Archive for the ‘seo news’ Category
Thursday, January 19th, 2023
Of all the ridiculous and sublime ways to spend $10,000 a month of your enterprise SEO budget, your least greatest ROI has come from link exchange emails like this below, where a C-note can get you a backlink on a website with a domain authority of 80+ – potentially evening out that PBN you created for another $10k.
The author took the screenshot.
If you missed that hint of sarcasm above, let’s be clear, you should not be spending your enterprise SEO budget on link exchanges or PBNs.
Instead, you should be looking to spend your enterprise SEO budget on SEO tactics that bring value to the company and align with the overall business objectives of your leadership team.
And when it comes to reporting to your C-suite, they want to connect the dots between your SEO budget and the bottom line.
We’ve all been there. You agonize over creating the Looker Studio dashboard and including the right metrics. You email your boss an impressive, in-depth SEO report and hope for the best.
But you are struggling to articulate clearly how your enterprise SEO strategy impacts ROI.
Well, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Don’t let feelings guide your decisions. Instead, you need hard, cold data to build your enterprise SEO report that will win over your leadership team.
My enterprise SEO monthly report template to answer all your boss’s questions
Based on inspiration from Tom Critchlow’s The SEO MBA and Adam Gent’s SEO Roadmap, I created this enterprise SEO monthly report template.
This report includes screenshots of all my Looker Studio and Tableau dashboards.
Caveat: I hate presentation decks. It’s a giant waste of time. But the reality is your boss and your bosses boss will likely want a deck. So give them what they want and what they are comfortable reading.
Here’s how to deliver your monthly enterprise SEO report to your boss and across departments
Every month I send two emails to my bosses, direct reports, and cross-departments. The main goal of these biweekly emails is to begin to build an SEO culture within the company.
The second email of the month, typically on the 15th, is the previous month’s report. I call out 3-5 highlights, lowlights, and next steps to give the C-suite a high-level overview.
Screenshot taken by author.
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72 enterprise SEO metrics to include in your monthly enterprise SEO dashboards
Below is a list of enterprise SEO metrics I include in all my dashboards.
It’s important to note that not all of these metrics are shared with my leadership team. Use these metrics to help understand the story you want to tell the leadership team.
Also, remember you are an enterprise SEO lead, not a data scientist or Google Analytics expert.
If you’re working at an enterprise-level company, you will likely have a data analytics team to collaborate with to build these dashboards with you.
In your first 90 days as an enterprise SEO lead, I recommend copying/pasting this as a starting conversation with your data team.
All reports listed below should be available to segment by:
- Market (Locations)
- Device (Mobile, Desktop)
- Branded, Non-Branded, Combined
- Directory breakdown (blog, product pages, category pages, support pages, etc.)
- Month-over-month, year-over-year
Website organic dashboard
All should be available to segment by organic, direct, or referral traffic.
Organic overview
- Website Organic traffic sessions
- Website Organic traffic sessions compared to direct and referral
- Website Organic traffic sessions branded
- Website Organic traffic visits / sessions non branded
- Website Organic traffic users
- Website Organic traffic new users
- Website Organic traffic new users vs. returning
- Website Organic traffic pages/sessions
- Website Organic traffic avg session duration
- Website Organic traffic bounce rate
- Website Organic pageviews broken
Leads overview
- Organic
- Website Organic traffic sessions
- Website Organic traffic users
- Website Organic traffic leads
- Website Organic traffic MQLs
- Website Organic traffic SQLs
- Website Organic traffic sign ups
- Website Organic traffic sign ups %
- Website Organic traffic revenue
- Direct
- Website Direct traffic sessions
- Website Direct traffic leads
- Website Direct traffic MQLs
- Website Direct traffic SQLs
- Website Direct traffic sign ups
- Website Direct traffic sign ups %
- Website Direct traffic revenue
- Referral
- Website Referral traffic sessions
- Website Referral traffic leads
- Website Referral traffic MQLs
- Website Referral traffic SQLs
- Website Referral traffic sign ups
- Website Referral traffic sign ups %
- Website Referral traffic revenue
Organic content overview
- Website Organic # of pages driving organic traffic
- Website Organic All URLs driving most organic traffic – display top 10, should list all URLs if deep dive needed
- Website Organic All URLs driving most leads – display top 10, should list all URLs if deep dive needed
- Website Organic All URLs driving most MQLs – display top 10, should list all URLs if deep dive needed
- Website Organic All URLs driving most SQLs – display top 10, should list all URLs if deep dive needed
- Website Organic All URLs driving most sign ups– display top 10, should list all URLs if deep dive needed
- Website Organic All URLs driving most revenue– display top 10, should list all URLs if deep dive needed
- Website Impressions – pull from Google Search Console
- Website Impressions biggest winners based on based on search queries filtered by impression difference
- Website Impressions biggest losers based on based on search queries filtered by impression difference
- Website Clicks
- Website Clicks biggest winners based on based on search queries filtered by clicks difference
- Website Clicks biggest losers based on based on search queries filtered by clicks difference
- Website Avg. Position
- Website Impressions vs. URL CTR By Device
- Website Top 10 Landing Pages broken down by Impressions, Clicks, CTR
- Website Top 10 Queries broken down by Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Avg Position
- Website Domain rating – Pulled from Semrush/Ahrefs
- Website Keyword rankings from Top 10 Overall – segmented by page type (blog, product, support, etc.)
- Website Keyword rankings from #1-3 spots, #4-11, #11-20 – segmented by page type (blog, product, support, etc.)
- Search visibility compared to key competitors
- % of visibility
- Organic Backlinks Overview – Pulled from Semrush/Ahrefs
- Link growth
- Referring domains
- Top 10 links with the highest domain authority
Organic technical overview
- Website pages with crawlability issues (crawl errors) broken down by 3xx redirects, broken 4xx errors, server errors 5xx
- Number of pages crawled
- Number of new issues
- Number of total issues bucketed into high, medium, and low priority
- What percentage of page loads are slow, average or fast? – Please pull % YoY comparison and quarterly
- How has the page load time changed over the last year?
- Homepage speed score desktop
- Homepage speed score mobile
- Competitor Homepage 1 speed score desktop
- Competitor Homepage 1 speed score mobile
- Competitor Homepage 2 speed score desktop
- Competitor Homepage 2 speed score mobile
- Competitor Homepage 3 speed score desktop
- Competitor Homepage 3 speed score mobile
- How does the site perform for each of the CruX metrics?
- Top 10 URLs segmented by performance score, LCP, TBT, CLS, Status
14 enterprise SEO tools to make your SEO report look so fresh and so clean
Below is a list of enterprise SEO tools I use to create my monthly reports:
Free enterprise SEO tools
- Looker Studio (previously Google Data Studio)
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Google Lighthouse
- Bing Webmaster Tools
Paid enterprise SEO tools
- Semrush or Ahrefs (depending on your preference)
- Screaming Frog
- Lumar (previously DeepCrawl, but comes at a minimum $10k per month price point now)
- Conductor
- Supermetrics (this is the only tool to connect all your platforms into Looker Studio)
Enterprise SEO tools I wish I had the budget for:
- Clearscope or MarketMuse
- Sistrix
Avoid overwhelming your C-level executives with SEO metrics they don’t care about
The chances of your boss or any C-level executives reading your 50-page SEO report are about as high as Tom Hanks finding Wilson.
It’s our job as SEO professionals to get under the hood to see how the car works. It’s our job to diagnose the issues. But it’s not our job to explain how the motor works or why.
You must choose wisely the metrics you share.
Before you hit send, ask yourself: Is SEO worth it from this report?
After all, you must make a compelling case for SEO in your reporting, or SEO will be left behind.
The post How to create an enterprise SEO monthly report appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, January 17th, 2023
Google’s Core Web Vitals first became a ranking factor back in 2021. In February 2022, the change was fully rolled out to all mobile and desktop searches.
Since then, Google has also worked on delivering new technologies to optimize web performance as well as experimenting with a potential new performance metric.
What are the Core Web Vitals, and what do they mean for rankings?
The Core Web Vitals are a set of three user experience metrics:
Google collects data for these metrics from real users as part of the Chrome User Experience Report. Pages that do well on these metrics rank higher in search results.
Use priority hints to speed up your website
Last April, Chrome released Priority Hints, a new HTML feature that gives website owners a way to mark the most important resources on a page. This is especially useful for images that cause the Largest Contentful Paint.
By default, all images on a page are loaded with low priority. That’s because before the initial render of the page, the browser can’t tell whether an image element will end up as the hero image or as a small icon in the website footer.
Therefore it’s common for LCP images to be loaded with low priority at first and then switch to high priority later on. That means the browser will wait longer before starting to download the image.
This request waterfall shows an example of that. Note the long gray line where the browser knows about the image but decides it doesn’t need to start loading it yet.
