🛍️

​Merchant listings performance is a new report within Google Search Console that was launched last week. You can view the merchant listings performance in the Google Search Image tab.

📊

​An 'unconfirmed' update by Google caused significant ranking fluctuations and volatility over the weekend. It has followed a pattern of volatility over the weeks, with AccuRanker's tracker almost off the charts.

📰

​Google warns if you're syndicating or republishing your content on other sites (such as LinkedIn), "you are trading the extra visibility you get from that platform with the possibility of that other site ranking above you."

🗂️

​Product variant markup will now generate rich results, including aggregate rating (reviews), price range and item availability. This means you can now switch schema from Product to ProductGroup for product variants.

🏤

​Google has also added return policy structured data support at the organisation level. This means you no longer have to specify the policy on each and every product.

⭐

​Google is testing Seller Ratings for organic listings outside of the US for the first time ever. This gives an opportunity for sellers who don't host on-site product reviews to receive star ratings in the SERP as a standout feature.

👮

​Google has a binary trust system, which is used with XML sitemaps 'lastmod' date. If your site repeatedly reports significant updates that Google does not detect, it simply stops trusting your lastmod signals.

Search Intelligence built 300 PR links for this client and their visibility exploded on Google

But it wasn't just the links that made their website chart look like NVIDIA stock. The client has also done all other things right in SEO.

A technically sound website with relevant content and a consistent velocity of links over many years.

Back to basics on unique URLs

With few exceptions, any unique URL counts as a 'different' page to a search engine.
​
This means if your same content is accessible with and without a trailing slash (/my-content and /my-content/) - these are considered duplicate URLs.

The same as if both www and non-www versions are accessible. In cases where content is identical and accessible through different URLs, you should be using permanent 301 redirects.

While Google can usually do a good job sorting these, issues can occur if you start getting differing internal and external links to different versions.

Google has a reputation system for site signals

Please excuse the incorrectly labelled epoch timestamp (it's actually Thursday, 1 September 2022 21:49:44) anyway!
​
📃 We know that Google stores when it detects a " last significant update" to a URL, and we can also signal this to Google via "lastmod" in an XML sitemap.
​
🤡 A few "smart" people thought it was a good idea to spam this lastmod to constantly tell Google the content had been updated.
​
⚖ Yesterday, it appears Google confirmed my suspicion they have a flag on whether to trust this on a site or not.

It is likely Google has a similar system for many signals that come via webmasters that they can verify.

Commonly missed URLs on site migrations

The number 1 thing companies miss during site migrations is URLs that are not internally linked! 😮 ⬇️⬇️
​
✉ What do I mean by this? Well, you sent that newsletter to 10,000 with some of your great content, and a few people loved it so much that they linked to it – great news!
​
✅ The incoming links have ?utm parameters (which is a different URL for Google), but that's okay – you've got your canonical tags set up – well done!
​
😭 Now, you do your site migration, and you haven't accounted for these query string parameters in your redirect rules; you've lost dozens of great links to pages that aren't redirecting, and your rankings suffer.
​
To combat this, you can use your favourite SaaS tool like Dragon Metrics, SE Ranking, Semrush, Ahrefs or Majestic to pull a list of non-deleted incoming links. Then, de-dupe this list from your usual site crawl.📝
​
🔗This will leave you with a list of unique URLs on your site that have incoming links and are not linked internally – you saved the rankings, 10/10 SEO. Well done!

Hreflang works outside of a single domain

The hreflang tag can be used cross-domain! So if you've got your .co.uk, your .com.au or even another language site, you can help Google understand the relationship and have them rank better! 🌍

"It works until it doesn't..."

“It works until it doesn’t” ☠

🥂 So you’ve found a tactic that brings in huge traffic that breaks Google’s guidelines. Great for you!

👮‍♀‍ It’s worth keeping in mind it’s not going to last forever, so it’s worth having a good understanding of the risk you’re taking. While no sites are permanently banned from Google, if you get a manual action (AKA a ‘penalty’), they will usually take months to resolve.

📉 When they are resolved, it doesn’t mean you’re back to where you were either - it means you’ll be where you should be after the shady tactic has been removed.

It’s worth calculating what those numbers look like. For ‘proper’ businesses, it’s rarely worth it. 📊

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

A big thank you to our top referrers, who have signed up over 10 people to the Core Updates newsletter, go follow them!

🥇 MJ Cachón Yáñez (LinkedIn / X)

🥈 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / X)

Got any feedback?

Apparently some people do read this far, I've had people email me! Thanks for that, I just want to tell you that you're brilliant if you read this far and I hope you have a lovely week.

As usual, I read all the emails, so any feedback or advertising questions - let me know!

~Mark Williams-Cook