TopListWP

Google Search Console products rich result report error handling updated

Google has made a change to the rich result reports for product structured data on December 28, 2021. This rich results report is viewable in Google Search Console and the change may result in the number of product entities and issues being different from previous days.

What changed. Google said the search company “changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Product structured data.” Google did not specify any more details than that.

The impact of the change. As a result of that change, Google said “you may see changes in the number of Product entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in the severity of some issues from errors to warnings.”

Google will annotate the report so that if you see a decrease or increase in these numbers, it might be related to the change Google made on its reporting end and nothing you changed on your end. Again, it might just be a reporting change and the Google search results have not changed.

If you notice changes in the product-rich results report in Google Search Console, do not panic, it is a confirmed change on Google’s end. If you didn’t make any changes to your site around this date, there is even less reason to be concerned.

You should still review all the errors, issues, and warnings Google specified in this report and resolve those issues going forward.

Read more: Google Search Console products rich result report error handling updated

Google algorithm updates 2021 in review: Core updates, product reviews, page experience and beyond

From an SEO perspective, 2021 can be summed up as stressful — not just because of several algorithmic updates throughout the year but also possibly because of the timing of some of those updates. With the COVID vaccine rollout, some businesses began returning to normal, but then the Delta and Omicron variant threw everything for a loop — was it just too much to handle for some?

It may have been a bit too much to handle for Google as well: The search engine launched Page Experience update late, never hit its deadline for the mobile-first indexing this year, and seemed to rush out two late. big algorithmic updates towards the end of the year.

June 2021 core update. Google took a while to release its first core update of the year, the June 2021 core update, which began rolling out on June 2, 2021. That update finished rolling out about ten days after it started, on June 12, 2021. This core update seemed to have been a slow rollout that had a bunch of mixed results based on the data given to us by several data providers.

Read more: Google algorithm updates 2021 in review: Core updates, product reviews, page experience and beyond

Google now lets you place products at the top of your local and Maps listing

Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, has a new feature in the products section that lets you mark a product as “special.” After you mark a product as special, that product will be moved to the top of the products you listed in your Google Business Profile listing.

What it looks like. Here is the setting in the Google Business Profile products section that says “Mark as Special.” It says “products marked Special is shown at the top of the page.”

Clearly, some local SEOs and businesses wanted a method to promote products to the top of the page. This gives them a way to feature one or more products higher up in their Google local search listings and Google Maps listings.

Read more: Google now lets you place products at the top of your local and Maps listing

December 27 & 28 Google Search Ranking Algorithm Jolt?

Around December 27th and 28th, we may have a Google search ranking algorithm jolt or quick tremor. I highly doubt Google pushed out something over the holidays, this last week of December. But it might just be some weird change that jolted the search results (like that even happens as I am describing).

There was a spike in SEO chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums starting late December 26th through December 28th and some, but not all, of the automated Google tracking tools, showed blips around December 27th and 28th. It is not unusual for Google’s search results to fluctuate without Google manually pushing an algorithm update, but this jolt seems stronger than normal fluctuations. Maybe it was some sort of weird bottleneck or something, I have no idea.

Our Google traffic and overall numbers have increased noticeably in the past couple of days, which frankly comes as a surprise for an international travel-planning site. The growth is in line with our standard pre-COVID traffic pattern: a low for the year before Christmas, followed by a slow but steady climb toward our annual summer peak starting around Christmas or New Year’s.

Read more: December 27 & 28 Google Search Ranking Algorithm Jolt?

Google: We Can Handle Really Long HTML Sizes Unlike Bing

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter when it comes to really long HTML file sizes, Google can handle it – and you should not worry about it. The question came up when someone shared a screenshot of Bing Webmaster Tools giving a notice that the “HTML size is too long.”

The SEO asked “Does Google have a limit on crawling long pages – Bing Flags some of our long posts as HTML Size is too long.” Google does have a limit but most pages won’t come to that limit.

John responded “we don’t have a documented limit, last I saw someone check it was 10’s-100’s of MB, so I wouldn’t worry about that.” John did add that it might impact your page speed and core web vitals metrics. He said “giant HTML pages do slow things down, so it’s probably still something to keep on your to-do list.”

Here is a screenshot of the Bing Webmaster Tools notice and to be clear, this is a notice and it does not mean Bing cannot handle it.

Read more: Google: We Can Handle Really Long HTML Sizes Unlike Bing

More news:

SEO 2021 year in review: Endless updates, title rewrites, GMB becomes GBP, and more

PPC 2021 in review: Privacy and automation force advertisers to adapt

Non-stop updates: SEOs share the impact on their day-to-day, work-life balance, and career outlook

Google On How To Improve SEO Audits

Google’s Martin Splitt offers advice on how to improve SEO audits in a way that makes them more useful to web developers.

A number of tips are shared in the second episode of Google’s SEO & Devs web series on YouTube, which is dedicated to the topic of SEO audits.

Bartosz Goralewicz, CEO of Onely, joins Splitt to provide recommendations on what works best, based on first-hand experience between his team and his clients.

This episode is worth listening to in full, as you’re certain to learn something that will improve your working relationship with developers and stakeholders.

Here’s just a sample of what’s included in the 30+ minute video.

Ditch The PDF Reports

Splitt recommends replacing PDF reports with more efficient forms of communication.

The issue with delivering SEO audits via PDF report is they often state what’s wrong with a site without saying what needs to be done to fix it.

Another problem with these reports is they’re not always aligned with the goals of the website.

Improve SEO Audits With Better Communication

Bartosz says the key to delivering better SEO audits is to communicate more thoroughly with stakeholders and developers.

“Usually we start with stakeholders… we talk to the stakeholders, we hop on a call before creating any offers or anything. We hop on a call and talk about what’s the KPI, what’s the problem, what are the challenges, why are we even doing that.

Why is this so important? Why do you want to fix that? Because if traffic is the only metric we still will work withthem, but we know how this might go. So we’re going to start with that.”

Starting the audit process with establishing stakeholder goals can help prevent you from delivering useless SEO audits, like the ones Splitt discussed in the section above.

Source: Google On How To Improve SEO Audits

Google Merchant Center allows retailers to save product filters

The ability to save product filters has been spotted in Google Merchant Center. We’ve reached out to Google for more details about this feature but have not received a response at the time of publication.

Tip of the hat to Kirk Williams of ZATO Marketing for bringing this to our attention.

This nifty, albeit minor, update can save marketers some time that might otherwise be spent fumbling through data to find what they’re looking for. Being able to save product filters enables marketers to more quickly analyze different product categories, such as clearance items, for example.

Source: Google Merchant Center allows retailers to save product filters

Google rolls out placement exclusions for Smart Shopping campaigns

The ability to exclude undesirable ad placements for Smart Shopping campaigns has been spotted in the Google Ads interface. Placement exclusions can be applied to the Google Display Network and YouTube, according to the screenshot (below).

We’ve reached out to Google for more details about this feature but have not received a response at the time of publication. Tip of the hat to Davey Stokkers and Fabio Antichi for first spotting this feature, and Gianpaolo Lorusso for bringing it to our attention.

More and more consumers are seeking to purchase from brands that align with their ethics and values. Being able to control what your ads appear alongside can help you prevent unwanted brand associations, which can, in turn, affect your conversion rates.

Additionally, Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will be bundled into Performance Max campaigns sometime in 2022. It’s not clear whether placement exclusions will still be available when that occurs. We will update this article with more details when we receive a response from Google.

