Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

This week, we had a lot of vocality around the Google core update and it has officially completed rolling out yesterday, June 9th - this core update was bigger than most. Google also updated its title link algorithm for multi-language and scripted titles. I posted the monthly Google webmaster report, seems like I forgot to do last month, so it is larger than normal. Google is beta testing the video page indexing report in Google Search Console. Google picks the first HTTP result code when there are two or more. Google said you can restrict your XML sitemaps to just search engines. Google said there is no direct SEO benefit to using a CDN. Google’s John Mueller explained why it doesn’t like some SEO metrics and why some make them cringe. Google Ads API version 11 is now out. Google is expanding the Google Ads verification program for financial services and products in some regions. Google Ads released a number of travel related features. Google Ads expanded text ads won’t let you make new ones or edit old ones. Google Merchant Center to opt you all in for automatic item updates for conditions. There is a spike in complaints around reviews going missing for businesses in Google Local. Google is testing search filters on the left hand side. Google is showing both short videos and visual stories in an accordion. Bing is testing a dedicated Ads tab for some reason. Bing is also testing a visit site button for branded sidebar navigation. 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:

Alcides Aguasvivas is a co-founder of Pix-l Graphx, he has been running the company for 18 years now and they are based around the corner from my office in Rutherford, New Jersey. He is most passionate about search, when it comes to marketing.

Alcides explained how he got into doing SEO and started his business. He basically started his business out of college and took it from there over the past 18 years. His first website was just JPGs and he wanted to figure out how to get it to rank in search engines. I discussed how I first got into SEO as well. He started his firm when he was 22 years old out of his bedroom - I can relate.

We briefly spoke about the impact of COVID on our businesses.

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

This week, we dove more into the Google May 2022 broad core update, stories of those hit, how Google looks at the data prior to the rollout and more. Google also hinted that useful nofollow links, despite the policy change in 2019, still don’t count for much of anything. Google suspended the job training rich results in search. Google launched new learning video rich results in search. Google added new best practices for author markup in the article structured data. Google News performance reports had a data logging issue for two weeks. Google posted a video on why the Search Console graphs fluctuate. Yoast SEO Premium will be adding IndexNow support, which is a bit surprising but I think it is a good thing. Google Ads that are under review will not trigger displaying those ads anymore. Google AdWords API error rates have begun and will be at 100% in the next couple of months. Google Shopping results now seem to be showing loyalty programs, at least for Target. Google AdSense will begin testing the Topics API for serving ads on July 1st. And Robert Scoble started a rumor that Apple will announce a new Apple Search engine at the WWDC event on Monday. Speaking of Monday, I am going to be offline for a holiday - so anything posted will be scheduled and I will catch up late Monday night. That was this past week in search 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:

In part one with James Pate, we spoke about doing SEO at IBM and using Airtable for managing enterprise SEO data. In part two, we talk about enterprise SEO adoption and SEO driven taxonomy. James explained that when he first joined IBM, the team has grown, they are now ingrained into many departments in IBM and so on.

He spoke about installing governance around SEO, like URL structures and other SEO rules that these departments need to think about when making new pages and creating new content. Creating standards is a huge thing for IBM. James said IBM is unifying everything into one CMS, but that is a process. Step one was to make the governance but then step two is to get the various teams to adopt it. So you need leadership help to encourage adoption of those SEO governance.

We then spoke about taxonomy topics in SEO and how you can leverage that in your CMS platforms. He explained how this can help you automatically interlink these sections and remove a ton of manual work. We discussed some ways how this is used and how it can be used in the future. He then integrated this into his rank checker tool so it really drives back reporting to what matters in each business group.

We also spoke a bit more about the structure of the IBM SEO team and how it is integrated within IBM. We spoke a bit more about the IBM team, where people are based, who is on the team and so forth. I probed him for more details on how the team works and so forth.

If you want help with this, reach out to James Pete on Twitter @jamesfpate.

