Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

In this show we got everything for you from creepy crawling to blood sucking vampires and and walking zombies. First, we had a few unconfirmed Google search algorithm updates this week, one last weekend, second on Monday and third on Wednesday and Thursday. Google said they don’t push algorithm updates out specifically before the weekends. Google said again that spikes in crawl rates do not mean an update is coming, they are unrelated Google said. We did see some weird crawl spikes this week on some sites. Google said they want to make crawling more efficient but it might not be done through IndexNow. Google said when it comes to deduplication of top stories, they remove the link if it’s the first link in top stories and if top stories shows before the web results - but that might change. Google released the page experience report for desktop pages in Search Console. Google said it is impossible for it to understand when different language content is equivalent. Google said it is getting better at understanding languages and locations without hreflang. Google product reviews update will expand, may use machine learning and might one day be incorporated into core updates. I wonder if Google might target fluffy content this year. Google’s John Mueller spoke about site migrations and URL changes in a video. Google said hosting companies should not use robot detection interstitials without 500 status codes. Google said recipe markup has to use fixed times, not ranges. Google might update and even rename the Google webmaster guidelines. Google said it is not doing away with target CPA. There is a bug with discovery and performance max campaigns plus there are new placement reports for performance max campaigns. Google Maps is testing showing review snippets in the map interface. Google has a location pack result with things to do, airports and transit stops. Danny Goodwin 301 redirected from Search Engine Watch to Search Engine Journal and now is redirecting to Search Engine Land. And if you are looking for the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, you won’t be able to find it in Google Search. That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable. Topics:

Google Search Ranking Update January 14th & 15th (Unconfirmed)

Another Unconfirmed Google Search Ranking Update (January 19th & 20th)

Google: We Don't Push Out Search Algorithm Rollouts Right Before Weekends

Google Reiterates That A Spike In Crawling Unrelated To Upcoming Algorithm Updates

Some Sites Seeing Massive Crawl Spikes From Googlebot

Google Wants To Make Crawling More Efficient & Environmental Friendly

Google Deduplication Of Top Stories From Web Search Results

Desktop Page Experience Report Now In Google Search Console

Google: We Don't Understand If Content Is Equivalent When In A Different Language

Google: We're Getting Better At Languages & Location Without Hreflang

Google Product Reviews Update Will Expand, May Use Machine Learning & Can Be Incorporated In Core Updates

Will Google Target Fluff Content In Search?

Google: SEO Site Migrations Are Hard Because URL Signals Need To Be Forwarded

Google: Hosting Companies Should Serve 500 Status Code On Robot Detection Interstitial

Recipe Schema Markup No Longer Supports Ranges For Cook, Prep & Total Time

Google Might Update & Even Rename The Webmaster Guidelines In 2022

Google: Target CPA In Google Ads Not Going Away In 2022

Confirmed Bug With Google Ads Discovery & Performance Max Campaign, Plus New Placement Reports

Google Maps Pins With Review Snippets

Google Location Search Pack With Things To Do, Airports & Transit Stops

Danny Goodwin Joins Search Engine Land : Reaction

Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency Disappears From Google Search

In part one Riley Hope and I spoke about her SEO career, how she did her thesis on ethics in SEO and we spoke about the automotive SEO space. In part two we talk about women in SEO and more on the automotive space and search results.

Women In SEO:

We spoke about how Melissa Fach, who has been in the SEO community for a long time, is now in the auto SEO space. But I reminisced about the old days of the SEO space, with SEO leaders who were female, like Jill Whalen, Christine Churchill, Heather Lloyd Martin, and many others.

More On Riley:

We then moved into more about Riley’s history, talking about being a Floridian versus a New Yorker. We spoke about how her husband is in the US Air Force, working on top secret and classified stuff that we can’t talk about. She is a military wife and she describes what it is like to live like that, huge credit to her and her family. But yes, they need to have perfect eye sight to be in the Air Force but not to do SEO.

Automotive Search Results:

We then jump back into automotive SEO and search and I bring up the controversy over the new features Google Search launched around auto retail search, by the way, Google said they license this data.

She does enjoy doing SEO in the automotive space because she doesn’t have to deal with everything for the client. She can focus on the SEO and doesn’t haver to worry about hosting, DNS, development and so forth. But she does miss working with small businesses, it was a bit more rewarding because there is more of a direct impact on what they do.

You can learn more about Riley Hope at RileyHope.com or follow Riley on Twitter @reillyhope13.

