Google/SERP Updates:

May 2022 Update Officially Done Rolling Out on June 9th

Google announced on Thursday that the May 2022 Core Update has been completely rolled out. While we will always see daily fluctuations in the SERPs, those related to the core update should be finished. It’s definitely worth monitoring any other tremors over time to recalibrate if they get anything significantly wrong.

Building a more helpful browser with machine learning

It’s always helpful to pay attention to how Google is improving Chome. We see search traffic coming from Google Discover and News. While using Chrome isn’t a ranking factor, for the crowd that argues that Google is a monopoly, you can ignore that what happens in Chrome is related to Google Search.

The connection between the two is apparent with the update of the ‘Journey.’ In explaining how Google uses machine learning to catalog your Journeys, you can see ways in which the MUM algorithm is influencing the way developers approach Chrome.

SEO tool Ahrefs invests $60M in building creator-friendly search engine, ‘Yep’

Published on Friday, June 3rd. The news that Ahrefs was launching a search engine slipped through the fingers of the SEO Weekly. The new search engine, fueled by data collected by the SaaS tools, proposes a USP around splitting advertising revenue 90/10 with creators. The only problem so far, the search results are not that great (especially for local intent queries)

The 2022 MNSearch Summit

Last week was a great 2-day in-person conference in Minnesota covering everything digital marketing. The MnSearch Summit hosted a variety of well-received SEO presentations from some of the most talented practitioners in the industry. 

Talks included:

• Topics, Taxonomies & Tabaxis: Navigating Entities in SERP by Jamie Indigo
• From the Ground Up: Building a Content Strategy for a Niche Industry by Niki Mosier
• Data & Keyword Segmentation: Answering Complex SEO Questions by Chris Long

Twitter Threads/Tweets:

Technical SEO – Don’t Fix Imperfections – Keith Goode 

In this Twitter thread, Keith Goode addressed the vast imperfections of technical SEO and how you can’t (or shouldn’t fix everything).  Issues should be ranked as Critical, High, Medium, or Low (nice-to-have) based on your answers. Keith emphasizes the importance of prioritizing the most valuable solutions before making big asks of your dev team.

Textual relevance for document ranking (TF-IDF) as one of many factors – Neeva 

Neeva’s Twitter profile shared their take on the complexity of developing a search engine. The thread starts with keyword relevancy and TF-IDF, but eventually identifies and addresses the importance of creating a fair evaluation of content length, authority, and external linking.

Tom Critchlow on Agency/Client Communication

Most agencies suck at client communication. Tom provides a playbook on respecting your clients by developing your presentations, pitches, and value propositions on their terms. He breaks down the core principles around:

1. Resisting short-term value
2. Giving context for your communication
3. Reducing complexity
4. Tieing your recommendations to business value
5. Not saying “we should…” but instead saying “there is an opportunity to…”
6. Pitching for your ideas

If books were created by digital marketers – Infographic via Semrush

Semrush designed a fun little infographic with a list of famous books cleverly rewriting the titles to add some fun digital marketing puns.

• The Great Google
• Moby Click
• The Perks of Being a Digital Marketer

General SEO:

How to Earn Topical Authority in 2022 and Beyond – Zoe Ashbridge via Moz

In this Moz article, Zoe Ashbridge, explains the concept of topical authority, why it’s important for improving your rankings and optimizing your site, and what you can do to earn it.

Her top tips to earn topic authority include:

• Keep up with current events
• Cover topic in full
• Create well-researched content
• Update content to keep it fresh and relevant

One interesting sign of topical authority that Zoe has identified: indented SERPs. When you see a site that’s earned indented SERPs, Google considers them an authority.

FAQ Pages for SEO (+ Examples & Best Practices) – Jake Sheridan via Ahrefs

Jake Sheridan delivers everything you need to know to maximize your FAQs for SEO. He explains why they matter for SEO, how to find the right questions to answer for FAQs, a few quality examples, and how to create the FAQ schema to earn rich enhancements.

Technical SEO Articles:

Moving to GA4 with your GA3 Data – JR Oakes via Locomotive

Open Souce Github Repository

With the sunsetting of GA3 next year, businesses want to be able to include their historical data without any gaps. The problem is that GA3 and GA4 data collection is quite different. 

JR Oakes, Savannah Castro, Joe Joinner of Locomotive, and Derek Perkins of Nozzle worked to produce a fantastic open-sourced solution for labeling the endpoints of your GA3 data so you can smoothly import it over to GA4 without losing historical data. It’s an open-sourced Python tool for formatting GA4 data to match and be backfilled with historical GA3 data in BigQuery.

Creating Internal Links For E-commerce Category Pages – Andrea Volpini via WordLift

Andy Volpini developed a widget for automating the creation of internal links for e-commerce category pages. He shares his Colab, a step-by-step guide, and his take on why you would want to create a tool to dynamically add related links on your site,

From an SEO value perspective, an related internal links widget:

• Reduce click depth
• Improve rankings with internal links
• Distribute page rank
• Optimizing Anchor Text

Get the Colab from the article and create your own.

8 Technical SEO Challenges for Large Websites – iPullRank

When you work on a massive site with thousands or millions of pages, you’re likely to run into some big-time challenges that impact your technical SEO. Andrew McDermott lists these issues and how you can address them with your dev team.

1. Misusing your crawl budget
2. The consequences of duplicate content
3. A disorganized site architecture
4. Poor internal linking
5. Javascript SEO rendering errors
6. A lack of context parity
7. Misused and missing structured data
8. The disaster of a mismanaged technical website migration

Rankable: 

Full Recap of the Content Rebalancing Framework Webinar

Did you miss the Content Rebalancing Framework Webinar that Kyle and I held a couple of weeks ago? No worries! We’ve got the full recap including the replay, the slide deck, the spreadsheet, and a written explanation of our approach to redistributing link equity of your old topic cluster.