Adding the fetchpriority="high" attribute fixes this problem. The browser starts loading the LCP image as soon as it’s discovered, causing the Largest Contentful paint to happen much sooner.
Run high-quality site speed tests
There are many free site speed tools available across the web. However, many that are based on Google’s Lighthouse tool use something called simulated throttling, which can lead to inaccurate metrics being reported. This also applies to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
You can use the free DebugBear website speed test to get accurate performance data for your website. The reports include both detailed lab test results and real user data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).
The new Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric
Core Web Vitals will evolve, and in 2022 Google released an experimental new metric called Interaction to Next Paint. It measures how long it takes for the user to update after a user interacts with the page.
A user interaction often triggers JavaScript to run on the page, which updates the page’s HTML. Then those page changes need to be rendered by the browser to display the updated content to the user.
Interaction to next paint seeks to address two limitations of the First Input Delay metric:
- FID does not include time spent processing user input
- FID only looks at the first user interaction
More than 90% of sites currently do well on the First Input Delay metric, far more than is the case for the two other Core Web Vitals. INP may therefore replace First Input Delay in the future, as it provides a better assessment of how good the user experience of a website is.
Take advantage of better image support in Safari
Downloading images takes up a lot of bandwidth, so browser makers are constantly working on new image formats and platform features. Unfortunately, it takes a while for these features to be fully supported in all major browsers.
Luckily there has been some progress in Safari last year. Safari was the last major browser to start supporting the new, more compact AVIF image format. Safari now supports native image lazy loading using the loading="lazy" attribute.
Identify and eliminate render-blocking resources
Render-blocking resources can have a big impact on the speed of your website. Many CSS stylesheets and JavaScript requests block rendering, which means no content will show on your website until these files have been downloaded.
To help website owners optimize page load time Google has started on better tooling to report render-blocking resources. For example, the new Performance Insights tab in Chrome DevTools indicates which requests are render-blocking.
Monitor Core Web Vitals over time
Ready to put some of these tips into practice?
Using a tool to continuously monitor your website lets you verify that your performance optimizations are really working and ensures you get alerted when performance gets worse. You can also look back at past test results to understand what changed.
DebugBear can monitor the Core Web Vitals of your website and those of your competitors over time and provides the in-depth reports you need to optimize your website. The reports also let you demonstrate the impact you’ve had on clients and the rest of your team.
DebugBear also keeps track of the Lighthouse scores for performance, SEO and accessibility. You get a detailed breakdown of what audits you need to improve. Start your free 14-day trial today and meet the Core Web Vitals this year.
The post How to optimize Core Web Vitals in 2023 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, January 17th, 2023
Imagine this: A small business owner, relying on Google Ads to make sales on his Shopify store, has had his livelihood crushed by Performance Max in two months. Sales are practically zero, cost per conversion is up 20x ($6 to $120), yet his Optimization Score is at 100%.
It’s a real and unfortunate situation that contradicts Google’s stance that their automation makes online advertising easier.
In fact, it illustrates how desperately the PPC advertising community needs better education on ad platform automation, especially when it comes to something as prominent as Performance Max.
That business owner did everything Google recommended, nearly destroying his online business in the process, and it’s unlikely he’ll recover without the help of a seasoned Google Ads professional.
This is the future that Google’s automation was supposed to prevent, but instead, we’re still trying to understand the basics of a campaign type that’s largely a black box.
Let’s fix that. Here are seven mistakes I’ve seen people make with Performance Max campaigns that you can avoid repeating.
Mistake 1: Thinking audiences and audience signals work the same way
Audience signals don’t work the way audience segments do in other campaigns, because you can’t target specific audiences in Performance Max. Instead, you provide signals that tell Google who to start showing your ads to, and Google uses the initial data to expand your audience.
Many account managers underestimate the importance of audience signals (I’ve seen some skip it completely). But anything that relies this much on automation won’t work as intended unless you provide the strongest possible inputs.
That’s why my top recommendation is to make sure you start every Performance Max campaign with strong audience signals. These can include:
- Everyone who converted on your website.
- Email subscriber lists.
- Historical customer data.
- Repeat or high-spending customers.
- Anyone else who you know is worth money to your business.
Source: Google.com
When you import those audiences at the start of a campaign, Google will analyze them for the millions of signals it tracks. And your campaign can begin with strong, relevant audience input instead of wasting money on guessing games.
Mistake 2: Neglecting your data feed
Because retail Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns rely on data feeds for keyword targeting, an incomplete feed means you’re missing out on potential opportunities.
A lot of brands advertising on Google don’t pay enough attention to their data feed, and that goes for Standard Shopping campaigns, too. It’s tempting to get started in Google Ads immediately, but take a step back to the Merchant Center and optimize your data feed for the best results.
Some of the things my agency checks for include making sure that:
- All products are categorized properly.
- UPC codes are included where applicable.
- Titles and descriptions are fully fleshed out.
- Titles and descriptions feature keywords and search terms related to a product.
Provide Google’s systems with high-quality inputs, and stay on top of the data you share to keep it accurate and up-to-date.
Mistake 3: Picking the wrong campaign structure
I’ve seen many Performance Max campaigns with several asset groups targeting different audience signals, but with the same creative or products. In my experience, that goes against the spirit of how Performance Max works.
Instead, we build asset groups around product categories or services. Because our targeting is based on audience signals rather than lists, splitting them this way provides little to no benefit. The lack of reporting at the asset group level for Performance Max means it’s unclear how this is helpful.
Source: Producthero.com
If you use different UTM parameters to send multiple traffic sources to a page, you could view the data in Google Analytics or offline conversions. But different audience signals can still target the same cohort. You can’t target a fixed audience in Performance Max.
It may seem counterintuitive if you’re new to these campaigns, but my experience says that building asset groups around audience signals only confuses the system.
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Mistake 4: Ignoring standard Shopping campaigns
Many of my peers aren’t happy with the lack of control over where Performance Max places your ads, but there’s one way to counter this.
To set up Performance Max to work as Smart Shopping only, you have to do two things:
- Remove all creative assets from the asset group.
- Shut off URL expansion at the campaign level.
When you do those two things, the campaign will likely spend the core budget on Shopping with very little spilling over to placements like Search, YouTube, and Display.
On the flip side, if you remove the data feed entirely, your ads typically won’t show up in Search and Shopping as Google focuses more on YouTube, Gmail, Discovery and Display.
Outside of that and a few account-level exclusions, there really isn’t much you can do to control placement by the campaign.
So when we work with ecommerce clients with larger catalogs, we typically recommend running Performance Max and Shopping campaigns together.
That means running one product segment in Shopping – whether by category, sub-brand, or other attributes – and others (like top items) in Performance Max.
Our team is auditing an account and the same SKUs are being targeted in both Smart Shopping and Performance Max campaign.
Not sure what this agency was thinking but this won't work. PMax is going to steal the show.
— Duane Brown 
4x Vax'ed! (@duanebrown) March 30, 2022
If a client is already active in Shopping and it’s working, we move some products that aren’t selling well to Performance Max. We may even do the opposite and move the top-performing products over. All we’re doing is testing what works to find the path to optimal profitability.
If you’re starting out with Performance Max and want to test Standard Shopping alongside it, what we recommend is looking for the subsets of products that are not getting:
Exclude those from Performance Max and put them in a Standard Shopping campaign where you have greater control.
Use manual bidding, be more aggressive with search term blocking, and use the added control to push those products to a stronger place.
Mistake 5: Saying ‘yes’ to all Google Ads recommendations
I can’t stress this enough: You should be the one making decisions about how to optimize your accounts and campaigns.
Google’s recommendations often focus on applying more automation and rely on the average of tens of millions of accounts. Only you have the ability to exercise judgment based on the nuances of your business.
Watch: How to turn off Google Ads auto-applied recommendations
During the automatic transition from Smart Shopping to Performance Max (now complete), the system automatically created a handful of non-Shopping assets – one or two images with your logo plus a couple of generic headlines – and began spending more of the budget outside of the data feed.
Smart Shopping may have split your budget 90/10 between Shopping and retargeting, but an “auto-upgraded” Performance Max campaign would spend a higher portion of your budget on prospecting ads using auto-generated assets that don’t convert well.
What helped us was making sure those assets were stripped away, and going back to core assets so the campaign could only target and create ads from your data feed. It might still spend more on prospecting than Smart Shopping, but it would be a much smaller expense with the focus largely on Shopping.
Mistake 6: Not optimizing assets to sculpt traffic
When I analyze a Performance Max campaign, I first look at total campaign spend and performance versus listing groups, data feed spend, and performance.
That gives me a breakdown of total spend on creative assets versus ads created from the feed. It’s not necessarily going to be 100% Shopping, it could be Display ads created using your feed.