Source: Google rolls out placement exclusions for Smart Shopping campaigns

Google Search Console testing announcement bar

Google is testing a new announcement bar or tab at the top of the Google Search Console interface. The bar does not yet seem to function properly but has three levels of announcements depending on the urgency of the information.

Types of announcements. Google Search Console shows these three types of announcements bars:

• Informational announcement
• Minor issue announcement
• Major issue announcement

What it looks like. Here is a screen shot of what it currently looks like, although, clicking on them currently does not do anything:

It seems Google will be able to use this to communicate issues with Google Search directly to site owners. Again, this is not fully functioning right now but I suspect it is rolling out soon.

Source: Google Search Console testing announcement bar

Waymo will partner with China’s Geely to develop electric robotaxis

Waymo is teaming up with Chinese carmaker Geely to build electric, fully autonomous robotaxis for the United States.

The self-driving arm of Google (GOOGL) parent company Alphabet announced the partnership Tuesday, calling the deployment of the cars a big part of its commitment to “expanding access to sustainable transportation.

“Both firms said in press releases that the ride-hailing cars would be designed and developed by Zeekr, Geely’s electric mobility brand, at a facility in Sweden using “a new proprietary and open-source mobility architecture.”

Once the cars are delivered to Waymo in the United States, they’ll be set up with autonomous driving technology called Waymo Driver.

The companies did not say exactly when the vehicles would hit the streets. A blog post on Waymo’s website said the cars would be introduced within its Waymo One fleet “in the years to come.”Waymo has said its self-driving vans have given tens of thousands of rides since the company launched a public robotaxi service in Chandler, Arizona, more than a year ago.

Source: Waymo will partner with China’s Geely to develop electric robotaxis

More News:

Popular WordPress platform Flywheel vulnerable to subdomain takeover, researcher claims

DuckDuckGo To Release Desktop Version Of Mobile App

SMS Marketing For Local Business: Trends You’ll Need In 2022

SEO 2021 year in review: Endless updates, title rewrites, GMB becomes GBP, and more

In 2021, SEOs faced a flurry of Google updates (including the highly anticipated yet possibly-overhyped Page Experience update), new search results page features like continuous scrolling, and countless other updates that could potentially affect visibility for their brands — all while operating amid the second year of the COVID pandemic.

From core updates and title change fiascos to improved shopping options and new ways of tracking data, this year was full of surprises. Here’s our look back at the most impactful SEO news, tactics, and tools of 2021.

Google algorithm updates

Core updates. Google released three major core updates — one in June, one in July and one in November. The first caused a lot of search volatility, with tools like MozCast reaching a temperature of 107.3°F on June 3. The July update continued this spike until it all died down around July 12.

On November 17, Google announced a third, somewhat surprising core update, just days before the Thanksgiving holiday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. According to many tracking tools, this update had higher volatility than June and July’s. Due to the speedy rollout and widespread ranking shifts, many SEOs rightfully wondered why Google chose this time of year to release such a large update.

Page title rewrites. Of all the algorithm updates from this past year, the changes to Google’s page title rewrites in the search engine results pages (SERPs) were the most controversial. Marketers began noticing significant changes to their SERP titles around mid-August.

Passage indexing. Google introduced passage indexing, an algorithm tweak that ranks segmented pieces of content on a page, to the SERPs in early February. Google now displays these passages as featured snippets and links users to that particular part of the page.

Read more: SEO 2021 year in review: Endless updates, title rewrites, GMB becomes GBP, and more

It’s A Wrap: December 2021 Google Product Reviews Update Done Rolling Out

Google said on Tuesday, December 21, 2021, that the December 2021 Google product reviews update is now fully rolled out. Alan Kent from Google shared this news on Twitter after I asked him for an update – he said “the Google product review update is fully rolled out.”

The update started 20 days ago on December 1, 2021, so just under a full three weeks as the original announcement said it would take.

Google Product Reviews Update Quick Facts

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

• Name: Google December 2021 Product Reviews Update
• Launched: December 1, 2021 at around 12:30pm ET
• Finished: December 21, 2021 (mostly to all data centers)
• Rollout: It will take about three weeks to fully rollout
• Targets: It looks at product review content
• Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards “insightful analysis and original research.”
• Not a core update: Many are going to say this is a core update, it is not.
• English Only: This is only looking at English-language content right now, this is a global launch but only for English content at this point.
• Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
• Discover: This update can impact your performance in Google Discover, Google previously said.
• Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s advice below
• Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. This may be the first refresh that Google has done, it is the first refresh Google communicated about.

Read more: It’s A Wrap: December 2021 Google Product Reviews Update Done Rolling Out

John Mueller Of Google Providing Webmaster Support on Christmas Again

Google’s John Mueller again, actually since 2007, year-after-year, has jumped into the Google support forums and on social media to answer webmaster questions on Google Search. It is a tradition for him, now 14 years and going. He carves out time to help those on Christmas even and day with their Google search and SEO issues.

This year, on Christmas eve he even did a Google SEO office-hours video hangout to answer questions.

So many were appreciative that John did this on the eve of Christmas.

Here are the previous years of John offering support on Christmas. He did it last year in 2020, 2019 and in 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007. And this year again, he is out there on social media and in the Google support forums helping webmasters.

Here are just some of his responses to webmasters he posted on Christmas eve and day, above and beyond.

Read more: John Mueller Of Google Providing Webmaster Support on Christmas Again

Google Keeps Track Of Algorithm Changes But It’s Hard To Use Even Internally

Alan Bleiweiss, a smart and fun SEO, asked John Mueller of Google if Google has a “Google Book of Secrets” where it stores all the algorithmic changes it makes in a single location. The short answer is, yes, Google does store all the changes it makes but the long answer from John is that it isn’t always useful.

The question came up at the 38:26 mark where Alan asked “does Google have someone tasked with the job of recording each update in a logbook, and noting which aspects of search are impacted? If so, is it called “Google’s Book of Secrets”?”

John Mueller said that yes, Google does document all of the changes it makes but he added that it is hard, even for internal Google purposes, to use that to figure out why a change happened to a specific URL. John said, “it is really hard sometimes to track back, even on our side, which of the changes had an effect here and what caused this difference in rankings.”

Mueller added that even if Google did publish this, which they kind of did in the past, it wouldn’t be helpful. John said, “so even if we gave you this kind of logbook of Google Search change, I think it is really hard to turn that into something useful.”

Read more: Google Keeps Track Of Algorithm Changes But It’s Hard To Use Even Internally

Read more:

PPC 2021 in review: Privacy and automation force advertisers to adapt

Non-stop updates: SEOs share the impact on their day-to-day, work-life balance, and career outlook

Bing launches travel-oriented results pages and a trip-planning hub

Popular WordPress platform Flywheel vulnerable to subdomain takeover, researcher claims

A subdomain takeover vulnerability in a popular WordPress hosting platform could allow an attacker to deploy malicious code to a victim by impersonating a legitimate website, a security researcher claims.

The alleged security flaw was discovered in Flywheel, a platform that offers WordPress hosting and related services.

Takeover

A subdomain takeover occurs when an attacker gains control over a subdomain of a target domain, usually when the subdomain has a canonical name (CNAME) in the Domain Name System (DNS), but no host is providing content for it.

“This can happen because either a virtual host hasn’t been published yet or a virtual host has been removed,” Ahmed Elmalky, who discovered the issue.

The exploit

In a recent blog post, Elmalky claimed he was able to exploit the vulnerability by finding a page that was hosted by Flywheel but wasn’t set up correctly.

