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What SEOs can learn about aligning with consensus as described in Google’s QRG

Written on August 15, 2022 at 11:51 am, by admin

When Google announced they were improving featured snippets using the power of MUM, some of the wording around aligning with consensus reminded me of things that are described in the search quality evaluator guidelines (a.k.a., the Quality Rater Guidelines, or QRG). 

While the QRG are not an exact blueprint of Google’s algorithms, they give us many clues as to what it is that Google is attempting to accomplish. Google recommends studying the rater guidelines:

“If you understand how raters learn to assess good content, that might help you improve your own content. In turn, you might perhaps do better in Search.” 

Google, “What site owners should know about Google’s core updates“

We have had good success in helping sites improve by assessing them like a quality rater would. I highly recommend you study them!

This article will discuss:

• What it means to align with consensus.
• What the QRG says about aligning with consensus.
• What Google’s expanding content advisories could mean for sites writing on fringe or alternative topics.
• Google’s new content advisories for information gaps or low quality sites.
• Why understanding the concept of E-A-T is incredibly important.

What does it mean to align with consensus?

In Google’s blog post, they tell us they are introducing changes to what they call, “featured snippet callouts.” This is the part of the featured snippet that is bolded and in a larger font – essentially the answer to the searcher’s question.

In the example given, if a searcher asks. “how long does it take for light from the sun to reach earth”, the featured snippet callout would be “8 and 1/3 minutes.”

Google search for [how long does it take for light from the sun to reach earth]

They tell us that these callouts will be checked “against other high-quality sources on the web, to see if there’s a general consensus for that callout, even if sources use different words or concepts to describe the same thing.”

At the time of writing this article, if you do this search, there is not yet a featured snippet with a callout, but you can clearly see that there is consensus from the top ranking sites on this answer.

Even though the results use slightly different wording – 499 seconds is the same as 8 1/3 minutes for example – there is a general consensus that this is a true fact. Google can likely feel comfortable that this answer is correct and therefore can feel confident in displaying it as a featured snippet callout.

Google says they’ve “found that this consensus-based technique has meaningfully improved the quality and helpfulness of featured snippets.”

With this change, aligning with general consensus (i.e. what the majority of high-quality sources say) is likely very important when it comes to winning featured snippet rankings, especially for “know-simple” queries where the searcher is looking for a specific concise answer.

If your content contradicts what the authoritative sites in your vertical say, Google will probably hesitate to show your answer as a featured snippet callout. 

Google is not saying that aligning with general consensus is a ranking factor at this point beyond being considered for featured snippet callouts. Given that there is a lot of information in the QRG to instruct the raters to assess whether content contradicts consensus, I think it’s reasonable to assume that for YMYL topics, aligning with consensus is important.

Whenever the topic of consensus comes up in SEO circles, it causes controversy.

Just because a bunch of people agree on something, does that make it factual?

It’s important to note it’s not just any site on the web that Google is looking at to determine whether there is consensus about an answer. They’re not looking for the most popular answer on the web. Rather, they say they are looking for consensus from “multiple high quality sources on the web”. (Google’s blog post on what site owners should know about core updates tells us a bit more about what they consider to be a high quality website.

Does this mean that any article that contradicts the viewpoint of highly ranking sites for a YMYL topic has no chance of ever being ranked by Google? I think Google possibly has a solution for this, which I will discuss shortly. 

What the QRG says about aligning with consensus

When the raters are taught to assess content, in several places of the QRG they are told to determine whether the content on the page aligns with expert consensus. This wording has been in the QRG for some time.

For YMYL topics, Google tells the raters it is a sign of high quality when content aligns with expert consensus and low quality if it does not.

In order for the raters to consider content high quality, it must be “factually accurate for the topic and must be supported by expert consensus where such consensus exists.”

In order for news articles or information pages on scientific topics to be considered high quality by a rater, they need to “represent established scientific consensus where such consensus exists.”

Again, for YMYL topics the raters are told to assess whether the page aligns with medical, scientific or even historical consensus.

In the most recent update to the QRG, Google stressed in several places that YMYL content should be assessed in terms of whether the topic, or misinformation on the topic has the potential to cause harm. “Health related advice that contradicts well-established expert consensus and could result in serious harm” is to be given the “lowest” rating by raters.

Aligning with expert consensus is important for sites that want to rank on Google with content covering YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics. 

Examples of sites that do not align with consensus

The QRG gives us several examples of content that raters should assess as low quality because they do not align with expert or scientific consensus. Here are a few.

1. A site promoting “proana” or “pro-anorexia” as a lifestyle choice

(Image of the site)

This site promotes anorexia as a lifestyle choice, which contradicts the recommendation of most doctors. Anorexia is viewed by doctors as an eating disorder and considered a mental illness.

If you read the content on the site, some of it is not bad. There is some relatively decent weight loss advice combined with the potentially harmful recommendation to drastically reduce calories eaten in a day. 

What do “high quality sites” have to say on this topic? No matter which search I did, the top ranking site exclaimed that proana was unsafe.

Google is unlikely to rank this page because it has advice that contradicts medical consensus and also has the potential to cause serious harm.

2. A page about the stomach flu

(image of the site)

There are a few reasons why raters are told to assess this page as “lowest” quality. It is an article giving medical advice, but there is no evidence of medical E-A-T.

The raters are not told exactly which parts of this article contradict expert consensus and to be honest, most of the advice in this article does seem to be in line with what experts recommend. The only fault I could find is that the content recommends not eating where the Mayo Clinic recommends a patient with the flu does try to eat certain easy to digest foods.

