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SEO updates you need to know
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Google is now testing a 'Short Videos' menu item on mobile, directing users to a feed of short videos published to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram & more. 'Short Videos' currently appears for ~10% of all queries globally |
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WooCommerce announced they will be reversing their migration to Woo.com after 5 months, citing Google visibility as an issue. Data shows that even if you do everything 'right' on a migration, there is still risk. |
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Google is now labelling some products within their popular product packs as "Product". It's not yet clear what triggers this badge, or why some of the other products aren't receiving this badge. |
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Google's new "Most Read" SERP feature offers a significant ranking opportunity for publishers, with selected articles immediately leaping to the top of the SERP, with a similar mechanism to Featured Snippets. |
Search with Candour podcast
How to make the web greener
Season 3: Episode 14
Matt Tutt joins Search With Candour this week to discuss how to make your website more sustainable.
- The resources required for data centres
- Putting pressure on larger companies to use renewable energy sources
- Should we have a universal crawler?
- How to check your website's impact on the climate
- How easy it is to use green web hosting
Listen now or watch the episode on YouTube
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This week's solicited SEO tips:
If there was a 'golden rule' of SEO
For me, the golden rule of SEO would be that there is absolutely no 'SEO change' you should do on your site that will make the user experience worse. None. No exceptions.
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How long does SEO take? An analogy to use
"How long does SEO take?" is a common question that is difficult to answer, so you can say:
"The question 'how long does it take to get fit?' is a very similar question to 'how long does SEO take?', first we need to know:
🏋♂️ What is the end goal we are measuring to? Both SEO and fitness are never "finished", so you have to pick milestones. Lift a certain weight or get a specific amount of traffic. Beat a friend in a race or outrank a competitor. Or maybe we're just happy to make some progress?
👣 What is our starting point? Is this our first time in the gym training, or did we used to play sports? Is this the first time you've done SEO or did you build some links before?
🏆 What are our competitors doing? How often are they training? How long have they been training for? Progress measured against competitors is by definition competitive, so you need to know what they are putting in vs you.
⌛ What resources do we have? Do we have time to train every day? Do we have money for dieticians, personal trainers, S&C coaches? Do you have in-house skills to help with SEO? How much budget do you have for specialists?
All of these are things you need to consider and have answers for before you can honestly answer "how long SEO takes".
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Thoughts on HCU and March Google updates
✨ The HCU classifier has targeted ‘patterns’: Many of the examples of sites I’ve seen hit by the HCU have the same tell-tale signs that they were ‘built for search engines’
✨ Google hinted at some of these patterns: Their spam update in March specifically said they were targeting sites "created primarily to match very specific search queries"
✨ The HCU has taken out many good sites too: I have seen examples of sites that have had excellent content but fit this pattern and have lost almost all of their traffic since the HCU.
✨ HCU classifier depends on authority: How aggressively the HCU classifier is applied seems to be in context to how established the brand/domain is.
✨ The second ‘small site goldrush’ is over: Until 2012, any small site could rank with link spam. Recently, Google algorithms were allowing brand new sites to rank for mass ‘longtail’ queries. This is over.
✨ Big UGC sites are the new target for spammers: Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, Medium, et al, will instantly rank for almost any term, so spammers are posting even on threads that are years old.
✨ Even for ‘Your Money, Your Life’ queries: Reddit and discussion forums are ranking for terms such as "weight loss" credit: Lily Ray
✨ May 5th is the next update: Google has specified sites “abusing authority” to get content ranking will be targeted in May, so we may see some of the parasite spam reduced.
✨ Final thought on User signals: It’s clear Google has changed how they are evaluating content, and it seems to be happening faster. I am wondering if actual user signals are less important than previously.
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Is Digital PR the same as buying links?
If you pay people for digital PR, you’re buying links”. 🤦♂️ I’ve seen this said a few times (usually by people selling links), let’s look at the differences:
✅ Buying links means exactly that, you are paying for link insertion. This breaks Google’s spam policies and may land you with a penalty - or more likely - if Google detects it, they simply won’t count it. Wasted money.
✅ If you’re buying digital PR, you’re paying someone to come up with something interesting and an editorial decision is made whether to cover it (let alone link to it). That’s what Google is looking for and falls within their guidelines.
✅ When you buy links, you’ll get the links you pay for. With digital PR, great ideas can go viral and earn dozens, sometimes hundreds of links, sometimes over months or years. I worked on an April Fool’s campaign with Expedia once that was still getting links 10 years later!
✅ There is value in what you create with Digital PR even if you don’t get the links
We’re running a link-building panel at SearchNorwich next month, with guest appearances from Jo O’Reilly, Tabby Farrar, Lydia Fox and Fery Kaszoni. If you have questions about link building or digital PR you’d like to ask the panel, reply to this email and we’ll get a recording up online!
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Bonus Easter SEO meme
Unfortunately, how we're seeing Google work at the moment :)
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Thanks for reading the newsletter, we're just getting started! If you have any feedback, I'd always love to hear it - just hit reply and I'll be sure to read it.
~Mark Williams-Cook
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