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Another clear trend resulting from this update seems to be Google favoring websites, particularly when users are searching for sensitive YMYL keywords, that are able to provide a higher level of trust. The main beneficiaries of this focus are websites with a strong brand profile and a broad topical focus. On the flipside, this has meant that niche websites dealing with these topics have seen their rankings fall.

An analysis conducted by Malte Landwehr, VP Product at Searchmetrics, suggests that Google’s algorithm has increased its weighting of user signals when calculating rankings. The results show that domains that improved their SEO Visibility following the Google Core Update have higher values for time on site and page views per visit, and lower bounce rates than their online competitors.

when checking queries that dropped and their corresponding landing pages, they line up with the problems I have been surfacing. For example, thin content, empty pages, pages that had render issues, so on and so forth.

Author expertise is extremely important, especially for YMYL content.

Also, and this is important, the site consumes a lot of syndicated content. I’ve mentioned problems with doing this on a large scale before and it seems this could be hurting the site now. Many articles are not original, yet they are published on this site with self-referencing canonical tags (basically telling Google this is the canonical version). I see close to 2K articles on the site that were republished from other sources

Small changes make a big impact. Google’s first point is that often with large sites, making small changes can make a big impact and return when it comes to search rankings. Google plotted the growth of one of the 7,000 websites, the Google My Business marketing site, showing how adding canonicals, hreflang to their XML sitemaps, and improving their metadata all resulted in gains in their organic traffic in search.Here is that chart:

Here is the chart showing the improvement after making the AMP error fixes:

Consolidation. For the past several years, many SEOs have been saying “less is more.” Meaning, having fewer sites and fewer pages with higher quality content often leads to better SEO results. Google says that works for them and they have been working on consolidating their sites. Google said they found a “large number” of near duplicate sites across their properties.“Duplicate content is not only confusing for users, it’s also confusing for search engines,” Google said. Google added, “Creating one great site instead of multiple microsites is the best way to encourage organic growth over time.”In one case study Google provided with the Google Retail site, they took six old websites and consolidated the content. They made “one great website” and it lead to them doubling the site’s call-to-action click-through rate and increased organic traffic by 64%.

Smart campaigns for small business Along with Google’s recent rebranding of AdWords to Google Ads, they announced the arrival of a new automated campaign type for small businesses, called Smart Campaigns. This campaign type, now available in the US, is built on top of AdWords Express, and according to Google, it can produce significantly better results. For now, this will become the default campaign type for new advertisers. The target users of this type of campaign might have chosen AdWords Express or Local Service Ads in the past, and those options will remain available until further notice from Google. If a small business decides to work with an agency or wants to venture into PPC management, it can still opt for the full Google Ads experience. This means they can choose from varying levels of automation and make decisions about where to trade off using machine learning to drive results with manual management that provides more control.

What is automated In the case of Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA, Target ROAS and Enhanced CPC, Google automatically predicts the likelihood of conversions by looking at auction-time signals including device, location, language, dayparts and more. These predictions feed the automated bids that are used for every unique auction. What still needs to be done manually While Google can predict changes in conversion rate and conversion value based on a variety of factors that are widely applicable across a range of advertisers, these systems don’t yet consider unique factors that impact individual advertisers. This means that advertisers should supplement “automated” bid strategies with a management methodology that changes targets based on business-specific conversion factors. Things like flash sales, coverage in the media, weather, social media buzz and so on can all impact how an ad campaign converts, but these factors may not be apparent to Google’s machine learning, so the advertiser who is aware of these factors must do active bid management. But instead of managing things by changing a max CPC bid, management now entails changing the target.

When we searched for presidents, a carousel of presidents in chronological order was presented, and when we click an image, the context is carried with it, something that does not occur when we search a president in isolation.

an entity is not simply a person, place or thing but also its characteristics.

There are a few key ways that Google determines the relatedness of entities, but one key mechanism that comes up repeatedly is the co-occurrence of the entities in the same resources.

All of the other major platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, recognize Open Graph tags. Twitter actually has its own meta tags for Twitter Cards, but if Twitter robots cannot find any, Twitter uses Open Graph tags instead.