He subscribed to Flywheel for $15, created a site, and linked it to the vulnerable subdomain, thus taking it over.

The mitigation

In order to protect against this simple but potentially damaging attack, end users should audit available DNS records and make sure they are aware of how exactly they are used and what type of services or applications are managed on them, Elmalky said.

Response

A spokesperson for WP Engine, of which Flywheel is a part of, said: “We have reviewed all of the posted information, both in the… article and the linked researchers’ articles, and believe this is an artifact of customer-managed DNS records on any platform with a shared IP space, not just Flywheel.

“In other words, though the researchers call out Flywheel, the issue is not specific to Flywheel, nor does Flywheel manage customer domain records.

“On the responsible disclosure front, we are unclear as to whether the researchers notified anyone, given that we have both a public vulnerability disclosure program and an abuse email address that is closely monitored by multiple teams.”

Source: Popular WordPress platform Flywheel vulnerable to subdomain takeover, researcher claims

Google Ads not serving fully on Gmail

Google Ads are not serving to all Gmail users, specific to Gmail users on desktop browsers. Google confirmed the issue in the Google Ads status dashboard over here.

What is the issue. Google said the issue is around Google Ads not being served, and thus the ads not being displayed, to users who use the desktop version of Gmail, Google’s email service.

When did it start. The issue started yesterday, December 23rd, at around 2pm ET or 7:01 PM UTC.

When will it be resolved. Google has not given us an estimated time for the issue to be resolved but the company promised to provide an update by Dec 25, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC “detailing when we expect to resolve the problem,” the company said.

Why we care. If you are running Google Ads for Gmail users, then you may see a dip in the number of ads being served. This is a known issue that Google is working to resolve.

Source: Google Ads not serving fully on Gmail

Multiple State of the Word Attendees Test Positive for COVID-19

Matt Mullenweg’s 2021 State of the Word address was held in New York City nine days ago with a live studio audience. On Sunday, December 19, all in-person attendees were notified by email that they were possibly exposed to COVID-19 after one of the attendees tested positive.

Although proof of vaccination was required at the door, multiple people have reported recent infections after traveling home from the event. Aaron Jorbin tweeted about his case today, and four more have been reported in a private channel on Post Status Slack.

There’s no way to know for certain whether the attendees who contracted COVID-19 caught the virus at the State of the Word, as many of them traveled from far away places and had meetups with other attendees outside of the main event.

Concerns about the lack of masks and no requirement for rapid tests began popping up prior to the event. From the perspective of viewing the livestream, masks were scant and attendees were quite close together in a small space.

The day before the event, the WHO warned that evidence suggested the new Omicron variant could escape prior immunity and would lead to surges with a high transmission rate. Studies were already showing reduced effectiveness of existing vaccines against the variant. On December 13, New York governor Kathy Hochul announced a new temporary indoor mask mandate for public spaces, which could be bypassed by requiring vaccines for entrance.

When asked how the State of the Word’s coordinators decided on the precautions, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy said the event met the local guidelines while allowing attendees to make their own choices for anything beyond the requirements.

Source: Multiple State of the Word Attendees Test Positive for COVID-19

WordPress 5.9 Beta 4 Fixes 20 Bugs, Polishes Workflow for Switching to a Block Theme

WordPress 5.9 beta 4 was released this week with fixes for 20 bugs since beta 3. There are a few important changes to note in this release regarding how the WordPress admin will direct users who are exploring block themes.

Prior to a fix in beta 4, it was possible for users to switch to a block theme within the Customizer. This has been changed so that users will see a banner notifying them that the block theme is incompatible, if they try to switch within the Customizer. Here’s the commit message:

“Starting in 5.9, block themes are not compatible with (do not support) Customizer; rather, they use the Site Editor. Viewing installed themes in Customizer, this commit adds an overlay message to alert users and give them a way to activate the block theme. Clicking on the “Activate” button activates the block theme and redirects back to the Appearance > Themes interface, where the user can then enter the Site Editor for customization.

Non-block themes are not affected by this change and continue to work in Customizer.”

Source: WordPress 5.9 Beta 4 Fixes 20 Bugs, Polishes Workflow for Switching to a Block Theme

Google punches itself in the face by discontinuing the Pixel Slate

Imagine, if you will, a runner five miles into a marathon. At this stage they would have barely started, covering just 20% of the overall distance. Now picture that person stopping mid-stride and punching themselves in the face over and over again until they cascade into unconsciousness.

That runner, friends, is Google.

To sprinkle some context on the tale of self-pugilation: Google has discontinued its flagship tablet, the Pixel Slate. 9to5 Google noticed the tablet — which was launched in 2018 — was no longer listed on the company’s website. The Pixel Slate is dead.

Google discontinuing a product or service isn’t much of a surprise, I mean, there are websites solely dedicated to keeping track of all the things the company has prematurely shuttered.

But the Pixel Slate is a big loss, both to Google and the public at large.

Before we go on, a short disclaimer.

We’ve reached out to Google for a comment and more clarification, but we’re working under the assumption that the company has shifted completely out of selling tablets, rather than readying for a next model. Not only has it half-announced this, the decision is also backed by logic: why would Google remove all traces of the hardware from its site if it was planning to launch something else?

In other words, Google’s tablet aspirations are dead.

But why are you a sadboy about the Pixel Slate?

Simply put, it’s because Google had the potential to make a fantastic, competitive, and affordable machine.

Over the past year, I got bang into tablets again — something I attribute to my time with iPad Pro. Long story short, I now get what tablets are for. I understand their value. And, alongside that, I recognize the importance of competition.

The iPad has long been the dominant tablet across the world and there’s little that’s truly challenging it. Yes, the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Amazon Fire HD are popular and solid devices, but they can’t really match Apple when it comes to quality, usability, and interoperability

But I believe Google could.

Let’s take its Pixel phones as an example. I’ve written before that the company found its sweet spot with the budget-focused “a” series of handsets. These thrive by eschewing the idea of competing as a premium brand — instead making affordable devices that use the cleanest version of Android and perform seamlessly as part of the overall Google ecosystem. In fact, the company seems to have taken this onboard, as with the Pixel 5 it actually removed some features the previous model had, as well as dropping the price.

And you know what? It was one of the best phones of 2020.

This is the approach I would’ve loved Google to take with the Pixel Slate. The original tablet wasn’t perfect — far from it, in fact. Although it was a gorgeous machine, it was overpriced compared to its competitors and it wasn’t entirely clear who it was aimed at.

Source: Google punches itself in the face by discontinuing the Pixel Slate

More News:

DuckDuckGo To Release Desktop Version Of Mobile App

SMS Marketing For Local Business: Trends You’ll Need In 2022

All In One SEO Vulnerability Affects +3 Million Sites

PPC 2021 in review: Privacy and automation force advertisers to adapt

In 2021, PPC professionals navigated changes in keyword match types and automated bidding, scratched their heads at the prospect of a future without third-party cookies, and navigated their role in an increasingly automated industry.

Prompted by the vision that platforms, like Google, have for their services as well as increased concern over user privacy, these changes underscored adaptability as one of the traits that define successful marketers. Below, we’ve summarized the most impactful changes, announcements, and developments that shaped PPC this past year and, in all likelihood, will continue to influence the years ahead as well.

Farewell, broad match modified keywords

In Q1 2021, Google announced a significant change to how it treats phrase match keywords by expanding it to include broad match modifier traffic (BMM).

“Broad match now looks at additional signals in your account to deliver more relevant searches,” Google also announced. These signals include landing pages and keywords in your ad group.