Google search [should you eat if you have the stomach flu]

I think the main concern with this content is that it is giving medical advice despite lacking medical E-A-T. Still, it is interesting to see that the raters are told it contradicts scientific consensus.

3. The Flat Earth society

(image of the site)

This is an interesting one. The site has content that contradicts the general scientific consensus that the earth is round.

Google is confident here:

While you and I likely agree that the idea of the earth being flat is just silly, there are many people who truly believe that it is. But Google does not want to show searchers this information as it clearly contradicts scientific consensus.

Should they though? 

What if people are clearly searching for information that is contrary to consensus?

There is a line in the QRG that says that for medical or scientific pages to be rated as meeting a searcher’s needs, the content “must represent well-established scientific/medical consensus unless the user is clearly seeking an alternative viewpoint.” (Bolding added by me.)

What bothers me is that this is not yet the case for many queries in Google search.

Based on reading the example above, I did some searches for [is the earth flat]. I was curious to read the viewpoint of people who hold this belief – I wanted to understand why they believe this and to hear it from their perspective.

I tried several searches – [explanation of why the earth is flat], [why the earth is flat – flat earther’s viewpoint], or [evidence supporting the earth being flat]. These articles clearly exist. People like to write about their theories!

But even though I was clearly seeking an alternative viewpoint, Google only surfaced articles that were telling me why the earth was not flat and how everyone who says so is wrong. My intent as a searcher actually was to read information that contradicts scientific consensus. 

Who is Google to decide that I cannot search for and find alternative viewpoints on the web? Is Google acting like an overprotective mom deciding which content is safe for me to read?

I think it is possible that Google’s “expanding content advisories for information gaps” described in their announcement could be the first step in addressing this issue.

Content advisories for information gaps

Google already shows content advisories where news about a breaking story is unfolding quickly on the web. They may show searchers a message saying, “It looks like these results are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take some time for results to be added by reliable sources.” 

In Google’s recent blog post they tell us they are expanding this advisory beyond breaking news stories.

In the example Google gives, the search was [how to get in touch with the Illuminati]. I did this search and did indeed get one of these warnings:

While there was a historical group called the illuminati, today when they are mentioned general consensus is that much of the information discussed falls under the category of unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.

Again, though, is it Google’s responsibility to protect me from misleading or potentially harmful information on the web? What if I legitimately was doing research and wanted to read information supporting this conspiracy theory? 

Following the warning that Google may not have reliable information on this topic, they actually do display some sites I could read to explore this topic further.

I believe, although it remains to be seen, that this advisory warning is Google’s answer when it comes to people who are clearly wanting to see results from a viewpoint that contradicts consensus or is potentially unsafe. They can now present searchers with sites that present an alternative viewpoint, even if there is concern that the content could be misleading or harmful.

I could see this actually being good for many alternative medical websites! These content advisories may allow Google to display sites discussing medical treatments that are contrary to scientific consensus if it is clear that this is what the searcher is looking for.

Understanding E-A-T is incredibly important

I was thrilled to see Google emphasize in this blog post the importance of understanding the concept of E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness). 

Google wants to show results from authentic sources.

They tell us in their recent blog post that they are expanding the “About this result” feature to help searchers understand more about the company whose website they are viewing.

This all sounds very much like E-A-T as described in the QRG.

The QRG is absolutely filled with information to help us understand what the concept of E-A-T means. Each time I read them I find more clues that can help us improve E-A-T.

This recently published Google document called Search Quality Rater Guidelines: An Overview gives a really good summary of how raters assess E-AT:

E-A-T is so much more than simply adding an author bio. For some content, an author bio may not even be necessary or even helpful! 

E-A-T includes having content that takes time, effort, expertise or talent/skill to create.

If you’re writing on topics where a searcher would expect to see an answer written by an expert, then yes, demonstrating the article was written by someone with expertise, or perhaps being known as a company with expertise in this area is important.

Having a reputation for knowing your topic is a big part of E-A-T.

Consensus: What SEOs can learn from Google

We spoke a lot in this article about the importance of aligning with consensus, especially if you write on YMYL topics. I’d like to reiterate that Google’s blog post was talking about using consensus amongst high quality sites as a component to help them produce better featured snippet callouts. 

They were not confirming that consensus is a ranking factor when it comes to ranking in organic search.

However, given there is huge emphasis on aligning with consensus in the QRG, I think it is reasonable to assume that if we want to have our YMYL content rank on Google, aligning with consensus is something we should strive for.

This is likely a component of trustworthiness, the T in E-A-T.

My advice:

• If most of your site aligns with general/expert consensus but some content is controversial, it may be helpful to have the controversial content separated into its own subdomain or folder. It might also be helpful to present both sides of the story in your writing and make it clear that the content on this page does not line up with what many experts believe. Or, a better option may be to remove the content that is controversial.
• If the majority of your site contains content that contradicts the consensus of high quality sites in your vertical, it is unlikely Google will rank your content unless it is preceded by the “content information gap” warning mentioned above. You may want to look at marketing more on social media, email marketing or some channel other than Google organic search.
• If you have content that is borderline — actually good science, but not yet widely accepted by all experts in your field as valid, I would recommend doing all you can to get the experts in your field talking about this subject. Good PR could help here. Also, ensure everything you write is backed by authoritative references and written by someone who has extensive expertise. As your topic becomes more mainstream, and experts start to align with your position, you may find you are able to rank better.
• If you’re not sure whether your viewpoint could be seen as contradicting consensus, do some searches to see what the top ranking sites say. For example, if you wrote on a controversial topic in the financial world, you could search for something like, “is [keyword] beneficial site:bloomberg.com” or “the harm of [keyword] site:wsj.com”. If your viewpoint differs, you need to really consider whether you want to publish this article. 
• Do all you can to demonstrate your E-A-T. Read the QRG, especially the examples, and thoroughly study Google’s questions they say to ask yourself in regards to content.