The tags can affect conversions and click-through rates hugely

Adding Open Graph tags to your website won’t directly affect your on-page SEO, but it will influence the performance of your links on social media

Depending on the type of website, sometimes organization markup fits best on the home page.Other times it may fit in on the contact page

Some companies may put review markup on every page in hopes that a star rating is shown for all pages in search results.That’s not a good practice, Mueller says.

The Structured Snippets feature will indicate information such as the date of upcoming events, features included in a service, product specifications, etc. In the case of a listed event, the feature may show along with a link to bring you to the event's webpage on the site

Using the arrow buttons on the sides of the carousel, you can move from one tweet to the next. The time of the tweet's posting, as well as a direct link to the specific tweet

expect the Carousel (Black) feature to predominantly display images with ancillary text underneath each image against a black background. The carousel is commonly known to appear in relation to movie titles, musical artists, book titles etc. Generally speaking, this form of carousel appears when there are more than four results to display within it.

Here is a Summary of Our Key Findings: 1. The #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 31.7%. 2. The #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to a page in #10 spot. 3. Organic CTR for positions 7-10 is virtually the same. Therefore moving up a few spots on the bottom of the first page may not result in more organic traffic. 4. On average, moving up 1 spot in the search results will increase CTR by 30.8%. However, this depends on where you’re moving from and to. Moving from position #3 to position #2 will usually result in a significant CTR boost. However, moving from #10 #9 doesn’t make a statistically significant difference. 5. Title tags that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR vs. pages that don’t have a question in their title. 6. Title tags between 15 to 40 characters have the highest CTR. According to our data, pages with a title tag length between 15 and 40 characters have an 8.6% higher CTR compared to those that are outside of that range. 7. URLs that contain a keyword have a 45% higher click through rate compared to URLs that don’t contain a keyword. 8. Adding “Power Words” to your title tag may decrease your CTR. We found that titles with Power Words had a 13.9% lower CTR compared to titles that didn’t contain Power Words. 9. Emotional titles may improve your CTR. We found that titles with positive or negative sentiment improved CTR by approximately 7%. 10. Writing meta descriptions for your pages may result in a higher CTR. Pages with a meta description get 5.8% more clicks than those without a description. I have detailed data and information of our analysis below.

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).

a growing black market in which some companies pay for fake positive reviews, while others are seemingly being extorted by web firms who post negative comments then propose their "review-fixing" services to get them taken down.

When CBC News asked Google about Riverbend's complaints, including Pereira's own fake review, it was finally removed — along with 32 other one-star reviews. And as a result, the company's star rating went up from 3.6 to 4.1 overnight. 

There is no evidence that Google is planning to turn away from algorithm-based content moderation, or make the kind of massive human investments that Toscano and others are calling for.

unlike the other three types of posts, COVID posts get their own special spot in the knowledge panel.

the average click-through rate on all the posts in our study was half a percent

when you are tracking the results from posts, that what you see inside Google My Business Insights is not going to match what you see inside Google Analytics.

1. Reputation In Your Title Tag You have control over the meta title tag and can change it as we outline above to include your overall rating and review count. Especially if you are optimizing this title tag for a page dedicated to reviews you can also let the user know you are displaying all of your reviews in one place, offering them a lot of data and efficiency. GatherUp customers would benefit here from showing all of their 1st- and 3rd-party reviews in the Review Widget. 2. Reputation In Your Meta Description

Posting about a single topic looks much better than having a long post that lists all your services.

we have not found that the content used in the Google Post has any impact on ranking, (for example: posting about “dog bites” doesn’t make you rank higher for “dog bite lawyer) so I would suggest focusing your posts on keywords you’re already ranking for that could use a boost in click-through-rate.

While it’s true that edits are tied to your whole Google account, it is the consistency and reliability of your edits that truly give you influence. There are a series of checks and balances that allow factual edits to grant you more trust. I have seen edits from a Level 3 guide get accepted immediately and those from a Level 8 guide go into a ‘not applied’ status immediately

Since the criteria to become a Local Guide is entirely based on the quantity of actions taken (rating/reviewing a business, suggesting business edits, etc.) rather than quality, it’s extremely common for bad actors to become a Local Guide