Google’s finally cracking down on the review rich snippet spam that’s been plaguing search results for years. This will not only help reduce self-serving review markup in SERP, but Google has finally provided clear guidelines for writing code that’s eligible for rich snippet placement. Huge win! I can give back that crying towel now.
The News
A study from BrightEdge found that organic search drives 53% of traffic across the web, and continues to be the dominate source of trackable digital traffic. Despite all the “zero click” fear mongering my fellow SEO practitioners, organic traffic share has actually been growing, while other channels like social media remained flat (around 5% of traffic). It’s nice a nice perspective jolt to remind us just how valuable organic search is in the modern marketing mix. Maybe I should charge more?
Google announced a major update to review rich results. Basically, Google is clamping down on the types of reviews displayed as rich results in search (the yellow stars you see in results). Google will now only show certain types of reviews (full list available in original announcement) and will not display self-serving reviews. Self serving reviews are defined as reviews about a product or business placed on the website of that business. This self serving review block is reserved for LocalBusiness and Organization schema types. Multiple tools are already reporting big drops in the number review rich results showing up in SERPs.
A new breadcrumb structured data report in Google search console makes it easier debug breadcrumb issues. Excellent!
Yoast 12.1 just launched, adding the Google favicon feature and new Schema filters to give SEOs more control over key aspects of markup.
Ranking Factors
