Did you notice any dramatic traffic or rank changes this week? The SEO community is buzzing around a new Google algorithm update, but nothing's been officially confirmed by Google. Phantom algorithm updates are like Prime Day for SEOs, but instead of killer ecommerce deals, we get to argue on Twitter. It’s awesome.
The News
Businesses with Google messaging enabled now get a massive call to action button on local knowledge panels from branded queries. If you’ve got this CTA on your listing, be prepared for an increase in new messages.
LinkedIn Premium subscribers can now promote company services and show up in search results for related queries. This is a great feature to drive SMB leads through LinkedIn. Scheduled to go live for all US-based businesses this fall.
The new release of Yoast 11.7 focuses on podcast indexing and improvements to FAQ and HowTo structured data. Great timing with the addition of podcasts in Google search results and increasing prevalence of structured data.
Google fixed the broken review bug. Finally.
You can now edit your Google business profile from the Google Maps iOS app.
Facebook is changing the aspect ratios on the mobile news feed from 2:3 to 4:5. This means less text, and less brand real estate in general, along with a new format to prepare for videos (videos not in 4:5 will be masked).
Ranking Factors
Google reviews your site in comparison to other sites talking about the same content.
For YMYL content, specifically in the health space, your writers should be experts, or you should have experts review your work.
If you change a URL, you should redirect the old URL to the new URL.
I feel terrible about this, but here is an emoji ranking strategy... sigh. Emoji search results return different content versus text counterparts, and they often display YouTube video carousels. If you use an emoji in your video title on YouTube, it correlates to ranking for that same emoji in Google search. Ok, I'm done.
Don’t obsess over the length of your content, long pages aren’t necessarily bad or good. Test for UX and create pages that are right for your audience and topic.
Videos inclusion in search results is an algorithmic decision, there’s nothing you can do with technical optimization to get video to trigger for a specific query.
The number of slashes in a url doesn’t matter.
Google doesn’t judge "real-ness" of author names.