Bundled bid strategies replaced standalone options

Google updated its Smart Bidding in April 2021, bundling the Target CPA (tCPA) and Target ROAS (tROAS) strategies with the Maximize Conversions and Maximize Conversion Value bid strategies.

Three months later, the company removed standalone Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value bid strategies for search campaigns. Shortly after that, Google removed the old tCPA and tROAS options from standard campaigns, effectively completing the bundling of these bid strategies.

FLoC was heavily debated, but not rolled out

With the deprecation of third-party cookies slated for 2022 (which Google later pushed back to the latter half of 2023), it wasn’t much of a surprise when Google first announced that it was testing an alternative targeting technology in October 2020. Known as Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), the proposal was opened for advertiser testing in Q2 2021.

Read more: PPC 2021 in review: Privacy and automation force advertisers to adapt

Messy SEO: Fixing site structure while a Google title change sinks clickthroughs

This installment of “Messy SEO” details my process of working with our marketing, content, and development teams to further clean up the search engine results pages for MarTech. In Part 4, we discussed the issues arising from Google’s title changes and the tactics taken to address them.

SERP title change fallout and improvements

Google’s SERP title changes from August did a number on our MarTech mission page, pulling in irrelevant alt text from our site header logo, making the title link read “Martech is Marketing Logo.”

We tried many tactics to combat this change: resubmitting the page via Google Search Console, adding contextual internal links, and updating the title tag every few days to see if anything changed. And, after months of edits and monitoring the SERPs, Google finally updated the MarTech title tag to reflect our chosen version (shown below).

Our original chosen page title tag read “What is MarTech? …This is MarTech.” We believed Google’s algorithm felt this tag wasn’t clear enough for searchers, so we tweaked it a bit to better highlight the main topic of the page. In a sense, we answered the question we posed in the same tag, inviting searchers to view the page to learn more.

We were thrilled to see Google update this important page’s title in the SERPs. But, after digging into the original change’s effects on MarTech search performance, we saw the true impact of Google’s SERP title alteration.

Google December 2021 product reviews update is finished rolling out

Read more: Messy SEO: Fixing site structure while a Google title change sinks clickthroughs

Google has confirmed that the December 2021 product reviews update is now finished rolling out. This update has officially completed rolling out a few days before Christmas.

The announcement. “The Google product review update is fully rolled out. Thank you!” Google’s Alan Kent wrote on Twitter.

December 2021 product reviews update. As a reminder, the December 2021 product reviews update started to roll out at about 12:30 pm ET on December 1, 2021. This update took 20 days to roll out after it was announced. So this update started on December 1, 2021, and lasted through December December 21, 2021.

When and what was felt. Based on early data, this update was not a small update. It was bigger than the April 2021 product reviews update but also seemed to continue to remain pretty volatile throughout the whole rollout. The community chatter and tracking tools were all at pretty high levels consistently for the past few weeks.

Read more: Google December 2021 product reviews update is finished rolling out

Microsoft Bing’s Shopify integration now live with buy now

The Microsoft Bing and Shopify integration that was previously announced in October is now live in the Bing Shopping and Bing Search results, the company announced.

Microsoft said “we’re excited to share that the experiences are live,” where you can more deeply integrate your Shopify site so Bing has showcased more “diverse products, great prices, and improved discovery of deals.” “With the integration of Shopify, you will now have access to millions of merchants to select from,” Microsoft said.

You can click the “Buy Now” link directly in the Bing search results and be taken directly to the shopping cart page on that Shopify website. Here is a screenshot of this:

Read more: Microsoft Bing’s Shopify integration now live with buy now

Google Search Console accessibility issues fully resolved five days later

Last Thursday, many SEOs noticed that Google Search Console was inaccessible. Google confirmed the issue saying “We’re aware of an issue with Search Console that prevents some users from using the service. We’re working on fixing it and we’ll post an update when the issue is resolved.” The issue was not impacting all users, but it did impact many users.

The issue is now officially resolved, five days after it was first confirmed. Google posted in an update “The issue is now resolved. Thanks for the patience.”

Resolved earlier. I believe this was mostly resolved earlier, like within 48-hours of the issue, but Google probably fully restored access five days later. It is not clear what the issue was exactly but it seemed to me it was around server capacity and resources for the Search Console tools. Again, that is not confirmed but the errors displayed conveyed a 429 Apache error which means “Too Many Requests response status code indicates the user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time (“rate limiting”).”

Read more: Google Search Console accessibility issues fully resolved five days later

More news:

Non-stop updates: SEOs share the impact on their day-to-day, work-life balance, and career outlook

Bing launches travel-oriented results pages and a trip-planning hub

YouTube to automatically link to places mentioned in videos

DuckDuckGo To Release Desktop Version Of Mobile App

DuckDuckGo is working on a desktop version of its mobile app, which offers a private browsing experience that’s said to be faster than Google Chrome.

It’s not a “privacy browser,” as DuckDuckGo makes sure to clarify in an announcement.

Rather, it’s being referred to as: “an everyday browsing app that respects your privacy.”

That could be PR lingo for what actually ends up behaving as a privacy browser, but we’ll have to wait and see when the product officially launches.

What’s the difference between a privacy browser and a private browsing app?

DuckDuckGo says the difference is defined by how its app is built:

“Instead of forking Chromium or anything else, we’re building our desktop app around the OS-provided rendering engines (like on mobile), allowing us to strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers.”

Not to be confused with DuckDuckGo’s extension for the Chrome desktop browser, its private browsing app will be a standalone product.

The desktop app will offer a number of advantages over using Chrome with the DuckDuckGo extension installed.

Source: DuckDuckGo To Release Desktop Version Of Mobile App

Google Ads issue affected a significant subset of users, now resolved

Google has confirmed an issue with Google Ads that is “affecting a significant subset of users,” the company posted on the Google Ads status dashboard. Google updated the dashboard to say the issue is now resolved.

The notice. Google posted at 3:22pm ET “we’re aware of a problem with Google Ads affecting a significant subset of users. We will provide an update by Dec 22, 2021, 1:00 AM UTC detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. The affected users are able to access Google Ads, but may not have access to the most recent data.”

What is the issue. Google wrote that the Google Ads conversions that use non-First/Last Click attribution models, such as Data Driven Attribution, may be delayed up to 24 hours.

Simon Poulton complained about this on Twitter saying “seems like there might be some conversion pipeline latency / undercounting going on with Google Ads today.”

It seems like this is just a reporting issue and hopefully Google will be able to restore that data.

Fixed. Shortly after posting this story, Google updated the status to report the issue is resolved. Google wrote “the problem with Google Ads has been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. The affected users are able to access Google Ads, but may not have access to the most recent data.” “Conversions delayed by this incident, those making use of non-First/Last Click attribution models, are now present in Google Ads,” Google added.

Source: Google Ads issue affected a significant subset of users, now resolved

Google Loses Top Domain Spot To TikTok

Google is no longer the world’s most popular domain after being dethroned by TikTok, according to rankings from web security company Cloudflare.

The list of most popular domains is part of Cloudflare’s Year in Review report and represents domains that gained the most traffic from one year to another.

Google.com — which includes also includes Maps, Translate, and News among others — ended the previous year as the leader in Cloudflare’s rankings.

At that time, TikTok was ranking in the 7th position.

TikTok.com is now ending 2021 with a leap toward top spot ahead of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other world leading domains.

