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Today is January 10th, and I’ll be recapping the Google SEO Office Hours from January 7th 2022 which ran just under an hour. There was somewhat of a theme this office hours with a lot of questions around internationalization and language, subdomains and subfolders, and of course indexing and crawl budget.

Full show notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e6 with links and more detailed descriptions.

As always, a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. I’ll skip questions that didn’t really have an answer or were so unique I don’t think it would apply to most marketers.

• We started off with another crawl budget question. Blogging consistently compared to someone who doesn’t, will Google crawl at a different rate? Does consistency have anything to do with ranking?
• If I post less often and less consistently, will Google pull my sitemap less frequently.
• Google will not penalize you for having duplicate content on your site
• If you have an older piece of content and you are updating it, should you repost it, or update the old post. 
• HREFLang again. The question was about a site that was doing well in one language. How should the HREFLANG tag be handled?
• Page experience. Are there more than just the three that we can see in Search Console. 
• What data is Google Chrome collecting from users that is used for rankings?
• They don’t have HREFLANG tags setup, should they?
• Updates to job related markup for direct reply. 
• They moved from folders to subdomains for country based jobs. 
• How to get another language version of a website into top stories.
• Since the number of features are increasing, how is search console calculating rankings?
• Their JavaScript rendering has some forward slashes in it that GoogleBot is interpreting as a URL and they’re seeing errors in search console from this. 
• Another question about subdomain and subfolder related to languages.
• Using rel=nofollow on links to a page to effectively no index it.
• Another my page isn’t indexed yet question.
• Pruning low quality content. What is the minimum traffic to keep an article?
• Structured markup - specifically breadcrumbs.
• New extensive review updates, how is that affecting new e-commerce sites?
• They had a lot of content theft, and after having them removed via DMCA, they didn’t see any increase in ranking. 
• Google is pulling the wrong info for his site, specifically the dates are pulling the wrong year, and showing up in the SERPs.

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Today is January 7th, 2022 and I’ll be talking about some Google SERP updates, a Google ads error, New Display Ads for Podcasts in Spotify, WordPress major security release, Making money from a site hack, and some actionable tactics to help drive customers to buy.

Full Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e5

Google has launched a “Shops” section in the mobile search results with three results that can be expanded to 10. Google’s statement:

 “We recently launched Shops, a new module available on mobile devices for select US-English shopping-related queries,” 

https://searchengineland.com/google-launches-shops-section-in-mobile-search-results-378256

https://twitter.com/b4k_khushal/status/1477337833643786242

Google looks to be testing or updating their Google Discover section with trending searches. See if it’s updated on your device.

https://twitter.com/jasonmandragona/status/1478748397372940290

Google Ads has an error right now when saving exact keywords saying they are being saved as broad. Google Ads Liason replied that it was a bug and they were working on fixing it. So don’t be alarmed, but is this the beginning of the end of match types? 

https://twitter.com/adsliaison/status/1479189369529450496 

While we’re talking about ads, Spotify is going to be bringing display ads to Podcasts. Spotify is calling them Call-to-Action cards. These will be visual and interactive during ad plays as well as retargeting while exploring the app. 

https://www.newsroom.spotify.com/2022-01-06/spotify-introduces-call-to-action-cards-for-podcast-ads/ 

Wordpress released a security release yesterday which patched 4 major vulnerabilities. This affects versions 3.7 to 5.8, so pretty much any WordPress install out there. 

https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/wordpress-5-8-3-security-release/ 

So, if your site is hacked, what do you do? First, you get it cleaned up and then make sure your IT or Dev Ops is taking proactive steps to ensure that it can’t happen again. If you don’t know anything about cleaning up - check out SUCURI, I’ve used them in the past to clean up a hacked site and they took care of things in just a matter of hours.

So what did years ago when her main site was hacked and started ranking for Michael Kors handbags. she was able to remove the hack and then redirected all of those pages to Amazon using her affiliate link. She made a few hundred dollars before turning it all off.

