Group items tagged

Cons of Microdata

if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, it is going to push you over the limit of the number of links that Google Search Console will give back to you in the various reports about links

Google cuts off at 100,000 total links

even though we know Google is ignoring most of these links, they don't label that for us in any kind of useful fashion. Even after we can get access to all of that link data, all of those hundreds of thousands of spammy links, we still can't be certain which ones matter and which ones don't.

Can it be problematic if our https site links out to non-https external sources in our content (or they were http at the time but 301'd to https

No, that's fine from an SEO point of view. From a security POV linking directly to the HTTPS version when it exists is better, but sometimes HSTS helps. For embedding (images, iframes), you need to use HTTPS

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).

JSON-LD scripts can be added to a web page in a manner that can be templated within a website, making it easy to add, update and remove.

John Mueller answered:“We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data that are kind of come out for JSON-LD first.

In short: Google’s clearly become so confident in RankBrain’s mysterious capabilities that it’s now used to help with every query that the search engine handles, more than two trillion per year.

Having said that, Google has said that RankBrain also is used as an actual ranking signal, repeating that yesterday at our SMX Advanced show.For the SEO and search marketers worried about what they should do now that RankBrain has ramped up, the answer remains the same: nothing, but focus on great content. Even people at Google don’t quite understand how RankBrain does what it does, we’ve been told. Honest. But it’s ultimately designed to reward great content. So focus on that, which has always been the case with SEO, and you’re on the right track.

Google describes BERT as the largest change to its search system since the company introduced RankBrain, almost five years ago, and probably one of the largest changes in search ever.

it is not so much a one-time algorithmic change, but rather a fundamental layer which seeks to help with understanding and disambiguating the linguistic nuances in sentences and phrases, continually fine-tuning itself and adjusting to improve.

BERT achieved state-of-the-art results on 11 different natural language processing tasks.  These natural language processing tasks include, amongst others, sentiment analysis, named entity determination, textual entailment (aka next sentence prediction), semantic role labeling, text classification and coreference resolution. BERT also helps with the disambiguation of words with multiple meanings known as polysemous words, in context.

No control over your robots.txt file The problem. Shopify does not allow store owners to edit their robots.txt file. This is an issue because the platform creates duplicate URLs for products associated with a collection/category page. “The ideal solution would be to use robots.txt disallow directives to block these pages from being crawled in the first place,” Kevin Wallner, founder of First Chair Digital, told Search Engine Land, noting that, while Shopify does add canonical tags pointing back to the correct product URL, this does not prevent the duplicate URLs from being crawled and potentially indexed. Solutions: Editing your Shopify theme, as discussed in our technical SEO for Shopify guide, is one way to resolve this issue. Alternatively, pages not included in your robots.txt file can be hidden from search engines by customizing the section of your theme’s layout file, as detailed on this Shopify help page. You can also use an app such as Sitemap & NoIndex Manager to add noindex tags and remove URLs from your sitemap, Wallner suggested. “Unfortunately this won’t work for duplicate product URLs, but it works for several other special Shopify page types with little to no SEO value, so it’s still a good move,” he said. Related: Shopify SEO Guide: How to increase organic traffic to your store Wallner also advised that store owners avoid linking to duplicate URLs in their header, footer, sidebars, breadcrumbs and within the text on their pages. If particular pages have earned important backlinks, store owners can also get in touch with webmasters to request that they link to the preferred URL.

Shopify stores generally score 20 or less on Google’s mobile PageSpeed Insights, with first contentful paint taking about 3.5 seconds, he added

Duplicate product pages are also a facet of Shopify. As an inherent characteristic of the framework Shopify is built on, category pages link to duplicate product pages, and although they do canonical back to the correct landing page, this may dilute link equity and make it more difficult for search engines to determine which page from their index they should favor.

“The reason this is just a bit riskier . . . is you’re setting up your entire website architecture around duplicate pages,” said Long, “Basically, every single category page on the site . . . is going to push internal links to duplicate product pages, but all of the product pages that are getting internal links technically aren’t eligible to rank in the search engines.” A solution for this does exist, you can read about it in our guide to technical SEO for Shopify.

Eliminating alternate URLs. Fortunately, there is a known solution

Google’s page experience algorithm update is starting to roll out now and will be completed by the end of August 2021.

The page experience update considers several signals that go into creating an optimal browsing experience for users.Google assesses each of the signals and gives a website an overall ‘page experience’ score. Site owners can view their score in the new page experience report in Search Console.These are each of the signals and what is required to achieve a “good” page experience score.Core Web Vitals: See our guide to Google’s Core Web Vitals.Mobile usability: A page must have no mobile usability errors.Security issues: Any security issues for a site disqualify all pages on the site from a Good status.HTTPS usage: A page must be served over HTTPS to be eligible for Good page experience status.Ad Experience: A site must not use advertising techniques that are distracting, interrupting, or otherwise not conducive to a good user experience.

If there is no consumer need for individual variant pages and no actual benefit to the end-user, use a single page and apply canonical links to the variants.

Google MUM, or Multitask Unified Model, is the latest algorithmic successor for the search engine giant. Google has called MUM “a new AI milestone inside of Google search.

It basically gathers subcategories for the query and delivers a more holistic picture for the benefit of the end user. MUM is particularly attuned to comparisons for an umbrella of related queries.

One thing that’s interesting about MUM is that it understands things across text and images. In the future, Google expects to be able to incorporate audio and video in the omnichannel mix, too.