When I see the performance of data feed ads versus creative assets, I better understand what direction to push the campaign in.
- Is the campaign working much better on the data feed side? I’ll lean in and move to a Smart Shopping style campaign.
- Is it getting better performance from creative assets? I’ll focus on putting out even better ones, like introducing top-performing assets from paid social campaigns.
While you won’t be able to see landing page performance reports in Performance Max, you can still revisit the “all campaigns” level and filter for Performance Max. This will show you which pages on your website Performance Max is driving traffic to.
From there, exclude pages from being served in the campaign (via campaign settings), or exclude certain products or categories from the data feed so that it stops sending traffic to those pages.
There’s much you can do to sculpt where ad spend goes, but this information isn’t native or accessible to newer advertisers.
Mistake 7: Using the wrong bid strategy at the wrong time
Performance Max is a fully automated bidding zone and manual bidding doesn’t enter this conversation. So across all campaign types, our goal is going to be getting on Smart Bidding with a target ROAS – the closest to profitable campaigns.
For brand new campaigns outside of Performance Max, we usually recommend starting with Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks for the first couple of weeks. It might not convert as well, but the goal is to drive traffic so the system starts to see what people are clicking and converting on.
Then we typically switch to Maximize Conversions, which is where we start Performance Max campaigns because it’s the lowest level in that funnel.
- Start with Maximize Conversions.
- Let the system spend its full budget.
- Win maximum traffic and study the data for patterns.
- Change to Maximize Conversion Value.
- Once you’re driving revenue, add a target ROAS.
A target ROAS tells Google you have a sales goal so it can push to meet that benchmark. Starting with it makes it difficult to gather enough data fast enough, which keeps you in the costly learning phase longer than necessary.
Our approach is to first make sure Google is spending the full budget and driving a nice amount of traffic, then to make sure we’re getting as many conversions as possible for that amount of traffic, and finally to push it to a place of profitability.
Google claims that a change in bid strategy puts the campaign back in a learning phase. But a change to your actual target – CPA for Maximize Conversions and ROAS for Maximize Conversion Value – should allow Google to adapt and continue. That said, I recommend changing targets in increments of no more than 10-20%.
The name of the game with Performance Max is “don’t shock the system.” Any drastic change will force it to look for new sources of converting traffic, resetting the learning phase. We’ve seen situations where it took up to six weeks to get campaigns back to a good place.
Getting comfortable with Performance Max
I get why there are mixed feelings around Performance Max.
When I started my search marketing career in 2003, I was resistant to change too. Any time Google introduced a new way to do things, I’d look for reasons it didn’t make sense.
But when you’ve seen as much change as I have in these two decades, you realize that ad platforms will keep moving forward. Google has a vision, they run the show, and it’s our job as search marketers to find ways to make it work for our clients and us.
Are there problems with automation, absolutely. But denying it, especially when we still have the opportunity to revert, means you ultimately end up behind the industry.
It's coming so we need to adapt and be a part of the conversation (and hopefully heard) #ppcchat
— Amalia Fowler (she/her) (@AmaliaEFowler) March 16, 2021
In some ways, what we do is like a Performance Max campaign. We put in the work upfront to learn something new, hoping we’ll reach a place where things run smoothly without our constant intervention.
The first step is accepting change, even if you don’t agree with it. The longer you fight it, the more you’ll have to catch up with those who already began looking for solutions.
So don’t try to hack the system or look for shortcuts. Accept the new status quo, put in the work to evolve, and claim a place for yourself in the future of search engine marketing.
The post How to avoid 7 mistakes that tank retail Performance Max campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, January 17th, 2023
Every article you can find online about Google ranking factors will tell you there are at least ~200 or so odd variables that contribute to how a site will perform in the SERPs.
That being said, there’s an enormous difference between what might impact SEO, what’s actually confirmed as a ranking factor, and what is simply a good principle to rank well.
It might sound like semantics, but “best practices” don’t just automatically translate into confirmed ranking factors in and of themselves.
So let’s separate these confirmed facts from fiction and all the other stuff you simply should be doing as a good marketer on a daily basis.
In this article, we’ll analyze all of the known, confirmed, rumored, and absolute myth-level Google ranking factors in an easy-to-read, highly condensed way.
Confirmed ranking factors
These are all the ranking factors that have been confirmed as true. We know they definitely impact your results in Google’s search engine to varying degrees.
Core Web Vitals
Your Core Web Vitals assess page experience signals to evaluate how engaging the user experience is. They confirmed in 2021 that they are a ranking signal, so make sure your site has a “good” ranking standing.
Source: Timing for Bringing Page Experience to Google Search
Anchor text
Google has confirmed that they use concise anchor text (read: “SEO strategies” as the anchor text and not “click here”) to better understand what’s on your pages, which can directly lead to them placing your page higher in the SERPs.
This isn’t the strongest ranking factor on the list (especially after the Penguin update), but it can still help.
Source: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
Domain history
You may be running an up-and-up, fully legitimate business now, but what if a sketchy business was using the domain before to scam customers?
Domain history does matter, and it’s a confirmed ranking signal, though Google’s John Mueller has gone on to say that the issue will resolve itself over time. Still, we recommend playing it safe on this one.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Nov. 13, 2018)
E-A-T
Google’s E-A-T framework assesses expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – and while it isn’t a ranking factor in and of itself, many of the factors that go into its calculation are ranking factors. So we’re putting this one in the confirmed column, but with a little “but only kind of” note.
Source: How Google Fights Disinformation
Headings
Headings – including H1s and H2s – can absolutely be a ranking factor, as they help Google understand the content on the page. They aren’t the only ranking factor, but they matter, so have them clearly written and keyword-friendly.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours (Aug. 7, 2020)
HTTPS
Secure search, or HTTPS – compared to HTTP – is a known and confirmed ranking factor. It also is an important part of a safe user experience, so make sure you get on this one fast if you haven’t already.
Source: HTTPS as a Ranking Signal
Content
It’s abundantly clear that content is used as a search ranking signal, and the quality of the content, including how directly it answers a question, can be vital to performance in the SERPs. The content on its own (and not just headings) is assessed by Google.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours (Aug. 7, 2020)
Backlinks
Links coming to your site from other sites have long been a general SEO best practice. That’s because PageRank established backlinks as “votes” from the very beginning, offering a new way to analyze quality that was originally modeled after citations to academic papers.
Source: Ranking Results – How Google Search Works
Keyword prominence
Keyword density isn’t a ranking factor (we’ll get to that later), but keyword prominence is. This is the location of the keyword, and the closer to the title or beginning of the text, the more prominent it is.
Source: English Google SEO office-hours (June 18, 2021)
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing – which involves over-stuffing your content with keywords in an attempt to get it to rank well – is a negative ranking factor, as confirmed by Google. Doing this will hurt you, so avoid it.
Source: Spam Policies for Google’s Web Search
Known paid links
If you’ve paid for backlinks and you get caught (which is admittedly very difficult) it is a negative ranking factor. It’s best to stay away from this.
Source: Spam Policies for Google Web Search
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendliness is confirmed as a ranking factor, and it’s been strengthening as a ranking signal for years. It’s particularly important for mobile search results, which have eclipsed desktop searches for at least seven years now. So here’s where mobile responsive best practices and confirmed ranking signals overlap nicely.
Source: Continuing to Make the Web More Mobile Friendly
Page speed
We know that page loading speed is a confirmed factor for Google’s SERPs (and has been since 2010) – and it’s an important one. It also directly impacts the user experience, so make sure that your site loading times are as quick as possible.
Source: Speed is Now a Landing Page Factor for Google Search and Ads
Physical proximity to the searcher
Google absolutely takes the physical closeness of the searcher into account when determining what results to show them, especially in local search. While you can’t change the location of your business, make sure that all of your business information (including location citations) are up-to-date and accurate.
Source: How to Improve Your Local Ranking on Google
RankBrain
RankBrain is an AI system released in 2015 (and significantly updated in 2016) to integrate AI into search queries for improved results, which is particularly helpful for ambiguous queries or long-tail keywords. It’s a confirmed ranking factor, but there’s no clear or distinct way to intentionally optimize for it.
Source: Google Q&A
Relevance, distance and prominence
Confirmed by Google as ranking factors, these three signals determine the popularity and geographical closeness of a business along with how relevant it is to the specific search. They are each vital for local search results, so take that into account when optimizing your local business page and remember to generate reviews.
Source: How to Improve Your Local Ranking on Google
Title tags
There’s plenty of evidence that optimizing title tags can have a correlative increase with ranking, though we know they’re not nearly as critical of a ranking factor as the rest of the content itself. It’s a small detail in a bigger picture, but they also say that Google looks for keyword stuffing here as a negative factor.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Jan. 15, 2016)
URLs
URLs are a minimal search ranking factor, which means that keywords in a URL are assessed when Google is crawling your site. Mueller has repeatedly stressed that this is not a ranking factor worth spending a lot of time on.