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1479143529020592130

Katelyn Bourgoin spent over 1500 hours learning about cognitive biases and heuristics, the stuff that drives customers to buy and she put together a Twitter thread of the top 19 concepts that marketers need to know: 

https://twitter.com/KateBour/status/1478792178726019073

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Today is January 6th, 2022 and today I’ll be talking about IndexNow from Microsoft, a couple domain related questions answered by John Mueller during his “ask googlebot” video from yesterday, a thought provoking local SEO article by Mirriam Ellis at Moz, and finally Disney is getting into the metaverse.

Microsoft Webmaster Tools released their IndexNow WordPress plugin over the holiday weekend.

https://searchengineland.com/indexnow-plugin-for-wordpress-378228

Ask GoogleBot - Domains Lightning Round From January 5th 2022.

Does Google care about tld?For example a real estate agent might want jimsmith.realtor instead of jimsmithrealtor.com.
Google says they don’t care, it’s treated the same.

https://youtu.be/9ERB7gJV7o8?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUM9wKeb-Gvm8bgpFM72yiXw&t=16

Can I rank globally for a domain with a ccTLD. The example was using .fr and you are a French site, but you want to target Brazil as well. In Search console, you can only setup one Country to target. Once you remove that, you are no longer targeting a single country.

Also, having a ccTLD send a signal to Google and tells it which country you are targeting.

https://youtu.be/9ERB7gJV7o8?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUM9wKeb-Gvm8bgpFM72yiXw&t=80

Miriam Ellis puts together another great article over at Moz - this is giving me whiteboard Friday feels. The article talks about 2022 Local SEO success. There were a few really great takeaways as I read the article and I encourage you to take 5 or 6 minutes and read it all the way through.

But what I liked most was the talk about supply chain gaps and how you couldn’t buy name brand anti-bacterial, but then your local brewer started making them. How you couldn’t buy masks but there were teams of Etsy sewists. Did you Google making your own bread or where to buy flour locally? The savvy business owners came up with new solutions.

https://moz.com/blog/2022-local-seo-success

And a few days ago we talked about Reddit’s homepage getting taken down a notch from a DMCA request. To follow up with that, a Reddit thread by user dustyd22 discussed a site that is copying their site word for word and just adding a “the” in front of the domain name.

A quick response links to Google’s content removal form.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/rwvaqi/website_duplication_by_a_competitor/

https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en

Disney has entered the metaverse.

Remember yesterday’s news where I talked about Nike the perfect Corp entering the metaverse. Well, Disney has just entered and they’re looking to make it big. IGN has an article on this, outlining the several patents that Disney just filed on An Augmented Virtual World Simulator That Doesn't Need a Headset Or Glasses.

https://www.ign.com/articles/disney-patent-augmented-reality-theme-park-rides 

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Y2K 22? How does an out of stock product page affect SEO? What platform is winning the Core Web Vital Game? A new app to improve SEO with Shopify, the metaverse and ecommerce, and a Search Console bug fixed.

Full Post: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e3

Y2K strikes again. This time for 2022, but it’s actually the exact same issue we had 22 years ago with dates being stores as 2 digit numbers. If you are active in email marketing, especially B2B, this may have affected you.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/email-stuck-in-exchange-on-premises-transport-queues/ba-p/3049447 

How are you handling out of stock or low stock items, and does this affect SEO? The low stock question was asked on Twitter to John Mueller.

https://twitter.com/mckeinze1997/status/1478421272161927168

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-handle-temporarily-out-of-stock-product-pages 

Shopify is doing a great job in the core web vitals area. Using data from HTTPArchive, Barry Adams noted that Shopify is performing better than AMP pages.

https://twitter.com/badams/status/1478340899088343040 

Yoast is best known for being an SEO plugin for WordPress with over 12 million users. They just announced their Shopify App which goes live on January 18th 2022.

https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-is-coming-to-shopify/ 

There was a user issue in Google Search Console where full users may have seen their status as delegated users and not have the full ability to do things like add new users. 

https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/136042635/are-you-not-seeing-users-and-permissions-in-search-console-settings-read-this?hl=en 

The Harvard Business Review wrote an article about brands entering the metaverse. 

Some brands to note:

Nike filed several trademark applications directly related to downloadable digital goods specifically for the metaverse. 

To see some real world implementations, visit on your browser in the links below.

https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-brands-can-enter-the-metaverse

https://www.emarketer.com/content/social-commerce-2021

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/02/nike-is-quietly-preparing-for-the-metaverse-.html 

Perfect Corp. virtual booth experience @ CES 2022: https://www.perfectcorp.com/business/CES2022 

And since it seems we can’t go a day without talking about TikTok, an article from the Verge suggests that TikTok is testing a new feature that is similar to the Twitter retweet function. 

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/4/22867456/tiktok-share-repost-retweet

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Today we’ll be looking at some negative SEO issues that have come up including how an onlyfan performer may have taken down reddit’s homepage, your IP address in Google results, Meta’s new restrictions on advertising, and the worst practice for handing over a site from one agency to another.

How easy would it be to remove reddit’s home page from Google’s index? Apparently a simple DMCA is all it took. Cyrus Shepard noted on twitter that the main reddit homepage wasn’t ranking #1 anymore and some further investigation looks like a DMCA request was the culprit.

While you are checking out the tweets, also take a look at Cyrus’ company Zyppy and their SEO success factors. Probably one of the better put together lists of ranking factors you should and shouldn't care about.

https://twitter.com/CyrusShepard/status/1478101570646540289

https://zyppy.com/seo-success-factors/

We’ve all been there, a staging version or just the straight IP version of the site gets indexed. I didn’t bring this up yesterday as part of the office hours recap as John somewhat touched on this issue, but there was a reddit thread where he put in a lot of effort into the reply and I think it’s important enough to mention. John Mueller said that generally, Google will list a site in its search results with the domain name rather than using an IP address. But if you see both and know your website is crawlable via this protocol then there's no reason to worry about being deindexed. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/rs7pjb/perfect_storm_caused_a_tank_in_ratings_ip_address/ 

Starting January 19th, 2022 Meta (You know, Facebook) will no longer allow you to market certain targeting options relating to sensitive topics. A list containing examples for all types of sensitive categories was given 

• Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”)
• Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”)
• Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”)
• Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures

I think this is a great move, and I am happy to see this. Having worked in marketing in the medical field, I did sometimes feel like we were able to target a little too accurately and it felt someone intrusive. Little by little, we’re getting less targeted ads, but we’re also safeguarding our privacy. I think the balancing act is a tough one, but this is the right direction. This also is something I think will help balance out the ability to influence a specific group too much, and forces advertisers to broaden their ads to a larger spectrum of people with differing political or social beliefs. 

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/12/08/updating-metas-detailed-targeting-options/

Hiding results when handing over a site: 
Just a fun little reminder of the URL removal tool in Search Console - which is used to temporarily remove a result from the search result pages. Think of it like a filter for results, and you are asking Google to filter the results out that follow a specific pattern. I’ve seen this used in negative ways when handing over a site from one agency to another, it’s a bit hidden but a great way to hide the important parts of a page with nothing else wrong with the site. 

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There wasn’t a lot of SEO news over the holiday weekend and the new year, but I wanted to recap what I felt were the most important takeaways from Friday’s English Office hours with Google’s John Mueller. As always, a synopsis, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video.

Full post here: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e1

Some people may rely on the cache pages in search result pages to verify the indexing of the content correctly. The cache pages are handled separately from the index, so you may have a page in the index that you don’t have a cache page for.

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=334

Poor translation automated translation of an alternate language, how does this affect the SEO’s main language version. This comes down to metrics that Google uses that are sitewide factors vs single page factors. If you have low quality pages, whether that’s thin content, badly translated content, or another issue, this can bring down overall site / domain quality rankings and be harmful to your SEO efforts. 

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=412

Google crawler ignores all permission requests from your site. This came up in a question that was related to IP based content detection that was causing their site to skew towards a specific geographic area for indexing.

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=1056

If you have pages that are authoritative, have good backlinks, but you don’t want them indexed, consider using a rel canonical tag to flow that authority to a different page. The question was asking about using a redirect for just GoogleBot, which is very borderline against Google guidelines. 

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=1190

This question is really relevant to work I’ve been doing recently where we saw over 150k pages removed from the index within about a week as Google picked up a no result message that we had in the source code but was hidden. If you have any text in your source code, whether hidden or not, Google CAN index it and use it. 

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=1424

Using the indexing API to get your results indexed faster than letting Google find it via a sitemap. John says that yes, it will crawl the page so it can review the content and the structured data associated with jobs. 

https://yoast.com/live-indexing-bing-google-yoast-seo/

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=1988 

Discussion about title rewrites that don’t make sense: Seems like it is still happening and can definitely be an issue if you are adding new types of content or products and Google hasn’t fully aligned that with your domain.

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=2492

This is the big one, my site isn’t getting indexed. How long does Google take to pick up on quality changes?

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=2556

 Screaming Frog updated their software to ver 16.5 which closed another log4j vulnerability that showed up, however a new one surfaced again, and they responded to my tweet to see what their timeline is for a fix. They can provide one via an email to their support team. 

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Google has made a change to the rich result reports for product structured data on December 28, 2021. This means that it is viewable in Google Search Console and may lead to different numbers of entities than before this update was implemented- which could affect your rankings!

https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-products-rich-result-report-error-handling-updated-378082

A nice tip from Dan Shure about finding gift keywords which saw a lot of visibility in 2020 and 2021. Adding adjectives like “funny” or “unique” came up with a lot of new mid & long tail keywords opportunities.

https://twitter.com/dan_shure/status/1476240334740934665

If you were getting a Search Console Emoji Alert, it was a Google bug, so you can ignore it as confirmed by John Mueller on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/rqrbec/weird_seo_spam_search_console_emoji_alert_lol/

SparkToro has a new homepage - Rand asked if anyone has 2 minutes to look at it and let him know any mistakes / issues. If you don’t have enough budget for a QA department, this is a great example of how you can get a lot of people looking at something and giving solid feedback.

https://twitter.com/randfish/status/1476608277165137921

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Today we’ll be talking about Google’s ability to crawl large pages, who uses screaming frog, what backlink types are simply ignored, and was there an algorithm update over the last few days?

Google’s HTML size limit is in the 10’s to 100’s of megabytes. Confirmed via tweet by John Mueller. This was in response to a Bing Webmaster Tools notice. 

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1468538974406946823

Screaming Frog is one of the best pieces of software you can buy. It’s somewhere around $150 - $200 for year and you run it locally on your system. It’s invaluable for ad hoc reports, technical analysis and more. A recent reddit thread got a little more visibility when John Mueller chimed in that he personally pays for a license.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/rrcji8/how_to_justify_screamingfrog_cost_to_my_boss/

No Follow, User Generated Content, and Sponsored backlinks are all treated the same, basically they’re ignored.
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1476140327174082564

https://youtu.be/wdE3ElNf4LA?t=2036

Confirmation - you don’t need to keep a 301 redirect on an old domain for more than a year.
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1476583352828366854 

According to recent SEMRush data, in December of this year was when things started getting really volatile. We saw a lot more movement than usual with Google and their products. In fact, this year is one of the most volatile years according to SEMrush.

https://www.seroundtable.com/semrush-google-december-2021-most-volatile-32668.html

Around December 27th and 28th we may have a Google search ranking algorithm unofficial update. It is not unusual for Google's search results to fluctuate without Google manually pushing an algorithm update. There’s a lot of chatter especially in the affiliate groups..

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-jolt-32670.html

There are many strategies and tactics in the SEO world that seem completely backwards at first, but if you take them into consideration they may actually work. Aleyda Solis' recent Twitter thread asking “what's the most counterintuitive recommendation/implementation I've done over my career which paid off as expected?”  

https://twitter.com/aleyda/status/1455613252663193605

Also, while you are at it, sign up for her weekly SEO Fomo Newsletter @ https://www.seofomo.co/ 

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Today we’ll be talking about the most blocked crawler bot, some takeaways from SEOs & Devs: Harmony in Tech, and a new notification system on Google Search Console that wasn’t supposed to be public yet.

Ahrefs is the most blocked bot from robots.txt files as tweeted by Malte Landwehr from data via builtwith. Something to note - Ahrefs is blocked by default on Shopify sites as well as by default on any plesk servers. Majestic and SEMRush were the only other SEO tools in the top 10. Some more data: https://trends.builtwith.com/robots 

https://twitter.com/MalteLandwehr/status/1473392514833043465 

A great article by Mirriam Ellis at Moz that sums up a lot of SEO with a bit of emphasis on local business.A few big takeaways from this are: 

• 69% of people say at least half of their searches have a local intent
• “Available near me” searches increased by 100% globally in 2020.
• 33% of searches result in a Google local pack being returned
• Google hiding website links in 59% of local packs.
• 87% of consumers read reviews. 
• 78% of consumers want to text with your business
• 60% of shoppers say they would change their purchasing habits to protect the Earth and 
• 83% of young people want to patronize brands which align with their values

https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-industry-story

Worth a listen talking about separating the content and the technical and making sure that’s not the same person. In fact, it can be two completely different agencies that you work with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMIKtfVD21g&t=625s 

SEO and JavaScript - a hot topic for many as Google recommends server side rendering instead of client side rendering, but how can you work with you dev team. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMIKtfVD21g&t=273s 

You might have seen this happen to your advertisements on Google. You may have had an ad that was originally disapproved because of a past violation, but now it's not!

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-past-violations-32652.html

Google is testing a new feature that will show products at the top of their search results pages. The option to mark as special has just been added, so we'll see how this improves your online retail experience!

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-business-profile-products-mark-as-special-option-32660.html

Google's April 2021 and December 2021 product reviews update only targeted English language content. Has it already rolled out to other languages though?

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-product-reviews-update-other-languages-32658.html

We were excited to see a new announcement bar on the Google Search Console interface! The most recent update had three levels of urgency depending upon how important it is for you know about this issue. 

https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-testing-announcement-bar-378064

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A lot of today’s podcast is going to be focusing on the Google SEO office hours with John Mueller - some of the more important things I think were discussed and my additional thoughts. From how scrapers are using Google’s own servers to crawl budget concerns.

Google's John Mueller was asked on Twitter why the link report seems slower than most of the other reports. He said that links is not an area they think SEOs should focus too much on and thus the report is not something they "spend lots of resources" on.

https://twitter.com/abondance_com/status/1473925258281426951 

SEO expert Alan Bleiweiss asked John Mueller of Google if Google has a "Google Book of Secrets" where it stores all the algorithmic changes it makes in a single location. John Mueller said that yes, Google does document all of the changes it made.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=2306 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-book-of-algorithm-updates-32650.html

John Mueller discusses a question about breadcrumb schema markup but gives some info about matching what a user sees with what is in the markup. It seems Google may not utilize markup if it doesn’t have a matching value the end user sees. FAQ schema is an exception, as you can have collapsed answers that aren’t visible.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=2385

When looking at multilingual sites, especially as you start out - you don’t have to translate every page. Google looks at multilingual sites by page.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=2636

Another question came up about crawl budget on Google SEO office-hours, and again John asked the number of pages. About 10,000 pages and John quickly said you don’t have to worry about crawl budget. The question was more about auto-generated pages that are no-indexed and showing up in search console and John gives a good answer on when you would no-index vs block in robots.txt and how those pages might still show up in the index.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=2751 

Scrapers are getting smarter and using Google Cloud services to run their quote GoogleBots to scrape site content. Doing this at first glance is a Google IP and may not set off red flags, and even allow more unrestricted access to your site. Make sure the IPs reverse domain to googlebot and not just google.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=3502 

Most of the search algorithms Google launches work across all languages. There are exceptions, like when Panda first launched and the product reviews update and some others. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithms-languages-32643.html

This year was full of surprises for search engine and digital marketing professionals, as well as the second year of the COVID pandemic. From title change fiascos to improved shopping options and new ways of tracking data, this year was packed with changes that could potentially affect their brands' visibility.

https://searchengineland.com/seo-2021-year-in-review-endless-updates-t