We had our first unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update of the 2022 year, it was on January 11th. Google admitted that there is a backlog of responding to manual actions. Google said they want to share more specifics on core updates but are not allowed to. IndexNow co-sharing URLs is now fully live between Microsoft Bing and Yandex. Google said fluff content is hard for it to understand but yet it seems Google ranks the content well. Many SEOs said they will still buy links in 2022 despite it being against Google’s webmaster guidelines. Google said for links to be counted, they need to be on indexed pages and even then Google might not count them. Google is still recommending you disavow whole domain names. Google reminded us that the search quality raters guidelines are not designed for SEOs. Most SEOs are not confident in strategy around Google Discover. SEOs said they will focus more resources on content this year. Do not, I repeat, do not block users from slower regions to speed up your core web vitals. Google Business Profiles now makes new owners and managers wait seven days to make changes. Google is testing trending videos in the mobile search results. Google is testing web stories for NFL games. Google Ads launched a disapproved ads auditor tool code. And a poll shows that 90% of SEOs are vaccinated - go figure. 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:

Riley Hope came to visit me at my office in October to talk SEO. Riley started in SEO by doing unpaid internships for non-profits after high school, this was during the “dark ages” of YouTube and Facebook she said. She reached out to a founder of company she found online she seemed to like and she got a real contract job. She learned SEO there and worked there for about two and a half years. Riley started her masters while a director at the agency she is at. It has been fun explaining how SEO works to her master advisors in university.

Ethics In SEO:

Riley explained the ethics behind SEO, she actually did her thesis on this topic.  Some of it was about not deceiving or manipulating Google’s algorithm for personal or financial gain. The other part was not harming users/searchers, and also an aspect of collecting data on people around data collection - GDPR stuff.

Riley said she explained recently, like the past year or so, got into the SEO space on Twitter. She observed that some companies target small businesses with misinformation and then others in the space call them out. We spoke about some popular names in the industry a bit and then moved back into talking about her career including her work in the SEO auto space.

Automotive SEO:

We then spoke about some of the challenges about doing SEO work in the automobile space and industry. She said working in the auto industry, specific with SEO, is like working in any other industry in the early 2000s and trying to get SEO things done, it is super hard.

We mentioned some names of SEOs in the auto space, such as Melissa Fach and Greg Gifford. Riley explained that SEOs in the auto SEO space is mostly male but in her agency it is more female.

You can learn more about Riley Hope at RileyHope.com or follow Riley on Twitter @reillyhope13.

It was a slow start to 2022 but I guess that is welcomed by most of you - I have my January 2022 Google webmaster report live, if you took off at all, you will want to read it and catch up there. Microsoft Bing released a WordPress plugin to easy allow WordPress sites to add IndexNow capabilities. Google Search Console products rich results report has been updated. Google said different languages quality on your site can impact other language sections on your site. Google said pages that look like error pages can be considered soft 404s and drop out of the index. Google said stock levels should not impact your rankings. Google said there is no need to nofollow internal links to pages that have affiliate links on them. Google said you can ignore link reports that show “toxic” links. Google said keyword density is still not a thing in 2022. Google may be showing more web stories in the top stories carousel. If you work for a dealership, you can list your cars for sale in Google local results. Google is testing a read full answer button in the people also ask. Google is testing a blue search bar header. Google is also testing a new design for visual stories and trending searches on Google Discover. Are you trying to add exact match keywords to your Google Ads campaigns and Google is saying no, they will be added as broad match? Also, Google’s John Mueller on New Years was helping SEOs and site owners. Google AdSense has resumed the related search experiments after eight months, it was suppose to be paused for only two months. 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.

Search Topics of Discussion:

In part one, we spoke about how Colt Sliva became an SEO engineer and some topics around visualizing search graphs. In part two we spoke more about entities, python for SEO and winning over developers. Now in part three we get into frequency statistics, improving on those models and doing proper A/B testing in SEO. Frequency statistics In the frequency of an event i is the number n_{i} of times the observation occurred/recorded in an experiment or study.

Frequency statistics was cheap, fast and easy to compute and that is why we used it in the old days. But we have faster computers, we are smarter, we should be using more advanced methods to predict changes and their benefit through machine learning and AI based methods.

So he is hopeful for SEOs using more sophisticated methods. It is harder for smaller SEO consultants or even smaller websites, sites with very limited traffic.

The big question does the new more advanced models work better than the cheaper method of frequency statistics? It is unclear right now.

I did bring up at the end that the keyword planner tool added trending data, with details, it is worth checking out if you didn’t see it.

iPullRank is hiring, so if you are looking for a job, hit them up.

More next week but you can learn more about Colt Sliva @SignorColt.