Source: @JohnMu on Twitter
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Unconfirmed but suspected ranking factors
Google hasn’t confirmed every single ranking factor out there, but that doesn’t mean that these elements below don’t have some sort of impact on the ranking algorithms. This is the unconfirmed but suspected-by-expert ranking factors that could impact your SEO.
Alt text
Having alt text for your images is definitely considered an SEO best practice, having alt text in and of itself is not a confirmed ranking factor. That being said, using it correctly and with keywords can help your SEO strategy by giving Google more context about what you have on the page.
Source: Google Image SEO Best Practices
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs help Google to assess the hierarchy of how your pages are arranged. Right now, we know it can help Google categorize pages, and that Google treats breadcrumbs as normal links in PageRank. We think they can have an impact on ranking, even if they aren’t confirmed as a direct ranking factor.
Source: @methode on Twitter
Click depth
Click depth, or the number of clicks it takes to get from your home page to the destination page, is very likely to be a ranking factor based on remarks from Mueller. But not a significant one. Think about how easy it is for users to get to the end page.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (June 1, 2018)
Local citations
Location citations that mention your key business information like name, address, and phone number, and while having these appear online aren’t officially confirmed as a ranking factor, it’s close. Google has noted that local results favor the most relevant results and that businesses with complete information will be prioritized.
Source: Improve your local ranking on Google
Co-citation
Co-citation and co-occurrence help Google assess how closely two unrelated sites or pages may be related and may give them clues as to how the pages are related and in what context. A few high-quality, trusted links to your site can help Google put together some of the puzzle pieces, but still, this is unlikely to be a significant ranking factor.
Source: Google patent on related entities and what it means for SEO
Language
It only makes sense that someone searching for shoes in Mandarin is less than likely to come across a site written in Spanish. To reach users in different locations, you’ll want to create content in the languages they speak.
Source: Ranking Results – How Google Search Works
Internal links
These are links to your own content on your site, but they need strong use of anchor text. At the very least, they definitely don’t hurt. That being said, they’re unlikely to be a strong ranking factor compared to others like site loading speeds.
Source: Learn About What Sitelinks Are
Schema
Schema markup is highly valuable when it comes to driving clicks, and it also provides microdata that Google is able to understand easily.
It isn’t confirmed as a known ranking factor but we know it can help you rank for queries you may not have otherwise. So it may help as a ranking signal, but the worst-case scenario is it just helps your overall SEO.
Source: Understanding How Structured Markup Data Works
The user’s own search history
Each user is different, and Google knows that. The algorithm do take the past search history into account when delivering search results as best as possible.
This, however, is not something that you can influence at all, and the impact is rarely significant (other than prominent locally personalized SERPs or frequently visited pages).
Source: @searchliaison on Twitter
Rumored but unlikely ranking factors
These are ranking factors that have long been speculated about, and while they have not been outrightly denied so far, we have a good reason for thinking they’re unlikely to be official signals.
301 redirects
While former Googler Matt Cutts said in 2012 that Google would follow an unlimited number of redirects from one page to another, there may be a slight PageRank lost in the process.
However, not much has been officially said, and, likely, they’re not a page ranking factor. In any case, you still want to manage redirects and linking closely to avoid issues in potential redirect chains. This is often more of a best practice for site performance.
Source: When migrating from HTTP to HTTPS Google says to use 301 redirects
Canonical links
Canonical links do have a connection with search rankings, but we know that even when they’re used correctly, Google might ignore it and pick their own canonical URL to show in the search results instead. Think Captain Barbosa’s famous quote from Pirates of the Caribbean here, “The code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.”
Source: Google selects canonical URLs based on your site and user preference
Outbound links
Outbound links are way too easy for people to game to be a ranking factor, but it is important to note that the anchor text and the links you choose can help Google better understand your content so it can bring in value indirectly.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Jan. 26, 2016)
Disproven ranking factors
While some rumored ranking factors are hanging in limbo, some have been disproven. Let’s look at what you don’t have to worry about, at least as far as SEO is concerned.
Worth pointing out – there’s a lot that isn’t on this list, but we wanted to cover the big ones.
Bounce rate
We’re listing this one first because it’s a common misconception that bounce rate impacts ranking. Google has repeatedly confirmed that bounce rates are not a ranking signal.
Source: @methode on Twitter
404 and soft 404 pages
Google itself has confirmed 404 pages do not impact how your other URLs rank, easily dispelling that ranking factor myth. Broken links and pages, however, can provide a poor user experience (so they should be found and updated when possible).
Source: 404 (Page Not Found) errors
Google Display Ads
This one has a bit of an asterisk.
Having ads from Display Ads on your page can lower site loading speeds, especially if you have a large number of them. So the concern was that these ads could hurt your ranking. And they don’t directly hurt your ranking just by appearing on your page.
They won’t directly impact your SEO ranking, though you will want to make sure that you aren’t overloading your pages with so many ads that performance (including site loading speed) isn’t impacted, because you don’t get a pass if they do.
And for that matter, using Google Ads, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics won’t automatically impact your ranking, either.
Source: The Top Heavy Update: Pages with too many ads above the fold now penalized by Google’s “Page Layout” algorithm
AMP
This one is simple: AMP is not a ranking factor, and we know that because Google has confirmed it multiple times, since 2016 at least.
Source: This Week in Google Podcast 341
BBB
While Better Business Bureau (BBB) reviews can impact consumer buying decisions, there is no evidence at this point in time that it can impact your SEO rankings, and one of Google’s team members confirmed it.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Nov. 13, 2018)
Click-through rate
Your click-through rate (CTR) has long been rumored to be a ranking factor, but it’s confirmed this isn’t the case – especially since Google knew that people were trying to game this years ago. So sure, it’s great for your site to have a higher CTR, but don’t expect it to help your rankings.
Source: CTR in the Google Algo: Google’s Gary Illyes and Stone Temple’s Eric Enge Discuss
Code to text signal
This one is not a direct ranking factor, but it can still impact the performance of the page, including ranking factors like loading speeds, along with user experience. So not important for ranking, but still good to keep in check.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Mar. 27, 2018)
Meta descriptions
We know that having a strong meta description is a great SEO best practice to drive a higher CTR to your site, but Google hasn’t used it as a ranking signal since sometime between 1999 and the early 2000s.
Source: @JohnMu on Twitter
Manual action
Manual actions are those that manually adjust a website’s visibility in search results by demoting or removing a site or specific pages from Google Search. These are conducted by Google – and they’re a penalty, not a ranking factor.
Source: Manual Actions Report
Content length
SEO writers will swear up and down that you need at least 1,000 words or 2,000 words or whatever that magic number is in order to be ranked by Google. That’s not true.
Google doesn’t look at content length as a ranking factor, but you should have enough quality content to be competitive on any given keyword to rank well.
Source: johnmu on /r/bigseo
Domain age
The age of your domain can help with site authority overall (see below), but Google has confirmed that it is not currently a ranking factor.
Source: @JohnMu on Twitter
Domain authority
Google has repeatedly confirmed that domain authority is not a ranking factor, as any “site authority” score is created by a third-party tool.
Sites with higher domain authorities may correlate with improved SEO because some of the calculations may be close, but they’re correlative and nothing more. Really, this one is common sense.
Source: johnmu on r/SEO/
Domain name
Your domain name is important (“www.coolshoes.com” can absolutely drive clicks), but it is not a ranking factor and hasn’t been for a while.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours (Sept. 11, 2020)
First link priority
Google doesn’t care which link comes first. This isn’t the magic hack some people insist that it is. They care about the quality of the links. And remember, anchor text matters more than where the link is placed.
Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Feb. 20, 2018)
Recency of content
Is Google automatically prioritizing a brand-new article over one written last year? No.
That being said, the thoroughness and quality of the article matter. If you need to refresh to stay competitive, that can help your ranking.
Source: @JohnMu on Twitter
Types of links
Think that having a .gov or .edu at the end of your domain will make a difference? Maybe to users, but unfortunately not to Google. Not a ranking factor.
Source: @JohnMu on Twitter
Keyword density
This may have influenced ranking at one time, and though it’s a general best practice, it is not a ranking factor. And remember: keyword stuffing doesn’t do you any favor.
Source: What is The Ideal Keyword Density of a Page?
‘We have no idea’ if these are legitimate ranking factors (or not)
Looking for a potential ranking factor that we haven’t discussed so far? There are a few that are still currently up in the air, with evidence that they may be a ranking factor but nothing to confirm that they actually are.
Authorship of your content
Does a specific author’s byline impact how Google will rank your page? Honestly, we’re not sure, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to use reliable authors who your audience will trust.
