🎫

​White-labeled coupon sites can be against Google's site reputation abuse policy. Google updated their FAQ to specifically mention this kind of site in their 'what creators should know about March 2024 core update' post.

👯

​A new 'double featured snippet' SERP feature has appeared in the wake of AI Overview rollbacks. This time with a 'from sources across the web' label that appears directly above the two results that can be featured at the top.

📖

​Google is now indexing .epub documents, after a quiet update to their documentation. Epub is a widely used digital ebook format that allows for reflowable content, making it adaptable to various screen sizes and devices.

🔗

​93.6% of the sites that ranked in the top 10 have over 1,000 unique domain links according to a study by Internet Marketing Ninjas, demonstrating for the [insert big number] time, that links are still very important to ranking.

📱

​Google will stop indexing sites that are not accessible via their mobile user-agent from 5th July. Google stresses this has nothing to do with mobile-friendliness, only the small number of sites not accessible via mobile.

📈

​The Google Search Console links report has been fixed. If you saw a decline last week in the number of links being reported by the tool, these numbers should now be back to normal.

👮

​Google has added two new options to the spam reporting tool; one for "Site reputation abuse" and one for "Expired domain abuse". However, it's worth remembering that Google doesn't use these reports for direct action.

Understanding users beyond 'keywords' with live data and intent clustering by Google

AlsoAsked allows you to quickly mine live "People Also Ask" data, the freshest source of consumer intent data, for understanding what users are searching about beyond 'keywords' and what you should be writing about.

Get 90 searches per month with no account creation, for free.

PSA: Google will rewrite your page titles in the SERP!

Google will sometimes rewrite your page title in the SERP, it will commonly use the h1 on the page, or more rarely, the anchor text from a link if it thinks it is more relevant!

They will, however, use your specified title for ranking purposes.

Mobile accessible != mobile friendly

There has been lots of misunderstanding about the recent statement from Google regarding indexing and the Google Smartphone crawler. The statement was: "After July 5, 2024, we'll crawl and index these sites with only Googlebot Smartphone. If your site's content is not accessible at all with a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable."
​
To be clear:
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📱 This is not to do with being mobile-friendly
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📱 As long as your site is accessible (even if it's 💩 to use) on the Googlebot Smartphone/mobile crawler, it can be indexed.
​
📱 This is really for those rare cases where visiting the page on mobile gives nothing - that's what is going to be impacted. Always, be cautious about claims unless they can be substantiated!

PAAs are not just for FAQs!

I’ve said this for a long time, but if you’re using questions data like PAAs just to make “FAQs” you’re only taking the most surface level value - and since March 2024, are likely at risk of getting a slap from Google for producing content “for” search engines instead of users.

The data is marvellous, but it’s important to consider the intent rather than single questions verbatim:

✅ If you see a question like “what size gaming mouse should I get?” what you’re being told is that people are interested in knowing about the different sizes. This means it will likely be worthwhile considering content like a size guide, and all the considerations that go with that.

❌It does not mean you just write “what size gaming mouse should I get?” and then a 200-word answer. Look at your sales data - what is the average? What sizes are even available? What factors are important?

😤 Put the effort in. Good content isn’t easy and questions are the starting point.

Data from AlsoAsked

$ in robots.txt

The $ sign works as a 'stop' in terms of pattern matching for robots dot txt.
​
For example, if you wanted bots to:
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❎ NOT crawl car.php
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✅ but you DID want them to crawl all of the model pages such as
car.php?model=1 and car.php?model=2 then you would use the rule:
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User-agent: *
Disallow: /car.php$

Anchor text FTW

Anchor text is hugely important for SEO and there's loads to know about it! Here are some of the key points:
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🔗 Anchor text is the clickable text a user can see within a link
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🔗 It's what is read out by screen readers used for people who are visually impaired or blind
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🔗 It helps all users understand what the next page is about
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🔗 It's used heavily by search engines to 'label' what the linked page may be about.
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🔗 The recent Google leak suggested that completely irrelevant anchor texts pointing to a page may mean the link is disregarded
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🔗 You should use descriptive anchor text wherever possible and avoid terms like "click here" and "read more"

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