The post What SEOs can learn about aligning with consensus as described in Google’s QRG appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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3 ways the customer journey can guide SEO

Written on August 15, 2022 at 11:51 am, by admin

Understanding how your users engage with your brand is vital to delivering a great customer experience.  

This is why you shouldn’t overlook the customer journey. It allows you to shape your website’s user experience (UX) and content strategies based on the people who matter – your customers.

Let’s explore how the customer journey can help guide your SEO program.

Customer journey and SEO

A well-mapped customer journey can greatly benefit SEO. 

Because SEO is a broad discipline, it is easy to scatter your efforts. Some people get too immersed in perfecting one aspect – either technical, on-page or external. 

Putting a premium on the customer journey helps align your SEO program and focus your efforts on what’s valuable. 

Whether you look at the customer journey as a linear or multi-touch path, four-level funnel, or a flywheel, you must implement an overall strategy. 

Within that strategy and even tactical activities and plans benefits from aligning with the customer journey.

Here are a few areas where the customer journey can guide your SEO efforts.

1. Mapping keywords and topics to the journey

Are you struggling with an extensive keyword list? Do you want to optimize for all the terms that you know are relevant but find it challenging?

Using your customer journey maps, you can get your content right overall and leverage the clarity for SEO. 

For instance, the best time to educate prospects is when they’re still in the research and exploratory phase. 

When someone is just gaining awareness of your brand, you should aim to become their trusted resource. Help them understand their problem and identify possible solutions. Avoid the urge to sell.

This strategy often works for B2B, but it can play out even in ecommerce and B2C. 

Let’s say you’re selling groomsmen gifts. You can plan on creating a comprehensive guide for everything an engaged couple needs to know when planning for their wedding. 

Doing so will help you get found as a great resource – even before they realize they need specific groomsmen gifts.

Building awareness and brand affinity early in the journey will help customers keep engaging with you until they’re ready to buy.

At that initial awareness stage, take the terms that you know are not likely to convert but are important. Then, strategically plan your content and optimization so you can be found at this stage in the customer journey.

The same is true for terms where you know the intent is to convert. Terms that show purchase intent – like a search for a specific product’s part number or action-oriented lead generation terms (e.g., “dentist near me”) – are further in the customer journey. 

Mapping the right keywords to this stage is critical too. At this point, we want to get them close to a purchase, contact form or another way to engage with us.

Don’t bury the call to action. Avoid hitting them with thought leadership or general awareness content.

Based on your customer journey mapping, you will also find a lot of in-between queries and topics to tie your content to. Use your understanding of the journey to categorize keywords and topics and map them to the right content on your site.

Hopefully, by categorizing your keywords this way and looking at content needs through this lens, you can gain some refreshing focus and clarity for your content plans and investment.

2. Conversion rate optimization goals and objectives

So you’ve invested a lot of time in mapping keywords and topics to respective stages of the customer journey and developed the content to fill any gaps. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that everything will work perfectly as intended.

Regardless of how objective and specific you are, there will always be something to test, optimize, and build upon.

In some cases, you might find out new things about what the customer journey looks like.

In others, you’ll get the impressions and traffic you want but won’t see the user move to the next step you expect in the journey.

This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. 

Go back to your historical data and your projected data. 

• What percentage of users typically do what next? 
• What do you expect them to do?
• Do they return to the site three days later on a more specific page? 
• Do they usually visit certain pages or take specific actions?

Dig deeper. See what other keywords you could be optimizing for. 

Understand when they bounce back to Google and how they might refine searches. Leverage data from other channels.

Getting granular with Google Analytics, heat mapping and CRO tools, and your customer relationship management (CRM) platform will help. 

Leverage them to learn where the journey is accurate, whereas the UX or content needs improvement. Find areas where you can optimize the assumed or planned journey.

SEO elements must be incorporated here to include technical factors (site speed, Core Web Vitals, indexing), on-page, content strategy and calls to action.

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3. Measurement and attribution

I could have listed this first as it is woven through my look at how the customer journey and SEO converge. 

I assume you have a well-defined journey. However, as I noted above, using CRO and other ways to optimize the journey and website overall, you will need to measure what is happening to make informed decisions fully.

Are the keywords you’re focused on at each stage driving traffic to your intended pages? 

Are the users doing what you want them to do and going deeper in the journey?

You’ll find weaknesses in your analytics setup and how you look at SEO and overall web analytics when you put it to the test. That’s a good thing.

Find new ways to view and measure the customer journey. Also, align your measurement of SEO factors and performance against that journey. 

This will help you focus your efforts and not broadly bucket global stats like rankings, impressions, traffic, and conversions.

Getting this deep, you can see what you’re leaving on the table. Perhaps you’re focusing too heavily on awareness keywords (and not getting conversions). Or you might be fixated on just action/”convert now” terms without fostering “unaware” users through the journey.

Conclusion

Focus and objective guidance is essential for SEO. Any prioritization and alignment with web and broader strategies can help, whether you have extensive resources to invest or can only adopt a lean approach.

Through leveraging a mapped-out customer journey, you can define needs, strategies, tactics, and goals for content. At the same time, you can manage expectations and investments.