Google has recommended adding author information into article schema and we suspect that authorship expertise does play a part in E-A-T. But again, it’s inconclusive at this time. (Note that we’re speaking about “authorship” more broadly here than referring specifically to Google’s old Authorship.)
Source: 14 ways Google may evaluate E-A-T
HTML lists
Orders or unordered HTML lists could be a ranking factor, but we really don’t know. If it is, it’s not a particularly strong signal, but it can help with SEO, especially if it can help you snag a featured snippet spot.
Source: How to get Google featured snippets: 9 optimization guidelines
MUM
The Multitask Unified Model (MUM) was rolled out in 2021 to help the algorithms better understand language so Google can more effectively answer complex search queries. It’s not a known ranking factor right now, but it could be in the future, especially since Google has discussed how it’s improved some search results in early tests.
Source: Using AI to Keep Google Search Safe
Text formatting
Using HTML elements to format text can help both readers and Google’s crawling tools quickly find important parts of your content. There’s evidence that bolded or italicized wording, for example, may receive extra weight in importance. Since it can help you tell Google what you want it to notice on the page, it may impact ranking, but the jury is still out here.
Source: @JohnMu on Twitter
Conclusion
There you have it – an expansive list of all the known, confirmed and refuted Google ranking factors, along with everything in between to keep us guessing.
And that’s just the point. This list will change in the future. That’s probably the only thing we can guarantee at the end of the day.
Because while the SEO rumor mill has speculated on what exactly Google’s “200 ranking factors” for nearly two decades, the truth is probably a lot murkier than that.
As Google continues to employ AI, machine learning, and other advanced technologies to slice and dice data, the true “ranking factors” that will move the needle for marketers tomorrow aren’t likely to be the same old static ones we used to rely on yesterday.
The post Google ranking signals: A complete breakdown of all confirmed, rumored and false factors appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, January 17th, 2023
Google Speed Update: New ranking algorithm designed for mobile search
In 2018, Google announced the “Speed Update” – a new ranking algorithm designed for mobile search – would go live later in the year.
The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.
Google’s Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan, Using page speed in mobile search ranking
In 2010, Google said page speed was a ranking factor only on desktop searches. Google promised to look at mobile page speed for years before this announcement.
Starting in July 2018, Google said it would be looking at how fast mobile pages are and use that as a ranking factor in mobile search.
Read all about it in: The Google Speed Update: Page speed will become a ranking factor in mobile search.
Google also answered several questions for Search Engine Land, which we published in: FAQs on new Google Speed Update: AMP pages, Search Console notifications & desktop only pages.
Also on this day
2022: The report offered metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, to quickly evaluate performance and see what improvements were needed for specific pages.
2020: DuckDuckGo, anyone? The new search engine would serve results powered by Bing and run contextual ads rather than behaviorally targeted ads that rely on cookies.
2019: The aggregate link data, using 27,000 queries, showed a strong correlation between links and ranking.
2019: The extended partnership would make all Yahoo search inventory available through the Bing Ads platform. Bing Ads would continue to serve all AOL search inventory.
2019: These 11 tips were largely established best practices – a good refresher, rather than new approaches.
2018: The study suggested there are about 40 million devices in US homes.
2017: Making calls, searching, texting and map lookups were the most common use cases for voice.
2014: Google said it pulled more than 350 million bad ads from its systems.
2014: 1-800-Flowers saw the overall conversion contribution from AdWords rise 7% when counting orders that started on one device and ended on another.
2014: The emails got a similarly clean look-and-feel to the card-style layout that had become prevalent in Google search results, Google Now, on Google’s mobile apps and elsewhere.
2014: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
2013: This included Facebook status updates, comments and shared links in addition to the Facebook content already present (Likes, photos, etc.).
2013: Paid search as a whole had a good holiday season, Adobe found, with spend by online retailers up 16% year-over-year.
2013: The ideal candidate: someone who combined a love for language, wordplay, and conversation with demonstrated experience in bringing creative content to life within an intense technical environment.
2013: They were not the first company to suggest you Google something to click on the first result. But they seemed to be the first to send out personalized messages in this fashion.
2012: Previously, impression share metrics were available only at the campaign level, which didn’t help when advertisers were trying to determine which particular ad group should be allocated more budget.
2012: While Google wouldn’t go dark, Google did link to anti-SOPA information on its homepage.
2012: Yang, who co-founded the company in March 1995, officially stepped down from its Board of Directors and all other positions with the company.
2011: Google began showing links to different video sites and search engines in its search results. The links appeared next to YouTube videos, but only on music-related searches.
2011: Microsoft’s use of its popular portal MSN as a traffic driver for Bing was compromising some of MSN’s partner relationships, angering internal sales staff and even costing the company revenue.
2011: The Spanish data protection authority demanded that Google remove links to articles online (e.g., newspaper articles) that contain defamatory content.
2011: Seznam called the news “misleading” and said they were based on “a rather unobjective interpretation of Toplist statistics.”
2011: Google had a special Doodle on Google.com for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
2009: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met with Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock, restarting speculation about the on-again, off-again merger/deal talks.
2008: Americans viewed nearly 9.5 billion online videos during the month and Google was the leading destination, with 3 billion videos viewed (31.3% share of all videos viewed), 2.9 billion of which were on YouTube (30.6%).
2008: Yahoo’s 248 million registered users became part of the Open ID system.
2008: The Flickr community was asked to tag photos to help users search for those pictures and give the Library of Congress a more complete and comprehensive method of organizing those photos.
2008: $25 million in new grants and investments to initial partners.
2008: It collected candidate videos as well as commentary and news footage.
2007: Gabe talked about the service, how it had grown, how it operates and future plans.
2007: A rundown on a few linkbait articles and the “to linkbait” or “to link bait” decision we had to make.
2007: Running anything in an ad unit that resembled the AdSense ad unit appearing anywhere on the same site became against the terms.
2007: New Google Checkout customers got $10 from Google to spend at Google Checkout merchants.
2007: From not buying Google, to Panama and more.
2007: It was a bug. Yahoo fixed the issue about a week later.
2007: Yahoo allowed users to vote for their favorite questions by adding a star next to interesting or high-quality questions.
2007: Peter Horan was the About.com CEO until its acquisition by the New York Times. and then headed up small business portal AllBusiness.com
2007: It was built using Google’s Custom Search Engine to find interesting and useful mashups.
2007: It combined aspects of computer automation with community and social commentary and ranking systems to create “box sets” of web-based content for specific topics.
2007: A look at the top stories, along with tips, takeaways and suggestions.
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< January 16 | Search Marketing History | January 18 >
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Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, January 16th, 2023
Top Story
In 2017, Google’s Gary Illyes explained what crawl budget is, how crawl rate limits work, what crawl demand is and what factors impact a site’s crawl budget.
As Illyes explained, most sites don’t need to worry about crawl budget.
“Prioritizing what to crawl, when, and how much resource the server hosting the site can allocate to crawling is more important for bigger sites, or those that auto-generate pages based on URL parameters,” Illyes said.
More from Illyes:
- Crawl rate limit is designed to help Google not crawl your pages too much and too fast where it hurts your server.
- Crawl demand is how much Google wants to crawl your pages. This is based on how popular your pages are and how stale the content is in the Google index.
- Crawl budget is “taking crawl rate and crawl demand together.” Google defines crawl budget as “the number of URLs Googlebot can and wants to crawl.”
Read all about it in Google explains what “crawl budget” means for webmasters.
Also on this day
2022: This impacted Google Ads that were served in Gmail for users accessing their email using the Safari desktop browser.
2020: Google confirmed: “the update is mostly done…”
2020: Some users may have seen a spike in unparsable structured data errors due to an internal Google misconfiguration.
2019: The tool added the ability to see a specific URL’s HTTP response code, the page resources, the JavaScript logs and a rendered screenshot.
2019: Page feeds eliminated the need to create targets for specific URLs or groups of URLs in DSA campaigns, making it easier to set up and manage.
2019: A law passed in 2018 mandated that search engine results be filtered through the federal state information system (FGIS).
2018: Jurado was drawn in a powerful pose against a backdrop inspired by the film “High Noon.”
2017: Google was embedding playable YouTube videos for certain queries.
2017: The Doodle, by guest artist Keith Mallett, captured one of the major themes of King’s speeches and writing: “All life is interrelated.”
2015: Google was sticking with the figure it gave in 2012 but stressed it’s “over” that amount. How much? Google wouldn’t say.
2015: The figure was important because it meant searchers often didn’t need to leave Google to visit a publisher’s site.
2015: Searches for [Oscar nominee] and [Oscar nominations] on Google and Bing delivered results for the best picture candidates.
2014: Local SEOs and people familiar with Google+ Local theorized about on how this happened and shared suggestions o how to guard against future hijackings.