Here’s the full list of the top 10 most popular domains as of late 2021:

1. TikTok.com
2. Google.com
3. Facebook.com
4. Microsoft.com
5. Apple.com
6. Amazon.com
7. Netflix.com
8. YouTube.com
9. Twitter.com
10. WhatsApp.com

Cloudflare describes TikTok’s journey toward becoming the most popular domain throughout the year 2021:

“It was on February 17, 2021, that TikTok got the top spot for a day. Back in March, TikTok got a few more days and also in May, but it was after August 10, 2021, that TikTok took the lead on most days. There were some days when Google was #1, but October and November were mostly TikTok’s days, including on Thanksgiving (November 25) and Black Friday (November 26).”

Also included in Cloudflare’s report are lists of the most popular social media domains, most popular e-commerce platforms, and most popular video streaming sites.

To no surprise, Amazon ended the year as the most popular e-commerce domain, followed by Taobao, Ebay, and Walmart.

The list of most popular video streaming sites was dominated by giants such as Netflix, YouTube, and HBOMax. Interestingly, Twitch didn’t manage to crack the top 10.

Source: Google Loses Top Domain Spot To TikTok

Microsoft Advertising CVP Rik van der Kooi announces departure

After more than a decade leading Microsoft Advertising, Rik van der Kooi, the platform’s corporate vice president, announced his departure on Wednesday. Rob Wilk, vice president at Microsoft Advertising, will step up to lead the platform.

Why we care

van der Kooi’s departure signals the end of an era of leadership at Microsoft Advertising and the start of a new one. “[van der Kooi’s] leadership has been instrumental in Microsoft Advertising’s growth over the last 10+ years,” John Lee, head of evangelism at Microsoft Advertising, told Search Engine Land.

“The decision to promote Rob Wilk into the leadership role is significant for continuity and the ongoing success of the Microsoft Advertising business [and] platform,” Lee said, adding, “In short, Microsoft Advertising is in a very good place with growth and momentum for the future.”

Additionally, new leadership often brings change, which may affect many (if not all) advertisers on Microsoft’s platform. It’s not clear what changes Wilk will make, but it’s something marketers should expect in 2022.

More on the news

• Rob Wilk has led Microsoft Advertising’s global strategic sales team for the last six years and has more than 25 years of advertising and media experience. Prior to working at Microsoft, he was the vice president of sales at Foursquare.
• During his tenure, van der Kooi helped to launch the Microsoft Audience Network (which is now available in 25 markets worldwide) and played a role in the acquisition of e-commerce advertising vendor PromoteIQ, among other accomplishments.

Source: Microsoft Advertising CVP Rik van der Kooi announces departure

800,000 WordPress sites still vulnerable to simple takeover attacks

Despite two critical flaws in a popular WordPress plugin being patched weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of webmasters are yet to deploy the update, putting their sites at risk of takeover attacks.

The “All in One” SEO WordPress plugin was vulnerable to two flaws – CVE-2021-25036, which is a critical Authenticated Privilege Escalation flaw, and CVE-2021-25037, a high-severity Authenticated SQL Injection bug. 

In total, three million sites were vulnerable to the flaw. In the past two weeks, since the patch was issued by the plugin’s developers, more than two million plugins were updated, leaving some 820,000 still vulnerable. 

Updating the plugins fast

Even though the flaws require the attacker to be authenticated with WordPress, they only need low-level permissions, such as Subscriber, to work. Usually, a Subscriber can only post comments and edit their own profile, but with CVE-2021-25036, they can elevate their privileges and remotely execute code on vulnerable sites. 

Automattic security researcher Marc Montpas, who first spotted the flaws, says abusing these flaws on vulnerable sites is easy, as all the attacker needs to do is change “a single character to uppercase” to circumvent all privilege checks.

Webmasters using the All in One SEO WordPress plugin should make sure they update it to version 4.1.5.3. 

Serious flaws that come with WordPress plugins are a relatively common occurrence.

The same month, the “Preview E-mails for WooCommerce” plugin was also found to hold a serious flaw, potentially allowing attackers complete site takeover. The plugin was used by more than 20,000 sites. 

Source: 800,000 WordPress sites still vulnerable to simple takeover attacks

More News:

SMS Marketing For Local Business: Trends You’ll Need In 2022

All In One SEO Vulnerability Affects +3 Million Sites

Catastrophic Log4j Security Fail Threatens Enterprise Systems & Web Apps Worldwide

Non-stop updates: SEOs share the impact on their day-to-day, work-life balance, and career outlook

This year, Google rolled out an unusually high number of updates. As a matter of fact, the company released a local search update as we conducted interviews for this article. Google updates can be frustrating for brands and businesses because they might negatively impact their visibility, ceding rankings to competitors and impacting traffic and/or revenue. 

The heightened frequency of updates this year may intensify that experience, which means that SEOs might also be under more pressure to identify issues and implement solutions. But, there are many types of SEOs working across different verticals as well as at agencies and in-house, and their respective experiences vary.

To provide a comprehensive picture of what it’s like to work in this environment, five SEOs have shared how their workload changes after updates rollout, how their clients might respond, along how this year’s updates have changed their work-life balance and career outlook.

The goal of search engines is to provide users with the best possible experience, which is what brands should be focusing on as well. The overlap means that, regardless of what updates may come, SEOs always have a north star to guide them.

“I see the Google updates as a way to emphasize that the purpose of SEO is to serve users and move away from the idea that ‘ranking and traffic is everything,’” Anconitano said, noting that ROI and conversions are more significant business metrics. “The only way to generate conversions is to serve users well. Being first in Google helps, but being relevant matters more than anything else, both in Google’s and users’ eyes,” she said.

Read more: Non-stop updates: SEOs share the impact on their day-to-day, work-life balance, and career outlook

5 ways marketers can support entry-level SEO talent

Despite almost two years of massive societal and market transformation, the SEO industry has remained largely intact. In fact, it’s expanded far beyond its prior reach.

“Rewind to March 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic beginning — people couldn’t go in stores, so they went online to buy their products,” said Abby Reimer, SEO manager at marketing agency Uproer, during her session at SMX Next. “With that, you saw a lot of businesses prioritizing their website and their online search presence, naturally leading to an increase in the need for SEO.”

“The demand for SEO has increased; however, the supply has not,” she added.

Like many industries, entry-level SEOs are often undervalued, making it difficult to land a relevant job when starting their careers. But, with such a high demand for their expertise, marketers and brands would be wise to capitalize on their talent.

Reimer says focusing on entry-level talent and training them to become senior-level SEOs can:

• Bring in a much larger pool of candidates;
• Make it easier on your budget; and
• Increase diversity in your organization as well as within the SEO industry.

Read more: 5 ways marketers can support entry-level SEO talent

The ‘Vicinity Update’: Winners and losers from the November 2021 local update

Google announced last week that it rolled out an update to the local search and map pack results. It began on November 30 and finished on December 8.

We noticed really dramatic differences in ranking on December 6, 2021. My agency named the update “The Vicinity Update” because the most significant impact we saw was that Google made it so that smaller, less established businesses that are closer to the user are now ranking better than overpowered businesses further away. Google said that it “rebalanced” the factors that make up the algorithm and we have observed that proximity got a big boost while some relevance factors declined. 

Google has weighted keywords in the business name too heavily for as long as I can remember. This often leads to businesses adding them, regardless of the fact that it breaks Google’s guidelines, because it has such a significant impact on ranking It has also led to Google showing fake listings in the search results instead of real businesses. With this update, businesses that are newer and trying to follow Google’s guidelines should have a much greater shot of ranking. 