SEO should not be done on an island. It’s best implemented as part of the whole. Customer journey thinking brings you closer to the overall marketing plan and strategy. Leverage it as an opportunity.

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Webinar: The key to email marketing success

Written on August 13, 2022 at 5:46 am, by admin

Marketers are being asked to do more with available resources while still delivering against tough targets. Pivoting this from a no-win mission to a job-well-done scenario is a no-brainer. The simple solution? Entrusting your email marketing to a reliable and scalable platform.

During this webinar, you’ll learn how Hertz has tackled their ESP sprawl, grew its marketing team and scaled operations through consolidation efforts.

Register today for “Why Finding the Right Platform is the Key to Winning in Email Marketing,” presented by Salesforce.

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Google reporting issue with Search Console Discover report

Written on August 12, 2022 at 2:43 am, by admin

Google had a data logging error that impacted the Discover performance report in Google Search Console. This occurred on July 26, 2022 and may result in a drop in the number of clicks and impressions that Google logged.

This did not impact your rankings or visibility, it was just a reporting glitch.

The issue. Google wrote that on July 26 “due to a logging error, site owners might see a drop in their Discover clicks and impressions during this period. This is only a logging error, it is not a drop in actual views or clicks.”

Reporting issue only. Again, this did not impact your visibility in Google Discover, it is just an issue with reporting and data logging. So it may appear like you saw a drop in visibility but in reality, it was just an issue with Google’s reporting engine.

Here is a screenshot showing the annotation Google put on the report:

Fix coming? There does not appear to be a fix coming to replace the data, it seems like the data is gone and you will just have to annotate the date and move on.

Discover is hard. As a reminder, Google Discover traffic is super volatile, and thus, seeing massive spikes or massive declines in your Discover clicks and impressions is normal. So the loss of this data will be hard to backward engineer for any marketer or SEO.

Why we care. This is important for you to know and communicate to your clients, boss, stakeholders, etc when providing these reports to your client. So make sure to annotate the chart, which Google did for you, and then communicate these issues when presenting them to others.

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The 4 stages of search all SEOs need to know

Written on August 12, 2022 at 2:43 am, by admin

“What’s the difference between crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking?”

Lily Ray recently shared that she asks this question to prospective employees when hiring for the Amsive Digital SEO team. Google’s Danny Sullivan thinks it’s an excellent one.

As foundational as it may seem, it isn’t uncommon for some practitioners to confuse the basic stages of search and conflate the process entirely.

In this article, we’ll get a refresher on how search engines work and go over each stage of the process.   

Why knowing the difference matters

I recently worked as an expert witness on a trademark infringement case where the opposing witness got the stages of search wrong.

Two small companies declared they each had the right to use similar brand names.

The opposition party’s “expert” erroneously concluded that my client conducted improper or hostile SEO to outrank the plaintiff’s website. 

He also made several critical mistakes in describing Google’s processes in his expert report, where he asserted that:

• Indexing was web crawling.
• The search bots would instruct the search engine how to rank pages in search results. 
• The search bots could also be “trained” to index pages for certain keywords.

An essential defense in litigation is to attempt to exclude a testifying expert’s findings – which can happen if one can demonstrate to the court that they lack the basic qualifications necessary to be taken seriously.

As their expert was clearly not qualified to testify on SEO matters whatsoever, I presented his erroneous descriptions of Google’s process as evidence supporting the contention that he lacked proper qualifications. 

This might sound harsh, but this unqualified expert made many elementary and apparent mistakes in presenting information to the court. He falsely presented my client as somehow conducting unfair trade practices via SEO, while ignoring questionable behavior on the part of the plaintiff (who was blatantly using black hat SEO, whereas my client was not).

The opposing expert in my legal case is not alone in this misapprehension of the stages of search used by the leading search engines. 

There are prominent search marketers who have likewise conflated the stages of search engine processes leading to incorrect diagnoses of underperformance in the SERPs. 

I have heard some state, “I think Google has penalized us, so we can’t be in search results!” – when in fact they had missed a key setting on their web servers that made their site content inaccessible to Google. 

Automated penalizations might have been categorized as part of the ranking stage. In reality, these websites had issues in the crawling and rendering stages that made indexing and ranking problematic. 

When there are no notifications in the Google Search Console of a manual action, one should first focus on common issues in each of the four stages that determine how search works.

It’s not just semantics

Not everyone agreed with Ray and Sullivan’s emphasis on the importance of understanding the differences between crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking.

I noticed some practitioners consider such concerns to be mere semantics or unnecessary “gatekeeping” by elitist SEOs. 

To a degree, some SEO veterans may indeed have very loosely conflated the meanings of these terms. This can happen in all disciplines when those steeped in the knowledge are bandying jargon around with a shared understanding of what they are referring to. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. 

We also tend to anthropomorphize search engines and their processes because interpreting things by describing them as having familiar characteristics makes comprehension easier. There is nothing wrong with that either. 

But, this imprecision when talking about technical processes can be confusing and makes it more challenging for those trying to learn about the discipline of SEO. 

One can use the terms casually and imprecisely only to a degree or as shorthand in conversation. That said, it is always best to know and understand the precise definitions of the stages of search engine technology.

The 4 stages of search

Many different processes are involved in bringing the web’s content into your search results. In some ways, it can be a gross oversimplification to say there are only a handful of discrete stages to make it happen. 

Each of the four stages I cover here has several subprocesses that can occur within them. 

Even beyond that, there are significant processes that can be asynchronous to these, such as:

• Types of spam policing.
• Incorporation of elements into the Knowledge Graph and updating of knowledge panels with the information.
• Processing of optical character recognition in images.
• Audio-to-text processing in audio and video files.
• Assessing and application of PageSpeed data.
• And more.