The week between Christmas and New Years is general slow and it was but we did have some Google search ranking jolts and tremors this week. The tremors make sense, as Semrush data showed, December was the most volatile month of the year and this year was the most volatile year of many years with Google Search. Google said it does keep track of its algorithm changes but it is hard to use to pinpoint specific URL changes. Google said most search algorithms work across all languages but not all, like the product reviews update is supposedly only English now but that might change in the future. Google Business profiles now let some business mark products as special to move them to the top. Google will not rank G-rated sex toy companies by their name in organic search but will in Google Ads. Google Search Console’s link report is not a priority for Google. Google Search Console tested an announcement bar. Google said there is no difference in SEO value between nofollow, ugc or sponsored link attributes. Google Ads still has a serving issue for Gmail desktop browser ads. Google Ads is testing excluding placements in smart shopping campaigns. Google Ads is rolling out the asset library directly in Google Ads. SEOs seemed to have mostly taken off for the holidays. John Mueller of Google did not, he worked helping with Google Search questions over the holidays, like he does year after year. Bing has a Santa hat on its videos in search. Google has its new years confetti and new years eve Doodle. I also published a list of the top people we cited over 2021 in our stories - thank you all so so much. That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week's video recap is sponsored by Duda, the website building platform ranked #1 in Google's recent CWV report, is offering 15% OFF their annual plans with a special promo code for you at agency.duda.co/barry

Search Topics of Discussion:

In part one, we spoke about how Colt Sliva became an SEO engineer and some topics around visualizing search graphs. In part two we spoke more about entities, python for SEO and winning over developers. He quickly brings up Freebase, a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members that Google acquired. You can look at the URLs in the Google knowledge panels or Google Trends results to see where the entity data is coming from, Colt explain. We spoke more about bikes, yippee.

Google’s API also gives you a confidence ratio of if the terms match what it thinks you mean. So maybe you can use that to see how confident Google is with your content and what it really means. He said there are some tools that leverage this now and wishes there were more but some are really solid he said.

We also spoke a bit about why Python is used so much in SEO. The purpose is to code things, in an easy way, to automate your SEO tasks. Sometimes tools can’t do what you want, so coding something yourself, with Python or any coding language, is sometimes the best method. We spoke a bit on how to get started with learning Python. We spoke about some examples of how to use it as well.

That brought us to the title change Google made, which he measured and we both agreed the SEO community went overboard on complaining about that change.

Colt then gave us some tips on how to win over developers to do SEO. It is not about socializing with them but more about showing them the benefit of what you want them to do on the SEO front. This is a topic that is important and we spoke about a few times on this vlog.

More next week but you can learn more about Colt Sliva @SignorColt.

Happy holidays and merry Christmas to all of you, hope you are not watching this video on your break but if you are - you clearly love search! On Tuesday, December 21st, Google confirmed the December 2021 product reviews update is done rolling out, just days before Christmas as expected. We have been watching the tremors and fluctuations amongst the Google search results for the past few weeks, it has been unsettling. Google told us that we do not need to work on algorithmic and ranking SEO issues over the holidays - thanks Google. Google said not all websites need to be an authority to rank,. Google said it looks at languages on a per page basis, not site wide basis. Bing launched shopping integration with Shopify and a new ethical shopping hub in the UK. Microsoft Bing added a bunch of search features around travel search. A survey said that most SEOs spend less than 25% of their time on link building. A company hired an SEO who built links, and one of those links was a link they hacked on the client’s other site to gain - how awkward. Google image search is testing a section for “top categorized results” which is weird. Google Ads had a confirmed reporting bug with some conversions, specific to non-first/last-click attribution models. Google Ads has new icons that some PPCers are noticing. Google’s latest podcast was interesting, it was about some of the legal consequences around Google Search, crawling and indexing. An SEO woke up to a gift, $80,000 worth of new traffic. Google has posted its holiday decorations for Kwanzaa and Christmas. John Mueller posted his now annual memes of 2021 SEO report, which is always fun and I am wishing you all a safe, healthy and relaxing holiday!

More show details over here.

Search Topics of Discussion:

Colt Sliva came out to my outside office spot to chat SEO with me. I asked him a bunch of personal questions to start, to make him tense up - just kidding. We spoke about his career, he is the SEO engineer at iPullRank, the place is run by Mike King who I spoke to before. He got into SEO by helping him mom create a blog and then writing some content and making money with Google AdSense. He did some development in school, did some art in school and then got a jobs working in marketing and doing SEO and content for these companies. He also did a lot of development work at those companies. He wanted to do more SEO and he found Mike King and he clicked with Mike, Mike hired him to work on more intense SEO at his firm.

We then dug a bit into the search graph, knowledge panels, entities and more. He said he learned about this by digging into white papers on the topic of how search engines work. He first started with PageRank’s algorithm and he said you can use Python to help you visualize these algorithms. Colt got pretty technical with the conversation, talking about Eigenvector centrality. In graph theory, eigenvector centrality is a measure of the influence of a node in a network. Relative scores are assigned to all nodes in the network based on the concept that connections to high-scoring nodes contribute more to the score of the node in question than equal connections to low-scoring nodes. He does this to better visualize the algorithms.

He gave some examples of how the knowledge graph works with a bicycle. We then spoke a bit about knowledge panels, which you might find as fun as talking about bikes.

More next week but you can learn more about Colt Sliva @SignorColt.