2014: The domain and keywords in that “domain send less and less” ranking signals to the overall Bing ranking algorithm.
2014: Paid search spend among RKG’s retail-heavy client set rose 23 percent year-over-year. Overall click volume increased 19 percent, and CPCs ticked up just 3 percent.
2014: Based on results from their high tech, consumer electronics and retail clients, PPC spending increased 17% year-over-year and 13% over Q3 2013.
2014: The Google Now cards ran through the latest Google Chrome build (Chrome Canary). Users had to be logged into Chrome.
2014: The logo included illustrations of the Silverback gorillas Fossey studied during her time in Rwanda, along with a picture of the Rwanda mountains where Fossey set camp for most of her 18 years with the gorillas.
2013: The non-brand ROI for Google was 22% higher than that for Bing.
2013: The interactive Doodle allows searchers to play the Zamboni game by cleaning the ice after it is being used by children, hockey players and ice dancers.
2012: Google’s advice was to use a 503 HTTP status code to tell spiders that the website was temporarily unavilable.
2012: The Doodle included a couple lines from his famous speech.
2010: Actually … Google’s goal was to acquire one to two companies a month. Not necessarily just small real estate companies.
2009: if you want to find Twitter’s powerful, compelling material, you went to Twitter. Not to Yahoo. Not to Google, the king of search.
2009: From bCentral Keywords, to not purchasing Overture, and its failed attempts to buy Yahoo.
2009: The purpose of this designation was to allow Google to recommend an approved technology partner to AdWords resellers if those partners didn’t have the requisite scalable technology.
2009: Due to technology compatibility issues.
2009: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2009: Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from December 2008.
2008: Google responded to some of the most asked questions on the Sitemaps protocol and how Google supported it.
2008: When Google tried to turn college and business school students into search marketers.
2008: Microsoft became the exclusive third-party provider of display, contextual and video advertising for EDGAR Online and its global audience of more than 2 million unique visitors per month.
2008: Media executives at Yahoo were leaving one after another.
2008: “not affiliated with Yahoo!, Inc. the search engine company.”
2007: Previously, a search for an address would have yielded a choice among Google Maps, Yahoo and MapQuest.
2007: When Google had just a 47.3% search market share.
2007: Google added the ability to filter product search results from merchants using Google Checkout – and promoted the new feature within its main search results.
2007: It seemed like Google had moved beyond suggesting spelling corrections to automatically doing them for you.
2007: It worked in a similar manner to the Google define: function, though it tended to be more comprehensive.
2007: A look at the disappointing service along with a revisit to how it was different from Search Wikia.
2007: It offered an interesting model, creating financial incentives for publishers to show polls on their sites and a relatively inexpensive way for marketers to get quick user data.
2007: “33% strongly agree they ‘feel lost’ without their cell phone.”
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< January 15 | Search Marketing History | January 17 >
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Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Sunday, January 15th, 2023
Facebook Graph Search arrives
In 2013, Facebook announced a new experience that it called Graph Search.
Facebook Graph Search relied heavily on Likes and other connections to determine what to show as the most relevant search results for each user.
At launch, Facebook Graph Search only included people, photos, places and interests.
Facebook Graph Search wasn’t a traditional web search engine like Google or Bing. It was a new type of search – a social search engine. Although Facebook was already using Bing for web search results at that time.
Dig deeper:
Also on this day
2021: The courses cover the basics including an introduction to LinkedIn Ads, how to use LinkedIn ad targeting, and reporting and analytics for LinkedIn ads.
2019: Advertisers could opt into automated bidding and tailor bids for the search ads by page placement.
2019: The directive sought to “harmonize” copyright law across Europe.
2019: The company had been using OpenStreetMap.
2018: “Pages that include matching images” section was not showing image thumbnails as it should.
2018: The image was designed by guest artist Cannaday Chapman and created in collaboration with the Black Googlers Network.
2016: In addition to recent searches, Google inserted a “What’s Hot” and “Nearby” option in the pull-down menu.
2016: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
Google began showing the social profile links for Pixar, Apple, Starbucks, Google and many more brands.
2015: Fifty four percent of respondents said search was the top way they found mobile content/websites
2015: Desktop’s influence, while still dominant, continued to wane
2015: Google had a new and improved Structured Data Testing tool, updated its documentation and guidelines, while adding more markup support.
2015: The feature would be eliminated on Feb. 11.
2015: Google asked: “What would you like to see from Google Websearch & Webmaster Tools in 2015?”
2015: Google made four updates to the events knowledge graph, after launching the markup back in March 2014.
2015: Google Maps App added cuisine type filters and more features for iOS and Android users.
2014: Google’s Matt Cutts answered this question: “Are results in different positions ranked by different algorithms?” Spoiler alert: The answer was no.
2014: The end of an era – this was Fishkin’s final day as CEO of Moz.
2014: While still representing the largest share, Experian reported search engines experienced a 13% drop in the amount of upstream traffic sent to retailers when comparing year-over-year traffic data.
2014: Google’s share of search queries was up 0.6 percent in December 2013, to 67.3 percent
2014: EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said Google needed to deliver additional, revised proposals within weeks to avoid a formal antitrust proceeding.
2014: What we do know: they answered at least one question about how to mount art on a brick wall.
2013: That time when Matt Cutts blog started ranking for [sreppleasers] in Google.
2013: That growth trend was down just slightly from the 21% annual increase reported for 2011.
2013: That was significantly more than the 13% who began at health portals like WebMD, general information sites like Wikipedia (only 2%) and social networks (1%).
2013: The winner would earn a $30,000 college scholarship, a $50,000 technology grant for their school, and have his or her logo displayed on the Google homepage.
2013: And they called it … PowerListings+.
2011: 13% said they couldn’t find what they were looking for. The answers were there, the “signal” that people want to tune into. They were just surrounded by a lot of noise.
2010: ComScore’s search share figures from December 2009: Yahoo, 17.3%, Bing, 10.7%. (Google? It was at 65.7%.)
2010: Amazon said it would no longer pay referral fees to Associates who sent users via keyword bidding or other paid search on any other search engine or their extended search networks
2010: The launch followed a pilot phase that the company said allowed developers to monetize mobile apps, desktop clients, social search engines and similar applications.
2009: Bartz said her instinct or “gut” was not necessarily to sell, although she would need to immerse herself in the issues and economics to make a better determination.
2009: The cuts were expected to be “far less than the 15,000 positions” first thought.
2009: The Wikipedia SearchMonkey App was turned on by default for all Yahoo search users, which made it the sixth app that all Yahoo searchers would see (with LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch and Zagat).
2009: TweetNews was a new search engine that used hot Twitter topics to bring more relevance and freshness to news search.
2008: Google Directory scores were much higher than those shown on the Google Toolbar.
2008: Microsoft teamed up with MediaCart to offer in-store behavioral ad targeting and took the concept of “location-based services” to the store aisles using RFID tags.
2008: How candidates, campaign staffers and other third parties were using Google Maps and the Maps API to showcase their messages and organize political volunteers and activists in upcoming primaries.
2008: Among the bidders: Google, AT&T, Verizon and MetroPCS.
2007: Among the findings: search marketers needed to be more concerned about getting into the top five rather than the top ten, if they wanted to be seen.
2007: More searchers were seeing a series of eight suggested searches as links, under the heading of “Searches related to:” followed by the original word you searched for.
2007: “It’s tiring to hear the Microsoft leadership just rip at Google rather than deliver successes that speak for themselves.”
2007: How the various search engines were trying to get users to make them their default choice.
2007: Graywolf’s blog was hacked, then Stuntdubl went down.
2007: “It’s your worst nightmare – someone reads parts of your Google emails, views your docs, modifies your spreadsheets, checks out your reading habits on the Google personalized homepage or Google Reader, and goes through your search history.”
2007: While 98% of Google employee money went to Democrats in the last election, the company-controlled Google NetPAC gave 61% of its contributions to conservative candidates.
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< January 14 | Search Marketing History | January 16 >
The post This day in search marketing history: January 15 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Sunday, January 15th, 2023
R.I.P. AMP
In 2022, we revealed what happened when Search Engine Land shut off AMP.
TL;DR: “We have seen very little disruption to our traffic and have reaped the benefit of having a clearer picture of our audience analytics.”
We didn’t see any year-over-year declines in traffic that we could tie to AMP aside from the loss of pageviews to a handful of pieces that routinely spike for organic traffic.
Why did Search Engine Land shut off AMP? As we explained in We’re turning off AMP pages at Search Engine Land, it was due to competition in Top Stories (after AMP was no longer required for inclusion in Top Stories) and waning support by social media platforms.
Read all about it in What happened when we turned off AMP.
Also on this day
2022: It was a widespread issue, not a Google bug, related to a chat feature in Shopify that had this unintended consequence in search.