What follows are the primary stages of search required for getting webpages to appear in the search results. 

Crawling

Crawling occurs when a search engine requests webpages from websites’ servers.

Imagine that Google and Microsoft Bing are sitting at a computer, typing in or clicking on a link to a webpage in their browser window. 

Thus, the search engines’ machines visit webpages similar to how you do. Each time the search engine visits a webpage, it collects a copy of that page and notes all the links found on that page. After the search engine collects that webpage, it will visit the next link in its list of links yet to be visited.

This is referred to as “crawling” or “spidering” which is apt since the web is metaphorically a giant, virtual web of interconnected links. 

The data-gathering programs used by search engines are called “spiders,” “bots” or “crawlers.” 

Google’s primary crawling program is “Googlebot” is, while Microsoft Bing has “Bingbot.” Each has other specialized bots for visiting ads (i.e., GoogleAdsBot and AdIdxBot), mobile pages and more. 

This stage of the search engines’ processing of webpages seems straightforward, but there is a lot of complexity in what goes on, just in this stage alone. 

Think about how many web server systems there can be, running different operating systems of different versions, along with varying content management systems (i.e., WordPress, Wix, Squarespace), and then each website’s unique customizations. 

Many issues can keep search engines’ crawlers from crawling pages, which is an excellent reason to study the details involved in this stage. 

First, the search engine must find a link to the page at some point before it can request the page and visit it. (Under certain configurations, the search engines have been known to suspect there could be other, undisclosed links, such as one step up in the link hierarchy at a subdirectory level or via some limited website internal search forms.) 

Search engines can discover webpages’ links through the following methods:

• When a website operator submits the link directly or discloses a sitemap to the search engine.
• When other websites link to the page. 
• Through links to the page from within its own website, assuming the website already has some pages indexed. 
• Social media posts.
• Links found in documents.
• URLs found in written text and not hyperlinked.
• Via the metadata of various kinds of files.
• And more.

In some instances, a website will instruct the search engines not to crawl one or more webpages through its robots.txt file, which is located at the base level of the domain and web server. 

Robots.txt files can contain multiple directives within them, instructing search engines that the website disallows crawling of specific pages, subdirectories or the entire website. 

Instructing search engines not to crawl a page or section of a website does not mean that those pages cannot appear in search results. Keeping them from being crawled in this way can severely impact their ability to rank well for their keywords.

In yet other cases, search engines can struggle to crawl a website if the site automatically blocks the bots. This can happen when the website’s systems have detected that:

• The bot is requesting more pages within a time period than a human could.
• The bot requests multiple pages simultaneously.
• A bot’s server IP address is geolocated within a zone that the website has been configured to exclude. 
• The bot’s requests and/or other users’ requests for pages overwhelm the server’s resources, causing the serving of pages to slow down or error out. 

However, search engine bots are programmed to automatically change delay rates between requests when they detect that the server is struggling to keep up with demand.

For larger websites and websites with frequently changing content on their pages, “crawl budget” can become a factor in whether search bots will get around to crawling all of the pages. 

Essentially, the web is something of an infinite space of webpages with varying update frequency. The search engines might not get around to visiting every single page out there, so they prioritize the pages they will crawl. 

Websites with huge numbers of pages, or that are slower responding might use up their available crawl budget before having all of their pages crawled if they have relatively lower ranking weight compared with other websites.

It is useful to mention that search engines also request all the files that go into composing the webpage as well, such as images, CSS and JavaScript. 

Just as with the webpage itself, if the additional resources that contribute to composing the webpage are inaccessible to the search engine, it can affect how the search engine interprets the webpage.

Rendering

When the search engine crawls a webpage, it will then “render” the page. This involves taking the HTML, JavaScript and cascading stylesheet (CSS) information to generate how the page will appear to desktop and/or mobile users. 

This is important in order for the search engine to be able to understand how the webpage content is displayed in context. Processing the JavaScript helps ensure they may have all the content that a human user would see when visiting the page. 

The search engines categorize the rendering step as a subprocess within the crawling stage. I listed it here as a separate step in the process because fetching a webpage and then parsing the content in order to understand how it would appear composed in a browser are two distinct processes. 

Google uses the same rendering engine used by the Google Chrome browser, called “Rendertron” which is built off the open-source Chromium browser system. 

Bingbot uses Microsoft Edge as its engine to run JavaScript and render webpages. It’s also now built upon the Chromium-based browser, so it essentially renders webpages very equivalently to the way that Googlebot does. 

Google stores copies of the pages in their repository in a compressed format. It seems likely that Microsoft Bing does so as well (but I have not found documentation confirming this). Some search engines may store a shorthand version of webpages in terms of just the visible text, stripped of all the formatting.

Rendering mostly becomes an issue in SEO for pages that have key portions of content dependent upon JavaScript/AJAX. 

Both Google and Microsoft Bing will execute JavaScript in order to see all the content on the page, and more complex JavaScript constructs can be challenging for the search engines to operate. 

I have seen JavaScript-constructed webpages that were essentially invisible to the search engines, resulting in severely nonoptimal webpages that would not be able to rank for their search terms. 

I have also seen instances where infinite-scrolling category pages on ecommerce websites did not perform well on search engines because the search engine could not see as many of the products’ links.

Other conditions can also interfere with rendering. For instance, when there is one or more JaveScript or CSS files inaccessible to the search engine bots due to being in subdirectories disallowed by robots.txt, it will be impossible to fully process the page. 

