I’m back! Need to take a few weeks off the SEO news beat to focus on client work. Our little agency is growing, fast. It feels good, but it also means long days and weird nights. I missed the free, public therapy writing Backlink Breakers provided, so here we are, back to the SEO news-update-grind, with 30% less sleep and 33.33% more mania.
The News
Moz launched a free domain analysis tool that allows you to find high-level SEO metrics for any site, The data includes link counts, top keywords, and proprietary scoring metrics to help gauge domain quality. I’ve always favored Moz’s content marketing over the actual products, but this is a super useful tool for quick research and comparison.
Video SEI value continues to rise, and a new Search Console “Videos” report helps SEOs better understand the performance video content in search results. Personally, its been frustrating to see video content take up so much search real estate, but be totally incapable of getting good data at scale (like tracking ranking in Search Console). I can stop crying now, because this new report now provides all the standard performance metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR, position) for video results! I’ve already used this feature on a few client reports, and it rules.
Google officially confirmed a core algorithm update ran on September 24th, making it the 3rd core update of 2019. Recent reports indicate this update targeted Your Money or Your Life sites, but there also seemed to be fluctuation around sites with thin content. This points to Google’s focus on updates targeting content signals over technical signals. Another clear sign form marterse that quality content, and creating materials that match customer and searcher intent, are vital to modern SEO success.
Google launched a new feature that displays a mobile search by photos option on selected GMB pages. The simple takeaway: add relevant business photos to your GMB listing.
Chrome will start blocking mixed content to help improve web security. Basically, if you serve anything over http:// on your https:// page, Chrome will automatically block it from visitors. This is a good change, and well-developed web pages shouldn’t be serving mixed content anyway. Run an audit on your site to check for these issues to make sure you don’t get hit by this update (and more importantly, to protect the security of your users!)
Google moved the change of address tool from the legacy version to the new Search Console. This helps streamline the process of moving a domain or subdomain without loosing SEO.
Ranking Factors
Rel=sponsored and rel=ugc do not change pagerank flow, they only carry extra information to Google about the links.
Links do not expire, but in certain cases they become less important over time. The example is a CNN link on the homepage is important, but years later if that article is deep in the CNN domain’s archive, the link is less important (in Google’s eyes). This ia good reminder, treat link building as part of the production process! As you write and produce, you should build links. Keep links fresh just as you keep content fresh!
HTML sitemaps don’t help with SEO.
