Google/SERP Updates:

May 2022 Core Update

Last week, Google announced that they’d start rolling out the core update. With every core update, Google attempts to improve search results which can sometimes result in some massive volatility in the SERPs. In essence, they’re reconfiguring the weights of the hundreds of factors that evaluate the value and relevance of the indexed internet.

We’re already seeing some examples of large traffic gains and losses as highlighted by SEO Consultant Glenn Gabe.

A surge in FAQ Snippets over the past month – H/T Brodie Clark

SEO Consultant Brodie Clark has been noticing a surge in FAQ snippets in the SERPs throughout May. You can earn FAQ snippets by adding them to your site using structured data. Will they maintain the volume post-core update? We shall see.

Google Analytics 4 Doesn’t Support Google AMP Yet

Twitter user Siva noticed that GA4 doesn’t support AMP URLs. Glenn Gabe escalated the issue to Product evangelist Krista Seiden and she confirmed that was the case. Additionally, Mary Albright noticed a lack of annotation functionality for GA4 which Krista also confirmed.

Google SEO 2022 – Weathering Google Updates

Barry Schwartz, John Mueller, and Dr. Marie Haynes participated in a Duda webinar that discussed everything we’ve seen over the course of 2022 for SEO. Dr. Marie Haynes specifically focused on her recommendations for adjusting your website when a Google Update has a negative impact on your rankings.

General SEO:

Optimize crawling, for the environment – Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk put together a poignant blog post detailing the impact of crawling on the environment and how unfettered URL creation can lead to waste in money and energy. 

Crawling has a cost to the environment.  Most content management systems  like WordPress create a ton of URLs that Google Crawls:

• RSS feed
• oEmbed URL
• JSON version of the post
• A shortlink

You can configure your CMS to reduce URL creation and use other solutions like crawl delays or blocking certain types of URLs with your Robot.txt to prevent excessive crawling.

E-commerce SEO: From Merchant Feed To Product Knowledge Graph – Valentina Izzo

Valentina explains the growing importance of the Product Knowlege Graph for eCommerce websites. She provides guidance for using structured data to get your catalog in the Product Knowledge Graph. Data cleanliness and syncing are essential. The info on your site and in the Merchant Feed or Manufacturer Feed needs to be the same.

Are internal link patterns associated with more Google traffic? – Cyrus Shepard

Cyrus Shepard looked at millions of URLs and looked for trends in internal linking that might impact organic traffic. He found positive associations with an increase in internal links along with variations in the anchor text, but some surprising results as well:

1. There’s a threshold where more internal links lead to higher traffic.
2. Larger high authority sites tend to benefit more from sitewide/navigational links.
3. You don’t want to use the same anchor text for your internal links. Creating different versions helps traffic.
4. The plain URL link without anchor text surprisingly increased traffic in many situations.
5. You still need to have some exact match anchor text though. Don’t only provide relevant variations.

SEO reporting to impress: How to successfully report your SEO process, efforts and result  – Aleyda Solis

Aleyda shared her process and reports for presenting SEO performance to clients and executives. The most valuable presentations include easy-to-understand data that uses KPIs that matter to the business. Ultimately, the job of the SEO in a presentation is to be a storyteller:

• Setup: What happened?
• Conflict: Why did it happen?
• Resolution: How to proceed? 

Technical SEO Articles:

How To Automate Ecommerce Category Page Creation With Python – Lee Foot

Using Screaming Frog, Streamlit App, and Keywords Anywhere, Lee Foot wrote a Python script that generates a ton of niche category pages for your products. It’s great at surfacing opportunities to produce landing pages directly tied to a subset of products and target longer tail keywords in specific niches. Lee provides a detailed technical guide to get your data from Screaming Frog and enter it into the Streamlit App he set up.

Congrats to Women In Tech SEO for their 3 Year Birthday

Areej AbuAli has done a tremendous job building a supportive and growing community of women interested in SEO Tech. Celebrating their 3rd birthday, the Twitter account shared some of their accomplishments, and the list is impressive:

• 5K+ global members
• 96 interview pieces
• 34 workshops
• 26 podcast episodes
• 17 newsletter editions
• 3 festivals
• 2 mentorship cohorts
• speakers & founders hub featuring 500+ women

Tools/Features: 

Page-oscope Chrome Extenstion from MobileMoxie

Cindy Krum and her team have released a very cool chrome extension that allows you to visualize desktop and mobile versions of a website right from the browser and compare the HTML as well as how the Javascript renders, and even identify the differences between the two devices. The extension also provides an interactive version of both that you can use to test out your versions and troubleshoot tech SEO issues that arise.

Imagen – unprecedented photorealism × deep level of language understanding

Somewhat unrelated to SEO, the research team at Google released their academic work and a demo of a new tool that can take written text and generate photo-realistic images. The AI produces amazing life-like pictures of anything you can describe. 

The implications for visual content creation are endless and will allow creators to save time and expand their imagination for a variety of use cases. On the other hand, a tool like this could be used to fabricate inauthentic images presented as real for nefarious means.

Screaming Frog Log File Analyser Update – Version 5.0

Code Named BytheSea in honor of the late Bill Slawski, Screaming Frog released a new version of the software with a few highly demanded features including:

• Updated Bot Verification
• Dark Mode
• URL Events over Time
• Regex formulas to exclude URLs when importing

Rankable:

The Content Rebalancing Framework Webinar

Garrett Sussman and Kyle Marino are presenting their process for taking content topic clusters and rebalancing them to improve link equity and search traffic. The webinar is Tuesday, May 31st, at 2:30 pm and will be available for replay.

Register