After over six months of waiting, we finally got a new Google broad core update, the May 2022 core update, I discuss some of what we are seeing early on. Also, we saw a lot of ranking volatility over the past couple of weeks - was this related? Google said the inclusive schema for image search’s monk skin tone scale is not yet here. Google updated its video best practices to define thumbnail transparency guidelines. Google is showing more FAQ rich results in Google Search. Google is displaying fewer sitelinks than it did before. Google Marketing Live was this week with a boat load of Google Ads news, I summarize the important search ones. Google Ads also added new audience targeting and reporting features. Google Ads smart display campaigns and optimized targeting had changes as well. Google Ads will prohibit some ads that promote skin lightening products that imply the superiority of one skin tone over another. Google Search is testing a new grid formal on mobile, for organic and ads. Google has explore outfits and shop similar features. Google Search is testing a new search bar tools design. Bing is testing a branded sidebar navigation tool. Google Maps is now displaying justifications directly in the map interface on mobile. Google Analytics 4 doesn’t seem to support AMP much. Google AdSense now shows screenshots for some policy violations. 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:

James Pate is the Technical SEO Manager at IBM, IBM has a whole group of respected and well known SEOs. I've spoken with Patrick Stox while he was at IBM, I also spoke with Tanu Javeri at IBM's NYC offices a while back. So this is the third IBM SEO I've interviewed. James is based in Brooklyn, which is not too far but yet super far from my office - the wonderful world of New York.

James ventured into SEO by developing software, such as WordPress plugins, like a rich snippets stars plugin. So I blamed James for Google showing fewer stars in the search results over the years. He also coded a plugin for videos and other areas. This is how technical SEOs think, which is wonderful. He did a lot of affiliate marketing when he first got into SEO, which is how a lot of SEOs sometimes start. He has a small company doing mostly WordPress for local companies and then he moved to a larger company to work on larger projects and then joined IBM.

At IBM he is involved in a lot of different projects, but he does a lot of work with SEO data, he looks at ways to improve inbound search specific to IBM products and then a lot of technical SEO projects. He built a redirect engine, he built a crawler and stuff like that. IBM is obviously a super old company, with a ton of old content, on many platforms and subdomains.

He spoke to me about the framework for managing enterprise SEO data. Specifically how he was about to centralize IBM’s SEO marketing data using Airtable with various automations. This helped IBM discover linking opportunities, content gaps, manage a topic taxonomy and more. This is all to help with huge number of pages, keywords and URLs. In Airtable, IBM stores not just keyword but also keyword intent, which is super interesting. He also tags them by topics, by page category, topic relationships and so on so he can build this map.

If you want help with this, reach out to James Pete on Twitter @jamesfpate.

There was another unconfirmed update on May 16th, about 6 months since the last confirmed Google core update. Spammers killed off the Bing anonymous sitemap submission method. Google will likely replace FID with INP in Core Web Vitals. Google Search Console performance reports now show education Q&A. There may be a new form of knowledge panel spam in Google Search. Google is asking some searchers for more search terms when their query is too short. Google scroll-to-text and highlight now lets some user share that highlighted text. Google shows video thumbnails in the SERPs without the video player being embedded on the page. Google recipe results can be broken into segments in the search results. Google Ads is testing replacing the ads label with a sponsored label. Google hotel results are using reviews for “Things to do” and more. Bing autocomplete search bar also is testing trending searches, related searches and people also ask. 75% of SEOs say you really need your own web site to have good SEO. And Google owned its new campus, the Google Bay View campus and it looks amazing. And I am so sad to report that the industry lost a legend, the mentor to all SEOs, Bill Slawski. That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable.

I also do a live COVID test, since everyone is sick in my home...

Search Topics of Discussion:

In part one with Lior Krolewicz is the founder and CEO of Yael Consulting, a marketing consulting company, we spoke about the IDF and how paid search has changed. In part two we spoke about PPC software, Google Ads automation and bugs with ad platforms. Now in this last part, part three, we spoke about what it means to be a good marketer.

