Dear <<First Name>>,

I finally was able to take a breath in November. This month’s newsletter has TONS of tips and ways to prepare for Google’s upcoming mobile-only indexing update (where they will drop desktop content), and their Page Experience update is coming next year, well as other updates from YouTube and others.

I also got a fun shout-out last month on Dan Shure’s November Experts on the Wire podcast with my friend Melanie Phung. Speaking of podcasts, we are looking for new podcasts guests for our Digital Marketing Victories podcast for 2021, so if you’re interested to be our guest, feel free to fill out the form here.

OK, let’s get into the updates.

November search news from Google Search Central

John Mueller goes over the updates from last month, which included:

• Google Webmasters is now called Google Search Central.

• There is a new team at Google called the Google Web Creators team. You can also follow them on Twitter and YouTube.

• You can no longer request individual indexing for URLs inside the URL Inspection Tool, as Google has disabled this feature.

• There is a WP Web Stories plugin, and it has been recently updated. There is also a video on how to do SEO for Web Stories. And if you’re interested in tracking user engagement with your web stories, check out the instructions here. 

• Page experience (Core Web Vitals) will be a ranking factor in May 2021.

Passage Ranking

Martin Splitt answered questions about passage ranking Google announced in October. Here are the crib notes:

• This update will help longer pages.

• The original announcement mentioned that it’s for “indexing”, but it impacts “ranking.” 

• Clear headers and jump links *might* help try more passage ranking. 

But ultimately, Martin said:

“Lots of people end up creating these long-winded pages that are having a hard time ranking for anything, really because everything is so diluted at this long content. We are helping those.”

Passage indexing is powered by BERT (the neural network-based technique for natural language pre-training that Google and Bing use to discern better the context of words, and Google now uses it for 100% of its queries.

Google: Slow URLs Can Potentially Impact Ranking Of Other Faster URLs On Your Site

If all of your slow URLs are on a subdomain, it might group those URLs; slow URLs in that group might impact others.

Microsoft Clarity is now free to use inside Bing Webmaster Tools.

A free heatmap tool! You just need to add their code to your site. Check it out inside BWT.

A new version of the Crawl Report in Google Search Console

Google released a new version of the crawl stats report in Google Search  Console. The latest report shows:

1. The total number of requests grouped by response code crawled file type, crawl purpose, and Googlebot type.

2. Detailed information on host status.

3. URL examples to show where in your site requests occurred.

You can learn more here.

Google Migrated The Disavow Link Tool To New Search Console  

You can now download and see errors in your disavow file. 

Page Experience Update - How to audit, measure, and improve

Page experience and performance (measured via the Core Web Vitals) will be a ranking factor in May 2021. Some great resources on how to audit, measure, and create an improvement plan are below.

How to audit your site’s Web Core Vitals 

This presentation by Rachel Costello from SEO Nerds Switzerland’s Meetup is excellent.

The deck is here, and the recording is here.

Her tips include:

• A list of areas you should check and add to your audit and tools to check those items.

• She also mentions URL Profiler, which you can use to query the Mobile-Friendly test API and Google's Safe Browsing API at scale. 

And as you're digging into solutions to improve your Core Web Vitals, loading CSS Asynchronously might help. Here’s the 411. And there’s another great article here on Search Engine Land that walks you through finding improvement recommendations.

Tools to measure + Case Studies to Persuade Others

Image Link Building - New Moz Whiteboard Friday

This WhiteBoard video is an excellent way for you to think through providing valuable images that can garner your site backlinks.

And new to me: 

• BuzzSumo has an infographic filter where you can add a topic to see the topmost shared infographics.

• Keywords with “statistics” and “facts” after the keyword are terms where the searcher is looking to link to something; it has “link intent” - a tip initially mentioned by Dan Shure on his podcast.

• Does the image carousel appear for the keyword that you’re targeting? If so, that’s a keyword with image intent.

Rand Fiskin’s Tip for Writing Blog Posts

Here’s the key takeaway. Remember this when someone asks you how often bloggers should publish:

“Quantity is pointless. Quality matters.”

Python + Google Search Console query data to estimate high traffic content production

A great article about using Python for SEO purposes.

Voice Assistant Use on Smartphones Rise

Siri is still the most used, but Bing is still powering about 45% of all devices. Get the most recent data here.

New Google My Business Dashboard

Get a tour and learn about the updates here.

YouTube algorithm updates

The crib notes from the Search Engine Journal article:

• Underperforming videos do not impact your higher-performing videos.

• Inactive subscribers are not a factor impacting YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.

• External traffic can help get a video shown in the recommendations section. But once it’s there, it has to perform well with viewers.

YouTube Introduced Audio ads

YouTube has been dominant, has a music platform, and is working on expanding into podcasting, so this announcement is not a surprise. 

In YouTube's own words:

“To help you tailor your media and creative approach to the different ways consumers are engaging with YouTube, we’re introducing audio ads, our first ad format designed to connect your brand with audiences engaged in and ambient listening on YouTube. Audio ads, currently in beta, help you efficiently expand reach and grow brand awareness with audio-based creative and the same measurement, audience, and brand safety features as your video campaigns.”

Google's to Convert Static Website Assets into Video Content

You can read the announcement and check out Google’s explainer video. It’s not publicly available yet, but Facebook has something similar (Video Creator Kit). YouTube also has a Video Builder tool.

YouTube Analytics Now Reports on Traffic Sources

YouTube is updating its video analytics with insights into specific traffic sources within the YouTube ecosystem that drive views to your videos.

Tag Mapper Tool - visualize your GTM tags

It not only helps you visualize your tags but also enables you to find mistakes before you make them. Check out the tool.

Cross-domain Tracking - Google Analytics 4

It's different in GA4. Get the instructions and watch the video here.

I discovered so many great resources this month! Check them out below:

• Use the Undistracted Chrome plugin to block sites that distract you.

• List of sources used in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

• Free Google Tag Manager Fundamentals Course.

• Automated Website Accessibility Solution for ADA & WCAG Compliance.

• Watch the NLP Summit 2020 for free.

• AudioHero -  A fantastic source for copyright-free music to use with your content. The Netflix of AUDIO. 

• StreamSuggest - Retrieves auto-complete suggestions from Google and Bing at scale and is exportable.

• Core SERP Vitals - See the Core Web Vitals directly in search results. 

• SEO Speaker Accelerator (free for mentees): United Search

• 5 Hours of Technical SEO from SEMRush (recordings and decks). The JS indexing deck, in particular, is 100% worth checking out. All of these presentations are really required viewing/reading.

• Check out this video around how to use Google’s Sheet’s new Smart Fill option.

• Check more than one URL in the Way Back Machine at a time.

Heads up: Google’s Lighthouse now powers GTMetrix 

That’s it for this month. I hope you’re still healthy and safe and that you have a chance to recharge during the upcoming holiday season!

Stay safe!
Katherine
 

Katherine Watier Ong WO Strategies LLC www.wostrategies.com