2020: You could see the projected impact of making bid or budget changes in your campaigns that used these smart bidding strategies.
2020: Pointy had solved a problem that vexed startups for more than a decade: how to bring small, independent retailer inventory online.
2019: Google removed the ability to leave comments on Google Webmaster blog because “most of the time they were off-topic or even outright spammy.”
2016: Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president of search, did almost all of his searches for more than a year on mobile devices.
2016: The new features: more competitive insights and benchmarking, customizable ad group and keyword bids, a new source for keyword suggestions and time range customization up to 24 months for keyword search volume.
2016: “It felt like the right time to freshen things up,” said Microsoft spokesperson.
2016: Google documented the attraction with tiny Street View cars as though it were a real place.
2015: In the past, if your images were hosted off your website’s domain, it was very unlikely Google would crawl them for Google News.
2015: Return on investment rose as revenue outpaced the rise in spending.
2015: You could track, over time, what Google Now Cards Google showed you each day.
2015: The update brought both camera and conversation mode translation to the iOS app for the first time, as well as vast improvements to those features on the Android version of the app.
2015: Historically, Google had never allowed for random people to come and visit or tour the offices.
2014: Thousands of hotels listed within Google+ Local appeared to have had links leading to their official sites “hijacked” and replaced with ones leading to third-party booking services.
2014: The feature wasn’t new. You just no longer had to dig into the “advanced image search” features to get them.
2014: Two video parodies make fun of what a Google would be if it was a real guy.
2014: A pop-up alert appeared on a Yelp business profile page and warned consumers that a Yelp sting operation had caught the company trying to acquire reviews by buying them, offering gifts or discounts, or some other way that Yelp doesn’t allow.
2013: Prior to this update, The Wayback Machine provided access to about 150 billion URLs.
2013: Kohn joined us as our Special Projects Correspondent. Marvin joined as a Contributing Writer, focusing primarily on paid advertising topics (she would go on to become Editor-in-Chief from October 2018 to December 2020).
2012: Founder Gabriel Weinberg has been taking feedback and tweaking the design for at least three-plus weeks in the site’s community forum, where he announced the new look and layout.
2011: After six years at the helm of Google Maps, Hanke said he was “restless” and was a bit tired of running a large organization.
2011: Google hit 66.6% – a record high for Google in comScore’s numbers – while AOL hit a historic low of 1.9%.
2011: In the new format, the headline was combined with the first description line, or the two description lines were combined.
2011: Police examined the data that Google collected between October 2009 and May 2010 and determined that it broke two South Korean laws.
2011: Both ads played on the Bing “decision engine” idea by having aspiring actors explain why they decided to get into acting, followed by a message that “pre-congratulates the Golden Globe winners of tomorrow.”
2011: “Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.”
2010: Query suggestions varied based on user location.
2010: Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com all saw their search share drop from November to December.
2010: Another warning.
2010: Businesses could use their Place Pages to promote time-sensitive (real-time) events – as long as they could find the feature.
2010: As the new Senior Vice President of the Yahoo Search Products team, Seth would manage Yahoo’s Search team and all things related to Yahoo Search.
2010: China’s government suggested it likely wasn’t going to allow Google to operate unfiltered or negotiate with the search engine.
2010: Network Distribution allowed advertisers to select if they wanted to advertise on Yahoo’s entire network or just on either the Yahoo Search network or Yahoo Search Partner network.
2010: The massive number of new tweets coming in was to blame. The search index behind Twitter Search couldn’t hold it all.
2010: Would the entire GoogleHack episode develop into a major reversal for the growth of cloud computing? (Spoiler alert: No.)
2010: The major search engines responded by linking information about disaster relief efforts from their homepages.
2009: New links appeared at the bottom of the ad’s info window: Get Directions, Street View, and/or Save to My Maps.
2009: It used web traffic, log files and other methods to find new or modified URLs.
2009: Google ceased developing a variety of products as part of a continuing move to keep efforts focused on products with greater usage
2009: The program was aimed at developers, hosting companies and others to take on the responsibility of billing, support and training, in exchange for a 20% discount on the services.
2009: Blame the failure on the economic conditions.
2009: A complaint sought to preempt the development of behavioral targeting and profiling in mobile advertising.
2009: The ads were either are false or failed to make legally required disclosures.
2009: Yahoo matched the advertiser’s ads by the contextual relevancy of the page’s content to the keywords the advertisers purchased.
2009: Google implied the cuts would be due to the engineers not being willing or able to relocate to Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
2008: The article generated some serious spam issues for Wired, generated discord within the search marketing community, and injured the search marketing industry in general.
2008: Google CEO Eric Schmidt was a member of the Apple board and was on stage for the iPhone’s introduction.
2008: The 14 million shares came out to about $339.5 million, but gave Liberty Media Corporation about a 30 percent stake in the parent company of Ask.com.
2008: The ban seemed to have caused their stock price to drop 45% in one day.
2008: University of Brighton professor said using Google and Wikipedia doesn’t encourage students to use their “own brains” enough
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< January 13 | Search Marketing History | January 15 >
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Friday, January 13th, 2023
When Google announced the helpful content update, many in the SEO industry expected AI-generated content to get hit hard.
I was expecting AI-generated content to get wiped out by this supposedly sweeping update, comparable to 2011’s Panda algorithm update. Yet, no major impact was recorded.
Soon after, Google released the October 2022 spam update and that’s when we saw websites using AI content affected, although not as dramatically.
What happened? Let me take a few steps back.
Another vicious Panda attack?
Back in 2011, content farms were a serious problem. Many companies like Demand Media made a fortune by mass-producing low-quality articles.
They created thin content stuffed with all kinds of keyword variations taken from keyword research tools and generated similar articles for each slightly differing version of a popular search query.
Underpaid and often outsourced workers from overseas wrote about topics they had no idea about, often creating gibberish.
Panda was a significant algorithm update that even legitimate blogs were affected. How do I know? My own popular SEO blog also got penalized. I lost most of my major top 10 rankings for phrases like [url seo], [image seo] or [advanced seo] overnight, and haven’t been able to recover them ever since.
Google was under increasing pressure to deal with content farms, especially as the search engine’s then-contender, the now-defunct Blekko, promoted itself as a content farm-free alternative to Google.
Welcome to the future (of search)
We’re living in 2023 and there are still no proper flying cars and jetpacks. What we do have are breakthroughs in automation, particularly for the manufacturing and services sectors.
On the web, it’s even more obvious. Automation helps us every day with a plethora of repetitive tasks and beyond.
The work we do has changed a lot in recent years. Boring and tedious tasks are being replaced by the creative industries. Many even play for a living by being professional skateboarders or gamers, making money as content creators and influencers.
When it comes to SEO, a lot of tasks can get automated, but the results vary. The overall focus of modern SEO is on human-to-human engagement – think of audience building and outreach.
My content creator bias
As a writer, I’ve become increasingly anxious in recent years due to the rise of AI. My fear stemmed not from an imagined Terminator-like apocalypse (even though that might still happen), but more from AI’s potential impact on my own line of work.
Would AI content soon replace actual writers like myself? We don’t know yet. It hasn’t happened as of now. What we do know, though, is that some bloggers use AI content tools to create content themselves.
Saying that AI might replace writers is like saying that typewriters or computers will replace writers. Can a tool replace the person who uses the tool? Maybe for menial tasks. But is writing a menial task?
In a way, I am already using AI just by writing this article. Google Docs offers suggestions to fix my grammar – although not as many as Grammarly (which was too invasive for me) but more than what Microsoft Word provided in the past.
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A look at automation in SEO
In SEO, there are many ways to automate repetitive tasks and streamline workflows using various tools.
Keyword research
No single person can compile and assess the data for proper keyword research. Even if you do not use AI or conventional keyword research tools, you at least use Google to check those keywords “manually,” while Google uses advanced algorithms, AI and all types of automation to access keyword databases.
There is indeed unethical or questionable keyword research automation, which involves crawling large numbers of Google results without authorization and causing heavy load on their servers.
That said, this is only relevant for large-scale technical SEOs, as most mere mortals will resort to common keyword research tools that might already include AI input.
Auditing websites
You can get a fully automated website audit from many SEO tools. Even though they can’t match the expertise of an SEO consultant, some are very helpful and often free.
Tools like Semrush, WooRank or HubSpot offer website auditing to inform your SEO strategy. Do not shy away from using them whenever they are helpful.
The only drawback is that some tools may cause a heavy load on a website as they crawl it in its entirety by requesting and parsing hundreds or thousands of pages, at once or in quick succession. I’m not aware of AI tools used to audit website issues but they would make sense for this use case.