Googlebot and Bingbot largely will not index pages that require cookies. Pages that conditionally deliver some key elements based on cookies might also not get rendered fully or properly. 

Indexing

Once a page has been crawled and rendered, the search engines further process the page to determine if it will be stored in the index or not, and to understand what the page is about. 

The search engine index is functionally similar to an index of words found at the end of a book. 

A book’s index will list all the important words and topics found in the book, listing each word alphabetically, along with a list of the page numbers where the words/topics will be found. 

A search engine index contains many keywords and keyword sequences, associated with a list of all the webpages where the keywords are found. 

The index bears some conceptual resemblance to a database lookup table, which may have originally been the structure used for search engines. But the major search engines likely now use something a couple of generations more sophisticated to accomplish the purpose of looking up a keyword and returning all the URLs relevant to the word. 

The use of functionality to lookup all pages associated with a keyword is a time-saving architecture, as it would require excessively unworkable amounts of time to search all webpages for a keyword in real-time, each time someone searches for it. 

Not all crawled pages will be kept in the search index, for various reasons. For instance, if a page includes a robots meta tag with a “noindex” directive, it instructs the search engine to not include the page in the index.

Similarly, a webpage may include an X-Robots-Tag in its HTTP header that instructs the search engines not to index the page.

In yet other instances, a webpage’s canonical tag may instruct a search engine that a different page from the present one is to be considered the main version of the page, resulting in other, non-canonical versions of the page to be dropped from the index. 

Google has also stated that webpages may not be kept in the index if they are of low quality (duplicate content pages, thin content pages, and pages containing all or too much irrelevant content). 

There has also been a long history that suggests that websites with insufficient collective PageRank may not have all of their webpages indexed – suggesting that larger websites with insufficient external links may not get indexed thoroughly. 

Insufficient crawl budget may also result in a website not having all of its pages indexed.

A major component of SEO is diagnosing and correcting when pages do not get indexed. Because of this, it is a good idea to thoroughly study all the various issues that can impair the indexing of webpages.

Ranking

Ranking of webpages is the stage of search engine processing that is probably the most focused upon. 

Once a search engine has a list of all the webpages associated with a particular keyword or keyword phrase, it then must determine how it will order those pages when a search is conducted for the keyword. 

If you work in the SEO industry, you likely will already be pretty familiar with some of what the ranking process involves. The search engine’s ranking process is also referred to as an “algorithm”. 

The complexity involved with the ranking stage of search is so huge that it alone merits multiple articles and books to describe. 

There are a great many criteria that can affect a webpage’s rank in the search results. Google has said there are more than 200 ranking factors used by its algorithm.

Within many of those factors, there can also be up to 50 “vectors” – things that can influence a single ranking signal’s impact on rankings. 

PageRank is Google’s earliest version of its ranking algorithm invented in 1996. It was built off a concept that links to a webpage – and the relative importance of the sources of the links pointing to that webpage – could be calculated to determine the page’s ranking strength relative to all other pages. 

A metaphor for this is that links are somewhat treated as votes, and pages with the most votes will win out in ranking higher than other pages with fewer links/votes. 

Fast forward to 2022 and a lot of the old PageRank algorithm’s DNA is still embedded in Google’s ranking algorithm. That link analysis algorithm also influenced many other search engines that developed similar types of methods. 

The old Google algorithm method had to process over the links of the web iteratively, passing the PageRank value around among pages dozens of times before the ranking process was complete. This iterative calculation sequence across many millions of pages could take nearly a month to complete. 

Nowadays, new page links are introduced every day, and Google calculates rankings in a sort of drip method – allowing for pages and changes to be factored in much more rapidly without necessitating a month-long link calculation process.

Additionally, links are assessed in a sophisticated manner – revoking or reducing the ranking power of paid links, traded links, spammed links, non-editorially endorsed links and more. 

Broad categories of factors beyond links influence the rankings as well, including: 

• Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness or E-A-T for short.
• Quality
• Location/Proximity
• Personal Search History.
• Encrypted vs. unencrypted (the use of Secure Socket Layer, or SSL) to deliver webpages, indicated by the “HTTPS” URL prefix.
• Mobile-friendliness. 
• Page Speed.
• And more.

Conclusion

Understanding the key stages of search is a table-stakes item for becoming a professional in the SEO industry. 

Some personalities in social media think that not hiring a candidate just because they don’t know the differences between crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking was “going too far” or “gate-keeping”. 

It’s a good idea to know the distinctions between these processes. However, I would not consider having a blurry understanding of such terms to be a deal-breaker.

SEO professionals come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. What’s important is that they are trainable enough to learn and reach a foundational level of understanding.

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Google steps up featured snippets with MUM; reducing false premise results by 40%

Written on August 10, 2022 at 11:41 pm, by admin

Google has announced several new enhancements to Google Search today that focus on improving the overall quality of the search results, while at the same time helping searchers evaluate the search quality of the results presented to them.

Google has made improvements to featured snippets, its content advisories, and the about this result.

Featured Snippets callouts now uses MUM and general consensus

Featured snippets in Google Search will now use MUM to help understand if there is a general consensus for the information Google shows as callouts in these featured snippets. Google said that its “systems can now understand the notion of consensus” by using MUM, Multitask Unified Model.

MUM has not been used to date in too many applications within Google Search, limited to COVID vaccine names, Google Lens features and some other applications – more on that here, including now featured snippets.