If you have questions about how the algorithm update impacted you, feel free to chime in over at the thread at the Local Search Forum.

Read more: The ‘Vicinity Update’: Winners and losers from the November 2021 local update

Google Confirms Links To 404 Pages Are Not Counted

If you have a lot of links to your site, but some of those links are pointing to pages that no longer exist and serve a 404 not found status code – those links technically are not helping or hurting your site in Google Search. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter if “the link goes nowhere, so we drop it.”

John explained this as if “you recommend something that doesn’t exist anymore, it’s really a useful recommendation, right?” The same thing with links, if Google finds links that lead to something that no longer exists, is that a useful recommendation? The answer is no and Google does not count them.

Read more: Google Confirms Links To 404 Pages Are Not Counted

Google SearGoogle Search Ranking Algorithm Tremors Continue & It’s Big

Are you dizzy yet? The Google search results are still super volatile and we are seeing high levels of chatter spike back up over the past 24 to 48 hours and the tracking tools are also running incredibly hot. There is just so much going on right now in Google Search for an SEO that taking off for Christmas might not be an option for many.

This story was originally published on December 17th at 7:50am ET but I wanted to add more data through Sunday, December 19th. In short, the chatter and fluctuations have continued and they actually spiked in a big way on December 18th. I have added a new section below for what is new with the volatility.

Just when you thought we had enough, we didn’t. As I mentioned just before, we had tons of updates this past year, both confirmed and unconfirmed Google search algorithm updates. It seems like this is ongoing volatility from earlier this week and it is hard to say if it is all directly related to the ongoing product reviews update or not.

Read more: Google Search Ranking Algorithm Tremors Continue & It’s BigQuizzes Test

More news:

Bing launches travel-oriented results pages and a trip-planning hub

YouTube to automatically link to places mentioned in videos

Google Local Search Ranking Algorithm Update Last Week

SMS Marketing For Local Business: Trends You’ll Need In 2022

The Evolution Of Business Messaging

The way businesses communicate constantly changes and evolves.

It started with the telegram, morphed into the postal service, and has continued to evolve into the rise of email.

The Problem: Now, our inboxes have become overloaded with emails.

The Answer: SMS messaging.

Consumers say that texting is an easy and convenient method of responding to businesses.

With an extremely high open rate of 98%, text message marketing is equivalent to the open rates of email marketing back in its heyday.

Text message click-through rates are at 18% – 6.9 times higher than email – but only 12% of local businesses use text messaging as a marketing tool.

This means most local businesses aren’t tapping into texting yet, and they’re ignoring many opportunities to better engage with their customers.

The Power Of Conversational Text Messaging

Your consumers crave conversations that go beyond message blasts.

• 74% of consumers said they would text a local business as if they were an actual person.
• About half of consumers say they are more likely to respond to a business’s text message if the employee introduces herself/himself.

The Marketing Advantage of Texting

When asked if consumers would like the ability to communicate with a local business via text message, this is what they had to say:

• 24% – Yes, and I already do.
• 43% – Yes, and I haven’t yet.

With a big desire to interact with businesses via text, there’s also a big chance for companies to set themselves apart through this channel.

Make your brand stand out by being the first to market SMS messaging in your niche.

When done well, you can gain an advantage and stand out from your competition.

Consumer Text Messaging Trends

Texting has a 209% increase in response rate compared to phone calls, emails, or even Facebook Messenger.

While consumers don’t typically respond to voicemails and calls, they will usually reply to a text.

Why? It’s quick and easy.

Consumers are looking for convenience when communicating with a business.

SMS Marketing Tips For Local Businesses

Podium conducted a survey with 1,000 respondents; their answers will give you insight into how to create the perfect SMS messaging strategy.

Offer Incentives

Podium found that customers would like local businesses to send:

• Incentives (coupons, discounts, promo codes).
• Loyalty offers and benefits.
• “Back in stock” notifications.

Add Personalization

You can also make a stronger connection by adding personalization to your text messages.

Personalization, such as using the customer’s name, significantly impacts sales and customer service.

Sending Frequency

On average, Podium recommends sending text messages once per week or once a month.

However, the frequency of sending out promotional messages depends on the type of business.

Create A Frictionless Buying Experience 

Text messaging gives your business the ability to be proactive, nurture a client within minutes, and capture a sale.

Just being there to answer questions, provide immediate and valuable links, and show your lead that you care increases your potential to convert.

How To Avoid Unsubscribes

Consumers unsubscribe when businesses text them without permission or don’t recall signing up.

Make sure you have permission to text your customers by having them opt-in.

Other scenarios that lead to unsubscribes are:

• Receiving too many messages.
• Receiving messages that are irrelevant to them.
• More.

Source: SMS Marketing For Local Business: Trends You’ll Need In 2022

The ‘Vicinity Update’: Winners and losers from the November 2021 local update

Google announced last week that it rolled out an update to the local search and map pack results. It began on November 30 and finished on December 8.

We noticed really dramatic differences in ranking on December 6, 2021. My agency named the update “The Vicinity Update” because the most significant impact we saw was that Google made it so that smaller, less established businesses that are closer to the user are now ranking better than overpowered businesses further away. Google said that it “rebalanced” the factors that make up the algorithm and we have observed that proximity got a big boost while some relevance factors declined. 

What industries did it impact?

This update was dramatic, and in my findings, is the biggest update we have seen in local search since the Hawk update in 2017. Some industries are seeing the impact more than others. We are seeing huge differences for lawyers, home services, insurance, dentists, and many others. It’s important to note that you won’t likely see the impact of this update unless you are doing grid tracking that shows you how far away from your office you rank.

The winners

The winners in this update are:

• Businesses that don’t have keywords in their business name but have strong competitors that do.
• Secondary locations for prominent businesses

The losers

The losers from this update are:

• Businesses that ranked really far from their office.
• Businesses with keywords in the business name.

For example, below are screenshots from a business that meets both criteria. One of the keywords that describes their service is a part of their actual LLC name. They used to rank really far from where they are located and no longer do.

The pins indicate the location the user is searching from. Green pins indicate the business ranks in the top three results, yellow pins indicate the business ranks near the top three results and red pins mean the business does not rank near the top three results.

Source: The ‘Vicinity Update’: Winners and losers from the November 2021 local update

How To Do A Content Audit: The Ultimate Checklist

How long has it been since the last time you did a complete inventory and analysis of your content?

This is known as a content audit, and most content creators are so focused on creating new content that they forget to audit what they’ve already created.

If it’s been over twelve months, you may be basing your content strategy on out-of-date information.

Here are a few reasons why you need to audit your content on a regular basis:

• Goals: Is your content achieving its goals? What is your ROI from the content you’ve produced? You won’t know unless you measure your content’s performance and track it through regular audits.
• Staleness: Your content can become stale or even outdated over time. Don’t beat yourself up, though. Stale content isn’t always your fault. What was relevant two years ago may simply need updating now.
• Accuracy: As your content ages, facts and data that once were true can become inaccurate. Running an audit through your content regularly will ensure your post’s accuracy, helping to protect both your brand’s reputation and your search rankings.
• Know What’s Working: How will you ever know what type of content or which blog post is your most successful if you never go back to audit all of your content pieces? Perhaps pumping out three blog posts a week is really just tiring, and not actually producing any results. You’ll never know if you don’t go back and do a content audit to see which pieces perform best, and which were the worst.

Hopefully one, if not all, of those bullets spoke to you and you now understand why it’s so important to audit your content regularly.

