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How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).

how long does a site need to wait for Google to process a quality change and the answer was at least two months - one month won't cut it. And this applies to both Google Search and Google Discover, it isn't different. John said he would guess for a large site a couple of months would give Google a chance to understand it better. A month is too little to see a significant impact.

John then goes into explaining that for a site that produces a lot of new content often, then Google will "focus essentially on the newer content on the main category sections of the web site." Because of the structure of your site, you are giving your newer content more prominence on your web site and Google will focus its crawling and indexing more on that newer content. John said if you are constantly creating new content, then that is where Google will shift its focus on.

if you're looking at an overall quality issue with regards to your website and you have kind of this reference part that's really important for your website but it's really low quality then we will still balance that low quality part with your newer quality news content and try to find some some middle ground there with regards to how we understand the quality of your website overall.

Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic May 27, 2010 at 11:02am ET by Vanessa Fox Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks. These frequent changes are one reason Google itself downplays algorithm updates. Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic. However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A,  ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.” I asked Google for more specifics and they told me that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before. Based on Matt’s comment, this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic. This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with “item” pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them. For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite. Based on Matt’s comment at Google I/O, the pages that are now ranking well for these long tail queries are from “higher quality” sites (or perhaps are “higher quality” pages). My complete speculation is that perhaps the relevance algorithms have been tweaked a bit. Before, pages that didn’t have high quality signals might still rank well if they had high relevance signals. And perhaps now, those high relevance signals don’t have as much weight in ranking if the page doesn’t have the right quality signals. What’s a site owner to do? It can be difficult to create compelling content and attract links to these types of pages. My best suggestion to those who have been hit by this is to isolate a set of queries for which the site now is getting less traffic and check out the search results to see what pages are ranking instead. What qualities do they have that make them seen as valuable? For instance, I have no way of knowing how amazon.com has faired during this update, but they’ve done a fairly good job of making individual item pages with duplicated content from manufacturer’s databases unique and compelling by the addition of content like of user reviews. They have set up a fairly robust internal linking (and anchor text) structure with things like recommended items and lists. And they attract external links with features such as the my favorites widget. From the discussion at the Google I/O session, this is likely a long-term change so if your site has been impacted by it, you’ll likely want to do some creative thinking around how you can make these types of pages more valuable (which should increase user engagement and conversion as well). Update on 5/30/10: Matt Cutts from Google has posted a YouTube video about the change. In it, he says “it’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries.” He recommends that a site owner who is impacted evaluate the quality of the site and if the site really is the most relevant match for the impacted queries, what “great content” could be added, determine if the the site is considered an “authority”, and ensure that the page does more than simply match the keywords in the query and is relevant and useful for that query. He notes that the change: has nothing to do with the “Caffeine” update (an infrastructure change that is not yet fully rolled out). is entirely algorithmic (and isn’t, for instance, a manual flag on individual sites). impacts long tail queries more than other types was fully tested and is not temporary

Soovle — Scrapes Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Answers.com to generate hundreds of keyword ideas from a seed keyword. Very powerful tool, although the UI could do with some work.Hemingway Editor — Improves the clarity of your writing by highlighting difficult to read sentences, “weak” words, and so forth. A must-have tool for bloggers (I use it myself).

Yandex Metrica — 100% free web analytics software. Includes heat maps, form analytics, session reply, and many other features you typically wouldn’t see in a free tool.

For example, two of my all-time favourite tools are gInfinity (Chrome extension) and Chris Ainsworth’s SERPs extraction bookmarklet.By combining these two free tools, you can extract multiple pages of the SERPs (with meta titles + descriptions) in seconds.

unlike photos on your website, photos on Google My Business listings don’t get indexed or included in Google Images search.  If you take a photo from your GMB listing and run it through Google Images search, it will return no results, provided the image isn’t also hosted anywhere else online.

How Google’s Selective Link Priority Impacts SEO (2023 Study)

First Link Priority

only have selected one of the links from a given page.

This is the first time Google has confirmed it is moving a large number of sites to this mobile-first indexing process. Google did tell us last October that a limited number of sites had been moved over. But this Google announcement makes it sound like the process of mobile-first indexing on a larger scale has already begun.

June 18, 2009 Evidence of Page Level Google Penalties? Richard at SEO Gadget showed how Google seemed to have penalized specific pages of his site from ranking in the Google index. The penalty seemed to be fair, in that there were nasty comments that slipped through his comment spam filter. The drop in traffic can be seen by the keyword phrases that page ranked well for. He noticed a ~70% drop in traffic for that phrase, which in his case resulted in a 15% drop in his Google traffic and a 5% drop in overall traffic. What I find extra fun is that a Google Search Quality Analyst, @filiber, tweeted: Google Page level penalty for comment spam – rankings and traffic drop http://bit.ly/JNAly (via @AndyBeard) <- interesting read! Of course that is not admission to this as a fact, but it wouldn't be too hard to believe that bad comments caused such a decline. Now, I don't think this would be considered a keyword-specific penalty, which most SEOs believe in, but rather a specific page being penalized. Forum discussion at Sphinn.

if you’re currently getting good traffic from Google News and Top Stories, don’t change any part of your domain name.

don’t change section URLs unless you really need to.

Including folder names in the URL can help Google identify relevant entities that apply to the section, but there doesn’t need to be a hierarchical relationship.