Now, with the help of MUM, Google can understand if there is a consensus across the web to help highlight the callout portions of the featured snippets. Consensus-based techniques, according to Pandu Nayak, Vice President of Search and Fellow, Google, have meaningfully improved the quality of the featured snippet callouts. It is important to note that this does not come to mean that featured snippets will show facts, it does not necessarily do that but it does help improve the overall quality of featured snippets callouts.

Here is an example where Google’s featured snippet callouts are improved. In the screenshot below, Google will now highlight this callout, the word or words called out above the featured snippet in a larger font, to provide a better answer for the searcher.

Here is what this looks like without this feature:

Can consensus be spammed? Pandu Nayak explained these featured snippets are generally taken from the top-ranked results, so he is hopeful that those top-ranked results in Google Search are not spammy. It is important to note that consensus is not being used as a ranking factor but rather being used for callouts for featured snippets.

Fales premise queries reduced by 40%

Another advancement with featured snippets is around what Google calls “false premise” queries. Queries that may be inaccurate or factually incorrect but are nevertheless used by some searchers in Google Search. Google said it has improved what featured snippets it shows for queries that contain information for things that did not happen.

Google will now show you information that is accurate and remove the false part.  Google said it will show fewer featured snippets that may show false or inaccurate information. Google said it reduced these occurrences for triggering featured snippets by about 40% in Google Search.

An example Google provided was for a search on [when did snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln]. Now, instead of showing information about snoopy, who obviously did not assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Google will ignore the snoopy part and show you the consensus on the web around this answer.

Pandu Nayak added that this also helps with the people also ask, since those are powered by featured snippets.

Here is how it might look:

Content advisories expanded to low confidence results

In April 2020, Google launched content advisories in Google Search with the aim of communicating to searchers that the search results are not 100% reliable either because they are new or Google does not have enough information about the topic yet.

Google said it is now expanding content advisories to searches where its systems don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results available for the search. Google said this “does not mean that no helpful information is available, or that a particular result is low-quality.” These notices provide context about the whole set of results on the page, and you can always see the results for your query, even when the advisory is present.

About This Result expanding as well

In February 2021, Google launched the about this result to communicate to searchers, before they click on the result, more information about that search result snippet they are looking at. Google has expanded the feature in terms of showing more details in more areas, as well as why the result is ranking for the query. Google now said this feature has been used over 2.4 billion times since it launched.

Later this year, Google is expanding in Pouguese (PT), French (FR), Italian (IT), German (DE), Dutch (NL), Spanish (ES), Japanese (JP), and Indonesian (ID) languages. Google also added the about this result to the Google app.

Google is also expanding what information is shown in the about this result, including how widely a source is circulated, online reviews about a source or company, whether a company is owned by another entity, or even when Google Search can’t find much information about a source.

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Microsoft Bing adds 3 new shopping annotations

Written on August 10, 2022 at 11:41 pm, by admin

Microsoft Bing has recently added three notations to its search results pages that show price history, available coupons and ethical choice ratings.

Price history. Bing shows a graph showing whether a product price has increased, decreased or is stable. It highlights the high, median and low prices. Here’s what it looks like:

Microsoft Bing’s Price history annotation

This annotation is available in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Australia and India.

Available coupons. Bing shows searchers directly in the search results when coupons are available for a website. The coupon will automatically be copied and applied to the purchase for shoppers without needing to do a separate search for a code. Here’s what it looks like:

Microsoft Bing’s Coupons available annotation

This annotation is now available in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and France.

Ethical choice. This annotation indicates whether a brand sells eco-friendly, upcycled or fair trade fashion. Microsoft Bing recently expanded its Ethical Shopping Hub, which assigns a rating (powered by Good on You) based on a brand’s impact on people, the planet and animals. 

Official announcement. You can read more on Microsoft Bing’s announcement: Shopping Searches are Now Smarter on Microsoft Bing.

Why we care. What’s good for searchers can also be good for websites. All of these annotations seem designed to help reduce friction in the shopping process and could lead to additional sales for brands and businesses.

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Webinar: The crucial role SEO plays in digital transformation

Written on August 10, 2022 at 11:41 pm, by admin

Effective digital transformation can accelerate organic marketing growth—and maintain that growth despite future economic or regulatory challenges.

Join search experts from Conductor in an upcoming webinar and learn:

• The crucial role organic and SEO play in enterprise digital transformation.
• The importance of diversifying marketing efforts and what that looks like.
• How to apply data-driven insights to elevate the customer experience.

Register today for “Beyond the Buzzword: Transform Digitally to Drive Organic & SEO Growth,” presented by Conductor.

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Google July 2022 product reviews update had very little ranking volatility, say data providers

Written on August 10, 2022 at 11:41 pm, by admin

On July 27th, Google released its fourth product reviews update named the July 2022 product reviews update. That update took a short and sweet six days to roll out and was completed on August 2nd. In short, this July update was almost none existent to most of the data providers we asked, where in aggregate, there were very few signs of any real Google update during that six-day time period.

Let me add the caveat that if a site was hit by this update, it 100% felt like a major update, where the site can see traffic changes upwards of 80%. Plenty of sites were hit hard and if your site was one of them, this story is not to diminish that in any way. This story just says that it was not as widespread as previous product review updates or core updates. But in the aggregate, it seemed this update was pretty minor across Google’s search results, as a whole.

Data providers show the July update was minor

Semrush. Semrush data showed that the July product reviews update was “incredibly mild,” Mordy Oberstein, Semrush’s communications advisor said.

The change in rank volatility between the July 2022 product reviews update and the March 2022 product reviews update, the data shows that the increases are minimal. Some niches “didn’t even crack a full point increase, the highest fluctuation rate the Semrush Sensor recorded during the update,” Mordy Oberstein added.