Source: How To Do A Content Audit: The Ultimate Checklist

Google Ads rolling out new icons more widely

Google, over the past few months, has been rolling out new icons within the Google Ads console. Those who spend their days inside the ad console are taking notice of the new icons.

Screenshot. Here is a screenshot of the new Google Ads navigational icons from Brett Bodofsky on Twitter:

Some saw these earlier. Some have said they saw these icons begin to show up months ago, so we assume Google is now more widely rolling the new icons out now.

Reaction. The reaction to the change of icons is not all positive but you’d expect that when Google makes any sort of change to any of its interfaces. ere are some of the responses to the new icons:

Source: Google Ads rolling out new icons more widely

John Mueller explains self-hosted WordPress vs Wix

Google’s John Mueller proposed his viewpoint on shifting a site from Wix to self-hosted WordPress. He also talked about managing WordPress hosting. Also, he replied to an issue on Reddit about changing an SMB site to a self-hosted WordPress setting from Wix. He gave his statement on this particular scenario. This topic discussed the comparative merits and drawbacks of self-managed and managed WordPress for SMBs.

The meaning of SMB is small and medium businesses. What those sizes imply is not anything unchangeable; there are many meanings. Commonly, small industries are those with under 100 workers. Medium size industries have between 100 to 500 workers. Some explanations rank the medium as increased as 1,000 workers. Regulated WordPress hosting is a hosting setting where the web proprietor manages all the technological maintenance.

The host also manages similar details of hosting a WordPress website. The managed hosting company handles things like backups, updates, security, CDN, and caching.

Regulated WordPress hosting achieves pretty much similar things for industries, choosing WordPress stuff. However, it has some regulations. Wix probably also has a benefit over operated WordPress hosting.

A regulated WordPress proprietor optimizes its hosting settings for security and speed. It’s flawlessly convenient for industries that eventually wish to scale up. It is suitable for businesses that have full control over SEO and technology. John Mueller discovered one obvious problem. If Wix is operating for a small industry, then there is no point in shifting to a diverse platform.

Source: John Mueller explains self-hosted WordPress vs Wix

More News:

All In One SEO Vulnerability Affects +3 Million Sites

Catastrophic Log4j Security Fail Threatens Enterprise Systems & Web Apps Worldwide

Google Updates Search Results For News Stories On Desktop

Bing launches travel-oriented results pages and a trip-planning hub

For years, search engines have been expanding their travel offerings to the dismay of online travel agencies — Bing’s new travel features only continue that trend.

The new destination search results pages are visual-heavy, which may make them more compelling to users. Many of the search features, like hotel results or the “Explore destination” carousel, take users to other Bing properties. And, since they’re more visually compelling than a standard search listing, it may be even more difficult for OTAs to compete in the search results.

The new Travel Guide is quite similar to Google’s travel portal, but both Bing’s Travel Guide and its destination search results seem to be designed for discovery, which may help it serve customers that are in the initial stages of their planning. 

Revamped destination search results. Searching for a destination on Bing may trigger its new travel search experience (shown below for the query “Honolulu”).

This search results page format includes a large search feature containing a link to the Travel Guide (more on that below) for the destination, as well as carousels for local attractions and news. The best time of the year to visit and hotel listings are also prominent on the page, along with Tours and activities ads.

Read more: Bing launches travel-oriented results pages and a trip-planning hub

How to optimize your site for better findability

“You wouldn’t build a house without having a strong foundation,” Niki Mosier, head of SEO and content at AgentSync said, “And you shouldn’t build a website without having a strong foundation either, and without constantly making sure that foundation is strong and that there are no cracks in it.”

Optimizing the architecture of your site can help search engine crawlers find and index your content, which enables them to show those pages to users in the search results. It can also help send link authority around your site as well as make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

In her session at SMX Create, Niki Mosier shared the strategies she uses to ensure that the foundations of her site are solid and identify opportunities for greater search visibility.

Crawl budget analysis

Crawl budget refers to the number of URLs per site that Googlebot (or any other search engine crawler) can and wants to crawl.

“Every website gets a crawl budget, which can vary depending on the size of the site and the frequency that new content is being published on the site, so having an idea of what a website’s crawl budget is can be really beneficial in making informed decisions on what to optimize,” Mosier said.

Conducting a crawl budget analysis enables you to get a more comprehensive view of:

• How your website is being crawled. “If you identify that Googlebot is the client, you can use log file analysis to find out how Googlebot is handling the URLs on your site [and] if it is crawling any pages with parameters,” she said.
• How fast your site is. While there are many tools that can tell you how fast your server reacts, a log file analysis shows you how long it’s taking for a bot to download a resource from your server. 
• Indexing problems. “Getting into the log files can really show us whether bots are having trouble downloading a page fully,” Mosier said.
• How often a URL is being crawled. The crawl frequency can be used to figure out if there are URLs that a search engine crawler should be crawling but isn’t, or vice versa.
• Crawling problems. This tactic can also reveal when a crawler is encountering 404 errors or redirect chains, for example.

“When it comes to actually doing crawl budget analysis, there’s a couple of tools that are helpful,” Mosier said, recommending ScaremingFrog’s Log File Analyser, Microsoft Excel and Splunk.

Read more: How to optimize your site for better findability

How to gain SEO insights using data segmentation

Recognizing patterns is a major part of successful SEO strategies, yet it can seem daunting with the sheer amount of data available. Murat Yatağan, the consultant for growth and product management at Brainly, recommends marketers address these issues using data segmentation tactics.

“You need to focus on generating insights based on patterns that you can recognize,” said Yatağan in his presentation at SMX Next. “An important part of a successful issue strategy is relying on these patterns that you have recognized — these things are telling you a story.”

Yatağan suggests marketers use one of two data segmentation tactics — with a developer’s help if needed — to serve as the foundation for your SEO strategy: custom scraping using Regex/Xpath or segmentations post-crawl.

“I segment data by traffic,” he said. “It’s organic traffic along with the crawl information that I gathered because these two [metrics] enable me to triangulate the data about the website, so it shows me some patterns.”

Here are four common patterns Yatağan recommends marketers look for to gain insights from their data segments.

Read more: How to gain SEO insights using data segmentation

Google Maps adds dock to bottom

Google recently added a feature to Google Maps to dock local listings to the bottom of the map interface. When you search for a business, you can click the “dock to bottom” button. That will trigger Google Maps to move that local listing to the footer of the map interface so that searchers can reopen the place later.

What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this feature, that I’ve been seeing for the past week for some of my local maps queries:

Use case. Searchers can use this to dock numerous places to the bottom of the page so they can organize a trip. It can also be used when you are searching for a local business and multiple options interest you, you can dock the ones you like and dig into which one you prefer to go to. If you are a foodie, you can dock a bunch of restaurants to check out later. There are many use cases.

Read more: Google Maps adds dock to the bottom

More news:

YouTube to automatically link to places mentioned in videos

Google Local Search Ranking Algorithm Update Last Week

Upgrade to the Google Ads API for even more features

All In One SEO Vulnerability Affects +3 Million Sites

Security researchers at Jetpack discovered two serious vulnerabilities in the All In One SEO Plugin. The vulnerabilities could allow a hacker to access usernames and passwords and also perform remote code execution exploits.

The vulnerabilities are dependent on each other in order to be successful. The first one is called a Privilege Escalation Attack, which allows a user with a low level of website access privilege (like a subscriber) to raise their privilege level to one with more access privileges (like a website administrator).

