you measure and case studies to convince others to take these metrics seriously. It includes case studies like this one. You can also benchmark your site against competitors with the Core SERP Vitals tool over at defaced. Dev where you can See the Core Web Vitals directly in search results.

You can also push the Core Web Vitals into your GA (the code to use in GitHub), then use a Google Data Studio dashboard to report on that data. Or if you’re on WordPress, there’s a plugin.

You can crawl using Screaming Frog’s Pagespeed Insights API to track performance on your staging server before launching.

And you can spot-check using GT Metrix, which now has Core Web Vitals included as Google Lighthouse now powers it.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

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Stay up to date on the new tools inside your search engine accounts. Learn more in today's SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

Send us Fan Mail

Trying to up your video game? Listen to today's SEO tip to learn more about new tools and resources to help you pivot your video strategy.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode.