Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

We had more volatility from Google Search on July 10th. Google shows half the number of people also ask boxes in the search results. Google Search Console anonymizes many queries, so it is not very rare. Google Search Console is rolling out the video indexing report slowly. Google Search Console has a bug with desktop videos in the performance report. Google Search is testing a new rich cards layout for celebrities and new get there weather, and map cars on mobile. Google is testing a top-ranked search feature. Google is testing larger images in search ads. Google has a destination-based Discover section with a story format. Bing is testing “answered by Bing experts.” Bing image search has a “shop for” box. Google Ads Performance Max campaigns gain a bunch of features. Google AdsBot mobile web crawler gets a new user agent. Google My Business app is no longer available. Google Business Profiles added a neat toggle to turn on or off your address in Google Search or Maps. Google Business Profile manager has a bug that hides details. Google Posts now expire after 6 months. Google Analytics 4 now supports more metrics and dimensions. Google interviewed me on their Search Off The Record podcast, it was fun. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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Search Topics of Discussion:

Jaimie and Jon Clark came for a visit and we all spoke SEO and a lot more. Jaimie Clark is the VP of SEO at Centerfield, she was previously the Head of SEO at Wirecutter, a New York Times company. Jon Clark runs his own firm, Moving Traffic Media and was previously an SEO at some large companies. In part one, I pinned Jaimie versus Jon in an SEO challenge - guess who won... Then in part two we spoke about Jaimie and Jon Clark's career paths and now in part three we talk about Jaimie Clark’s professional career and growth to the title of Vice President of SEO at a major corporation. Jaimie gave some advice on what new SEOs need to think about when thinking about career development. Jamie explained that see where SEO takes you in your career, go down the rabbit hole and try things and see what sticks. The bigger the company, the more opportunity you have for a larger role in this space. She explained there are a few different paths an SEO can take these days and she explained this in more detail in this video.

Jon Clark explained how the industry as a whole is maturing and there are needs for these roles. Without these roles, that can hurt large companies going forward. So companies really need to think about having these higher level roles.

It is interesting to hear Jaimie and Jon’s thoughts on this topic of career development in SEO.

This week, I published the monthly Google webmaster report - a great place to catch up on the Google news. Google may have done another algorithm update on July 5th and July 7th. Google created its own landing page for its algorithm update timeline. Google said course rich results require three courses to be eligible. Google said it is safe to delete your disavow file if you had no prior history. Google said the follow to nofollow ratio does not impact your rankings. Twitter added back the nofollow attribute to its links. Google Search Console’s link report seems to keep dropping links. Google Search Console Insights now supports GA4. Google removed the interesting finds search results feature. Google is testing things to do in an overlay format. Google is testing highly rated by users in search results. Google Merchant Center added auto-tagging for all free listings across all Google experiences. Google released version 2.1 of Google Ads Editor with a new overview page design. Google improved the Google Adcs location targeting options. Microsoft Advertising added automatic updates for Shopping Campaigns, auto-generated Remarketing Lists, more eligible UET tags migrating to the Microsoft Clarity insights experience, Customer match expanded to new markets and more. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week's video recap is sponsored by Semrush.

Search Topics of Discussion:

Jaimie and Jon Clark came for a visit and we all spoke SEO and a lot more. Jaimie Clark is the VP of SEO at Centerfield, she was previously the Head of SEO at Wirecutter, a New York Times company. Jon Clark runs his own firm, Moving Traffic Media and was previously an SEO at some large companies. In part one, I pinned Jaimie versus Jon in an SEO challenge - guess who won...

Jaimie and Jon met while doing SEO at Razorfish, so they are one of the few SEOs that met while on the job. Jaimie left that position after doing agency work for five years and was happy to go in-house. Jaimie spoke about the pros and cons of in-house versus agency SEO work. We also spoke about my old buddy Chris Boggs, who was leading up SEO at Rosetta when she worked there in 2009, then she worked at Reprise and then at Razorfish and then moved to the New York Times. She worked at New York Times and with the Wirecutter there, and the Wirecutter is like an SEO success story. We spoke about that site for a bit and the back story, which is probably interesting for most of you. And now she is a Vice President of SEO at Centerfield and she dropped the name Brock Boser, who I worked with maybe 20 years ago.

We then dug into Jon Clark’s career, he started back in 2005 at a company named HydroWorx stuffing envelopes and mailing out promotion campaigns but the CEO told him to do some search ads and he jumped on it and did PPC back in the super early days of paid search. He then worked at Microsoft, as an account manager, getting customers to spend money on their search ads, this was prior to 2010. He was there when Microsoft was transitioning to Bing, which was an interesting time back then, he explained. He also started doing freelance work for a while during his career during all of this. He then joined Razorfish and was there five years before joining NBC Universal. And then eventually he started his own firm Moving Traffic Media with a partner of his.

We may have had another update, an unconfirmed Google Search algorithm update on June 27th and 28th. Google’s Danny Sullivan talked about how Google communicates about Google algorithm updates at the Google NYC SEO meetup. Google has updated the rich results guidelines to disallow marking up products that are widely prohibited or regulated, or that can facilitate serious harm to self or others. Google has clarified more on the 15MB Googlebot indexing limit. Google updated its crawl stats report help documentation. Google posted a video on SEO tips for e-commerce sites. Google explained how to inject canonical link tags using JavaScript. I had to post a reminder that Google no longer users the supplemental index, which was sad. Google added a pros and cons feature to the Google Search snippets. Google Top Stories now groups news stories by topics. Google is testing expandable local related courses. Google’s automobile knowledge panel marks hybrids and electric cars as green. Google Maps is testing a new local panel with tabs and images. Google is testing a new feature to find places through reviews. Bing is testing a “click to see full answer” feature and “from this page” feature which is featured snippets. Bing is also tested showing “use tab” in the autocomplete bar. Google is automatically selecting background colors for some image snippets. Google is also testing shading Google Shopping Adcs background colors and is also testing retail merchant brand sliders. Google also added a Discover Shopping search filter to filter by Black-owned, Latino-owned, Veteran-owned or Women-owned businesses. Google is going to pay Wikipedia for repurposing its content, which is big. And I went to the Google NYC SEO meetup at the Google Chelsea building this week, I posted a short video of it that you can find linked to at the end of this video. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Sponsored by BruceClay who has been doing search marketing optimization since 1996 and also has an amazing SEO training platform.

Search Topics of Discussion:

Jaimie and Jon Clark came for a visit and we all spoke SEO and a lot more. Jaimie Clark is the VP of SEO at Centerfield, she was previously the Head of SEO at Wirecutter, a New York Times company. Jon Clark runs his own firm, Moving Traffic Media and was previously an SEO at some large companies.

In any event I first pinned them against each other in a game of SEO trivia - guess who won?

The trivia questions featured answers with Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, Panda vs Penguin, disavow files, Medic updates, new queries, John Mueller, Danny Sullivan, Gary Illyes, Ginny Marvin, Daniel Waisberg, Paul Haahr, Urchin, Android, YouTube, Fitbit, Apple, title links vs title tags, authorship, domain authority, RankBrain, EAT, YMYL, and more.

Hope you enjoyed this one, it was a lot of fun for me at least. But in part two we get into the real interview.

This week, we had some interesting tremors and ranking shifts from an unconfirmed Juneteenth Google search ranking update that really spiked a day or so ago. Google News revamped its design, added more features and customizations and relaunched in Spain. Google updated its help documents around Googlebot crawling, job posting and moved HTTP status documentation around, Google also clarified how to use product rich results markup on product variants. Google said content not visible on a page is no longer treated as less important. Google also said that hyphens in URLs as keyword separators are still recommended over underscores. Google Local Service ads requires five or more reviews for some service types. Google Ads will fix the performance max product listing tab to allow you to compare reports. Google Shopping Ads seems to be testing inserting queries related to material into the ad title. Google added a new LGBTQ+ owned business attribute to Google Business Profiles. Google in store nearby search feature is being tested in an expandable menu. Google is testing rounded favicons in the search results. Bing is testing a secure and HTTPS label in its search results. Google tests two rows of brand box stories for snippets. Google is also testing bolding domain names in the snippet. Google posted an interactive infographic timeline of Google Search since it launched. Google is trying out YouTube shorts for help content while John Mueller cuts his office hours to only once per month. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week's video recap is sponsored by Duda, the Professional Website Builder You Can Call Your Own.

Search Topics of Discussion:

In part one, Alcides Aguasvivas is a co-founder of Pix-l Graphx spoke to me about how he started him firm 18 years ago while in college. In part two we spoke about local SEO for small businesses. In part three we talk about site development and the importance of solid site infrastructure.

Alcides said so many people do not understand that your site’s infrastructure is fundamental to how search engines work - how they crawl and understand your site. It is not just about some content and links but it is also about how your site is technically built.

He said he had a client he did an audit on and there was a development web site getting half of the traffic. He said it is not just about that, but also looking at:

We also spoke about the medic update and how that impact, in a positive way, his clients back in 2018/2019.

We ended off talking about why he named his company the way he spelled it and the issues he has with it being spelled that way.

You can learn more about Alcides Aguasvivas at his website Pix-l Graphx.

Just when you thought the Google core update was done, we have been seeing big tremors this week that make us question if it was really done. Google product reviews update is still only rolled out for English content. Google Search Console updated its reports to show either invalid or valid, nothing in between. Google Search Console legacy messaging is going away August 1st. Twitter for some reason seemed to have removed the nofollow attribute from links. Google is testing a featured snippet card layout which is pretty cool, it has four answers. Google is testing hiding the local pack in an expandable menu. Bing is testing a local pack that opens in the same screen. Google is testing a new explore section. Google is testing a right panel section that scrolls with you. Google Search is testing new shopping filters in mobile. Bing is testing showing coupons in the search snippets. Google Business Profiles box in search shows some a “profile strength” widget. Google’s Things To Know shows up for 1% of queries according to RankRanger. Google is testing the full “advertisement” label in the local pack. Google Ads will address concerns over third party sales solicitations and poor advice. Google AdSense launched Shopping links. Microsoft Advertising now requires some advertisers to do an advertiser identify verification. Google is holding one of its first in-person SEO meetups and it is in the Google NYC office, I will be there, hope to see you. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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Search Topics of Discussion:

In part one, Alcides Aguasvivas is a co-founder of Pix-l Graphx spoke to me about how he started him firm 18 years ago while in college. In part two we chow down on SEO, specifically about local SEO for small businesses.

We specifically talk about optimizing your web site for local intent queries, breaking down your services pages in more detail and also setting up your Google Business Profile pages. Some of the topics we talked about here include:

You can learn more about Alcides Aguasvivas at his website Pix-l Graphx.