The security researchers at Jetpack describe the vulnerability as severe and warn of the following consequences:

“If exploited, the SQL Injection vulnerability could grant attackers access to privileged information from the affected site’s database (e.g., usernames and hashed passwords).”

Authenticated Privilege Escalation

One of the exploits is an Authenticated Privilege Escalation vulnerability that exploits the WordPress REST API, allowing an attacker to access usernames and passwords.

In the All In One SEO plugin the problem was in the security checks that verify if a user accessing an API endpoint had the right privilege credentials.

According to Jetpack:

“The privilege checks applied by All In One SEO to secure REST API endpoints contained a very subtle bug that could’ve granted users with low-privileged accounts (like subscribers) access to every single endpoint the plugin registers.

…Since it didn’t account for the fact that WordPress treats REST API routes as case-insensitive strings, changing a single character to uppercase would completely bypass the privilege checks routine.”

Authenticated SQL Injection

The second exploit is an Authenticated SQL Injection. This relies on an attacker first having some user credentials, even one as low as a website subscriber.

Updating SEO Plugin Recommended

This vulnerability affects versions 4.0.0 through 4.1.5.2. The latest version at this time, 4.1.5.3 is the safest version to update to. The security researchers at Jetpack recommend updating to the latest version.

Source: All In One SEO Vulnerability Affects +3 Million Sites

3 do’s and don’ts for attracting new clients

As we approach the end of another year, businesses are formulating their goals for the year to come, which may also mean a re-evaluation of the partners they’ve enlisted to reach those goals.

Likewise, agencies, freelancers and consultants are also looking to fill their rosters for the year ahead. As the search marketing industry has matured, competition has grown more intense, increasing the stakes of your marketing efforts.

To that end, numerous search practitioners have shared the strategies that have won them clients as well as the methods they don’t recommend for attracting new business. 

Figure out your identity and lean in

Clearly defining what you are about (as an agency or a professional) enables you to be transparent about your limitations. This can also be a sales strength “because when you are able to be completely honest about what it is you do NOT do, then it (a) keeps expectations firmly where they should be from both parties and (b) attracts the clients looking for that,” Williams said, adding, “I recently had someone exclaim on a sales call, ‘It is so refreshing to hear someone just be honest with us! I’m so sick of being sold to!’”

Share your expertise

Demonstrating your knowledge by helping others can help establish you as a trusted source of knowledge, which can help promote your business. “We work to put out a helpful marketing blog post once a month and put together a weekly digital marketing news show/podcast,” said Greg Finn, partner at Cypress North and host of the Marketing O’Clock podcast, noting that he’s received new clients from both tactics.

Partner with non-search marketing agencies

Clients are often in need of marketing-adjacent services, which can be an opportunity for a referral. “We work with partners to sell other related services,” said digital marketing consultant Joe Youngblood, “For example, we might work with a design agency to sell website designs for a new, up and coming CMS. That design agency, in turn, promotes our SEO services,” he said, adding that, in some cases, a custom solution involving his services along with those of another, non-search marketing agency can be created for clients. “This leads to a percentage of the clients converting to long-term SEO clients,” he said.

Providing free work remains divisive

Giving potential clients a sample of your work can go a long way in proving its quality. However, this tactic is somewhat controversial due to the ethical implications of performing free work, and because there’s no guarantee that the initial investment on your end will yield returns.

Strategies to avoid

Answering a request for proposal (RFP) may seem like an easy way to get your services in front of a high-intent client, but the search marketers that spoke to Search Engine Land for this article do not advocate doing so. “Without the ability to have a full conversation, RFPs can really put a damper on fruitful conversations, especially when they are open to public bidding,” Finn said.

Signing a client is just the first step

Once the client is onboarded, the real work begins. The quality of your work can greatly influence client renewals as well as new client opportunities.

Source: 3 do’s and don’ts for attracting new clients

Adobe Announces Free Creative Cloud Express

Adobe announced a free creative suite that contains the core functionality of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. Creative Cloud Express is aimed at non-experienced users, comes with 1 Million free stock images, thousands of templates and will soon feature social media tools.

Design Tools With No Learning Curve

Adobe designed the free editing suite so that anyone can use it, even people with no experience.

“Creative Cloud Express draws on our decades of experience working with the creative community. It makes the core technology in our industry-leading products like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro available with just a few clicks — and with no learning curve.”

The free versions of Adobe’s tools are available as a suite called Creative Cloud Express. The suite is available on the web, in Microsoft stores and on apps for iOS and Android.

Screenshot of Adobe Creative Cloud Templates:

A thoughtful aspect of Creative Cloud Express is it’s connection with the premium Creative Cloud.

Creative Cloud Express can be connected with the professional version, Creative Cloud, which can allow professionals to share assets with clients who use Creative Cloud Express.

Example of an Adobe Creative Cloud Express Template:

There’s a premium version that provides access to millions more stock photos, Photoshop Express and Premiere Rush but for the average non-designer and casual user the free Creative Cloud Express should be more than adequate.

Examples of What’s Possible With Creative Cloud Express:

Generous Features

The Creative Cloud Express suite comes with a generous suite of features that allows users with no experience to apply Photoshop effects, filters, textures, easily remove backgrounds, resize elements, and add overlays with professional results.

Source: Adobe Announces Free Creative Cloud Express

Google Search launches enhanced autocomplete with second column

Google has officially launched a new enhanced autocomplete search suggestions that may include a second column of predictions, and provide easier access to content related to a search, a Google spokesperson confirmed with Search Engine Land. In addition, Google confirmed it is also testing a new edge to edge autocomplete interface and other full width elements in the desktop search interface.

Enhanced autocomplete. The new enhanced autocomplete interface may show additional search predictions including people also ask, people also search for and other content that is related to the query. Here is a screenshot of what this looks like:

Edge to edge autocomplete test. Google is also testing another variation of autocomplete that the search company is calling “edge to edge.” This is where the search box blends directly into the other elements of the search results page. Essentially, Google removes the border around the box where you enter the search query, making it go edge to edge with the rest of the search results.

Here is a screenshot I posted from @MusingPraveen on Twitter. Brodie Clark did a deeper dive on this edge to edge search interface as well.

More full width tests. As you know, Google confirmed launching a full width local and map results interface in search. Google is also testing other full width elements that the search company has not fully launched yet but continues to test. That includes a full width image pack, full width featured snippets and more.

Google overall told us that the search company is frequently testing out and launch changes to different visual elements on various features within Google Search.

Source: Google Search launches enhanced autocomplete with second column

Amazon Alexa SEO tool will disappear in 2022

Amazon’s influential suite of SEO and digital transaction tools will close in 2022. It is damaging to the search marketing community. Alexa.com declared that it would leave its marketing assistance after 25 years. Established in 1996, Amazon subsequently acquired Alexa in 1999. It was originally recognized for giving rankings depending on commerce measured through a toolbar.

However, Alexa ultimately broadened to give a full suite of trade products. The items include backlink checking and site auditing. Alexa.com offers an entire suite of search commerce tools. Nonetheless, what it’s primarily recognized for is Alexa Rank. It is a measure that gives a ratio of site popularity. In the first 2000s, they collected the data via an Alexa toolbar that users surfed and downloaded.

Source: Amazon Alexa SEO tool will disappear in 2022

More News:

Catastrophic Log4j Security Fail Threatens Enterprise Systems & Web Apps Worldwide

Google Updates Search Results For News Stories On Desktop

Meta Makes It Easier To Run Cryptocurrency Ads