Lior explained that google marketers care about its clients and its businesses. So finding people who deeply and truly care about helping people, that shortens the learning curve in training new staff and making for good marketers. He said, pretend this is your money and make a decision as if it was your money. A lot of his clients become friends and they have a strong relationship with each of their clients. He never locks in clients into long contracts, he will even give clients free audits because he doesn’t feel the client can benefit too much from his services.

He also said a great marketer has a good balance between being analytical and creative. So from understanding the problems and data through analytics and then coming up with creative ways to come up with a solution. Great marketers should also enjoy growing businesses with new ideas and so forth.

Often giving honest advice, even if that advice does not help you today, it may come back to help you years and years later. Small business owners may be more sensitive to their small business clients because small business owners get the challenges and stress involved in running a small business. So maybe small businesses have those advantages in helping customers in a better way?

He then shared a quick case study of orthopedic shoes client. Lior paid for it out of his own money, the client got burned twice before and was scared, so he took money out of his own pocket, and in the first month they went from $20,000 in sales in a month to $500,000 in sales in a month.

Learn more about Lior Krolewicz on LinkedIn, @yaelconsulting or at YaelConsulting.com.

Google had a big unconfirmed search ranking algorithm update around Mother’s Day. Also, this week was Google I/O and Google had a ton of announcements specific to search, I take you through many of them. Google’s digital marketing certification coursework had some pretty bad SEO advice around keyword density and word count but it later took it out. Google also released a new search appearance filter named translated results in the search performance report. Google will also release a new video indexing page report in the future. Google added troubleshooting your title links to the help documents and also added a new help document for valid page metadata. Google also now supports education Q&A structured data with a new help document. Google also allows FAQs schema on different sections of the page. Did you know that Google Search Console may stop collecting data when you stop accessing Search Console for a long time? Google said when it comes to the product reviews update your content should add new information to the body of knowledge. Google is testing a new search ad format with large swipeable images. Google added new business guidelines for local results for virtual food brands, like MrBeast Burgers. Google Maps has a new feature to prompt users to answer this question. Google Search added a popular destinations carousel. Microsoft Bing is testing interesting reads. Also Bing has a new top rated tutors carousel that links to TakeLessons, which is a property Microsoft owns. Bing’s Wikipedia box in the search results now can scroll. Bing added “see results for” on the left hand side bar. Google Universal Analytics changed the title of the real time analytics to “in the last 5 minutes.” Google has upset Mark Cuban with fake Shark Tank search results. We also have a recap with the Google Search Central Unconference.

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

Search Topics of Discussion:

In part one with Lior Krolewicz is the founder and CEO of Yael Consulting, a marketing consulting company, we spoke about the IDF and how paid search has changed. In part two we spoke about his company, how he focuses on customers over his own business growth. He would like to grow but he first needs software to help facilitate that. He has a ton of data and he wants to build software to bring a lot of that data to light and not all the tools out there do that properly. So it is about using the data to find the problem and you can do that with math, if you know how Google Ads works. He has a passion for this software bit and it is amazing to see that.

We then spoke a bit about automation with Google Ads and how often you set up conversions incorrectly, the conversions aren’t there for the AI to work properly. But when you dig into the campaign, you often see a lot of waste with automation. So then he may decide to pull it all out and then decide to handle to manually. There are a lot of folks who set it and forget it and that is a huge mistake. Lior explained budgets are important but if you can base budgets based on ROI, then it gets fun.

He deals with a lot of clients who were burned previously and he loves helping those businesses get back on track and then scale their growth over time. Lior did admit, automation can work, and he even says you should try it. He loves beating the AI and if he does not, the data he gets from it, is valuable. But more often than not, he can out perform the AI for the client. We then spoke a bit about ROI and costs and acquisitions and other metrics.

We also briefly spoke about the mass disapproval issue that happened a few months ago with Google Ads. He is concerned about those ads losing the history of the ads but he is not as concerned about it as he would have been in the old days. He then shared some bad examples of Microsoft Advertising doing weird things with keyword matching.

Learn more about Lior Krolewicz on LinkedIn, @yaelconsulting or at YaelConsulting.com.