Checking links (both internal and external)
Checking internal links or external links from sites that link to you and sites you link to is a classic way of using SEO tools long before AI was sophisticated enough to help with SEO tasks. Internal links can break or simply divert website authority to orphan pages or less important resources.
A well-optimized website has a structure that allows the overall authority to flow freely. AI tools could easily find and track links in ways that go beyond “push button” or “cron job” types of checks. As always, it’s important not to cause too much load on other websites.
Checking rankings
Checking rankings is similar to checking links, but with a twist. Google search results must be crawled using automated tools, which is against their terms of use. If you use ranking checkers from your local computer, your IP might get blocked by Google.
Thus, this is quite risky and should only be an option when you have nothing to lose or you’re advanced technology that either balances the usage of Google resources or obfuscates your tracks to cover up where the load comes from.
I know that some SEO tool providers have access to large server farms to fool Google into believing that legit human users are accessing their services. AI could help to alleviate the issue by causing less load or by hiding the activity better.
What about automated content?
Automating content creation is not an ideal use case. AI tools do not have the firsthand experience Google requires and is expected by readers. They merely rewrite existing knowledge using their “own” words.
In the past, lots of spammers have tried to trick Google into believing that they have content-rich sites by spinning articles and rewriting them with synonyms. Google has long since filtered this from the SERPs.
The new generation of content automation tools run by AI
Many AI content tools proliferate in the market. They have well-designed websites, and some even quote SEO experts who recommend them.
I just searched the web for AI content and found lots of services offering it. Some of these tools are.
Proof Content
Proof Content promotes itself with the slogan, “Data-driven content for brands with something to say,” and claims their AI content is “automated,” “tailored,” and “speedy.”
They use “human editors” so content is not 100% automated. One of their results examples highlights success by an “increase of 127% SEO traffic growth YOY.”
Frase
Frase emphasizes speed even more while still promising improved quality, “Better content, faster.”
They also clearly talk to SEO-driven marketers by declaring they can “create SEO content fast with AI,” adding that “going from keyword to SEO-optimized article has never been easier.”
GrowthBar
The GrowthBar AI content generator is even called growthbarseo.com in the domain name so there is no doubt that it is made to create SEO content. It also says so in its value proposition: “Make SEO … content that Google loves with AI”. It also incorporates a keyword research tool and a Chrome extension.
There is no ambiguity when it comes to the most important use case of these tools – content creation for SEO purposes.
What do the quoted experts say?
Brandan Hufford is quoted on the Frase page as saying:
- “I’ve spent a great deal of time comparing tools to get the most out of what I write, and Frase feels like you’re using content marketing cheat codes.”
Kevin Indig is cited on the same page:
- “Frase feels like a next-gen content tool that’s not just exciting for SEOs, but for writers as well. In my mind, that’s more important to create successful content.”
Thomas Melching encourages the use of GrowthBar with the following:
- “Make SEO-perfect content in one click, generate meta descriptions with AI, and keyword research. GrowthBar is game-changing and it has a free trial.”
Mark Sandusky praises GrowthBar, saying:
- “GrowthBar has helped us break into new SEO categories and write content faster. I use the Content Generator almost daily.”
Can they all be wrong? As they also do not hide their usage of AI content tools they are apparently not afraid of their projects being penalized as spam or thin content.
So, is AI content helpful or spam?
Can we clearly say whether AI content is helpful or spam? Well, we can’t. It depends.
In my opinion, AI content can be both helpful and spam.
The motivation and the effort invested in it are some factors to consider. If you invest zero effort and let the AI do 100% of the work, the risk of getting low-level content farm drivel is high.
It really depends on quality over quantity.
One thing is for sure, churning mass-produced, low-quality content makes all your content less than stellar. It doesn’t matter whether you use AI or inexperienced writers to inflate your website disproportionately, the outcome is the same.
Less is more when it comes to content production. Regular publishing is fine as long as it’s not flooding.
WordLift has an in-depth overview of how “generative AI” can work for SEO content purposes and beyond.
Image credit: WordLift
As of now, it mostly works well for easy content-related tasks (green) like:
- FAQ generation.
- Product descriptions.
- Summarization.
- Introductory text.
Human intervention
The key to making AI work in content creation is to double down on quality.
Implement quality control and ensure editorial content involves actual human editors. Do not let AI write and decide by itself. People must stay in charge.
This is also the feedback I got from SEOs using AI for content creation. Their content is never completely automated and there are quality checks to ensure compliance with Google’s standards.
Google Search Advocate John Mueller has been pretty clear about AI content being “still” against Google’s webmaster guidelines in April 2022.
Using AI ethically in SEO
The question of whether AI content is helpful or becomes spam essentially boils down to the ethics behind it. What is the purpose of the automation process?
Do you want to flood Google with potentially useless content just to make money from ad or affiliate revenue? Well, guess what, you are likely to spam.
Do you want to get your hands free from the menial work of rephrasing the basics that AI can gobble up from the web automatically to make sure your contribution is akin to poetry and one of a kind that nonsentient AI can’t replicate? Bingo!
Can creativity get fully automated?
Only truly intelligent AI could actually create as a human being does. Otherwise, it’s merely combining “facts” from elsewhere.
Many science fiction works have dealt with the possibility of artificial intelligence becoming fully alive. Most of those are scary dystopian visions. Some aren’t.
There is a movie that is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes called “I, Robot” starring Will Smith. Based on a novel by Isaac Asimov, a respected science fiction writer, the film captures both the essence of humanity and true artificial intelligence pretty well. Asimov comes close to answering this question. (You can read the novel on Archive.org for free.)
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Thursday, January 12th, 2023
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a scorching hot topic lately, especially since the launch of ChatGPT Nov. 30. Microsoft Bing has plans to add ChatGPT to search. Some have questioned whether it’s a Google killer.
Now we’re seeing more examples of brands using AI-generated content. Bankrate is the latest example. It is having some of its content written by machines but reviewed by human editors.
It’s a bold strategy (let’s see if it pays off for them). And the SEO community wanted to know Google’s policies around these efforts.
Bankrate example. The example was highlighted by Tony Hill, who posted on Twitter that “BankRate.com, one of the largest finance sites on the web has now started using AI to write some of its content. A big moment in web publishing and SEO.”
The screenshot reads “this article was generated using automated technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.”
Wondering how Bankrate.com is ranking for these articles? Sistrix did an analysis to find out:
For Bankrate.com, this specific use-case and the current point in time, one can say: yes, it works.
Many , randomly-checked articles rank on the first page for both the main keyword and many other long-tail keywords
“How Bankrate.com is ranking with AI-generated text” – Johannes Beus, SISTRIX
Bankrate isn’t the only example of this. CreditCards.com is also using AI-generated content. The first line of the CreditCards.com Team author page says “Content published under this author byline is generated using automation technology.”
CNET has also quietly been using AI to write entire articles from the ground up since November.
Do a Google site search for [“This article was generated using automation technology”] will reveal dozens of CNET articles in Google’s index. CNET also assures readers that these articles have been “thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.”
The potential issue. If we can have machines and AI write content for us, then the amount of content that can be produced at incredibly low costs can be somewhat exciting for brands and businesses – more content for a minimal investment sounds like the stuff of dreams.
But, at the same time, mass-generated AI content can also frightening for consumers (what should you spend your time reading?) and search engines (what content should Google be ranking in search?).
So much content is being produced daily already; how much more can we consume, and how much more does Google need to crawl, index, and decide to rank for a given query?
Google’s statement on AI-generated content. Is Google OK with crawling and ranking content written by machines? If not, is Google OK if those AI-generated pieces of content are reviewed by human editors before they are published?
Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liason, reiterated some of what was said before about Google’s stance on this topic.
Sullivan wrote on Twitter this morning on the topic of AI-generated content, “content created primarily for search engine rankings, however it is done, is against our guidance.” But he added that “if content is helpful & created for people first, that’s not an issue.”
Sullivan then referenced their guidelines for the helpful content update, saying that the “key to being successful with our helpful content system — and if it’s not helpful content, the system catches that.”
If the AI can write helpful content, then it should be fine, one would assume.
Then Sullivan references the revised E-E-A-T quality raters guidelines, saying, “For anyone who uses *any method* to generate a lot content primarily for search rankings, our core systems look at many signals to reward content clearly demonstrating E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).”
Finally, Google has a spam policy for automated content, which states “generated through automated processes without regard for quality or user experience” which is against Google’s guidelines.
Why we care. We know machine-generated content is not new, but what is new, is that the machines are getting better with the help of AI, in generating human-like, high-quality content. The question is, is it being produced with the intent of helping people or ranking in Google Search. If it is the latter, the helpful content system’s aim is to make sure such content does not rank well.
For the time being, Google wants content by the people, for the people but you can use AI for ideas and help you along the way. If machines and AI can write the content, you’d think similar technology can detect content written by AI.
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