This charge shows a comparison between the July and March 2022 product reviews updates, showing July was almost insignificant compared to March:

This also works when you just isolate the peak changes, the most volatile snapshot in time during the update, you really cannot compare the two. It is like the July update was nothing compared to the March update.

Here is another interesting chart showing the newly ranked URLs after each update and also the URLs not previously in the top 20. Click on each chart to expand:

Just one note, around June 15th, Semrush updated its Sensor to adjust the levels of sensitivity it used down. Semrush confirmed this with us today but also posted about it on Twitter some time ago, which is why we asked for confirmation on this story. That being said, the other tools showed similar findings, which was very little volatility related to this update.

RankRanger/Similarweb. RankRanger, a company of Similarweb, showed similar results, where RankRanger data “didn’t see any unusual rank fluctuations,” according to Shay Harel from the company. “The latest Product Review update was pretty uneventful,” Shay Harel added. This is based on both RankRanger and SimilarWeb, RankRanger’s new parent company, data where both traffic data and rank fluctuation data show lower levels of fluctuations.

This chart below shows that the fluctuations and volatility during the period of time of the July 2022 product reviews update were limited, to say the least:

Now that RankRanger has Similarweb, they can now also compare traffic from Google Search to compare on that level. And that also showed that the December update was larger than the July update:

RankRanger compared this July update with the December update, not the March one. So keep that in mind, since Semrush compared it to the March update, which was the most recent one we had prior to this July update.

Now broken down by position, you see a similar picture:

RankRanger also showed the volatility by niche for this last update:

Here are some top winners and losers from Similarweb’s data:

Sistrix. Again, the data shows the same story, “after an initial analysis it’s clear that this update did not have a major impact on SERPs,” Steve Paine from Sistrix told us. Sistrix sent us a few examples of sites that did see movement both up and down after this update:

seoClarity and Moz. Both of those toolset providers told us they saw very little, just like the toolsets above. “Our internal tools are showing minimal changes,” Mitul Gandhi from seoClarity told us. He added that it is “hard to tell in a quick view anything more than standard fluctuations.” Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz also told me that he was unable to pin down a lot on this last update, saying there is not much to see with this update.

More on the July 2022 product reviews update

Google product reviews update. The Google product reviews update aims to promote review content that is above and beyond much of the templated information you see on the web. Google said it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings.

Google is not directly punishing lower-quality product reviews that have “thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” However, if you provide such content and find your rankings demoted because other content is promoted above yours, it will definitely feel like a penalty. Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty against your content, Google is just rewarding sites with more insightful review content with rankings above yours.

Technically, this update should only impact product review content and not other types of content.

July 27 to August 6. This July 2022 product reviews update only took six days to fully roll out and to be honest, that is surprising. We saw very limited changes from the tracking tools and honestly, while some sites seemed to get hard by this update, it does not seem there was a lot of SEO community chatter around ranking changes due to this update. In fact, we saw a spike on August 3rd but clearly, that was after this update was complete.

What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by this product reviews update. We posted that advice in our original story over here. In addition, Google provided two new best practices around this update, one saying to provide more multimedia around your product reviews and the second is to provide links to multiple sellers, not just one. Google posted these two items:

• Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review.
• Include links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice.

Google added the following criteria for what matters with the March 2022 product reviews update:

• Include helpful in-depth details, like the benefits or drawbacks of a certain item, specifics on how a product performs, or how the product differs from previous versions
• Come from people who have actually used the products, and show what the product is physically like or how it’s used
• Include unique information beyond what the manufacturer provides — like visuals, audio or links to other content detailing the reviewer’s experience
• Cover comparable products, or explain what sets a product apart from its competitors

Google added three new points of new advice for this third release of the products reviews update:

• Are product review updates relevant to ranked lists and comparison reviews? Yes. Product review updates apply to all forms of review content. The best practices we’ve shared also apply. However, due to the shorter nature of ranked lists, you may want to demonstrate expertise and reinforce authenticity in a more concise way. Citing pertinent results and including original images from tests you performed with the product can be good ways to do this.
• Are there any recommendations for reviews recommending “best” products? If you recommend a product as the best overall or the best for a certain purpose, be sure to share with the reader why you consider that product the best. What sets the product apart from others in the market? Why is the product particularly suited for its recommended purpose? Be sure to include supporting first-hand evidence.
• If I create a review that covers multiple products, should I still create reviews for the products individually? It can be effective to write a high-quality ranked list of related products in combination with in-depth single-product reviews for each recommended product.  If you write both, make sure there is enough useful content in the ranked list for it to stand on its own.

Why we care. If your website offers product review content, you will want to check your rankings to see if you were impacted. Did your Google organic traffic improve, decline, or stay the same? Long term, you are going to want to ensure that going forward, you put a lot more detail and effort into your product review content so that it is unique and stands out from the competition on the web.

We hope you, your company, and your clients did well with this update.

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Webinar: What ad channels work best for your brand?

Written on August 9, 2022 at 8:39 pm, by admin

New ad channels pop up seemingly overnight. Headlines tout the popularity of the latest and greatest options, and marketers feel the rush to participate. For those in the B2B space, it can be even more complex trying to decipher whether the newest trend is worth investing the time and effort to help you reach your target audience.

Join experts at MNTN who share performance metrics used to determine the effectiveness of ad channels they’ve tested—whether it’s a new social channel or even Connected TV.

Register today for “Leap or Linger: Determining Which Ad Platforms to Test for Your B2B Brand,” presented by MNTN.

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