Category: Google

How To Track Passage Ranking SEO Performance in Google Search Console (And Why You Might Want To)

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UPDATE You’re really not an SEO blogger until @rustybrick has called bullshit on one of your posts https://t.co/Us4eajHBx9 — Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) February 11, 2021 So I may have jumped the gun on the “passage ranking” thing, but even though this may be old news, these URLs started showing up in a lot of GSC accounts over the past week so I wouldn’t be surprised if these are related to passage ranking. And I do think the idea of using…

E-A-T LOCAL for SEO

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What is E-A-T? Why It’s Important for Local SEO. “E-A-T” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) has been a trendy topic in SEO for the past few years. I love this AHREFS chart showing how each month hundreds of new articles on the topic are published. Thanks to Joshua Hardnick for the idea. A lot of the SEO literature on E-A-T focuses on “serious” YMYL categories like Health & Finance, but a perusal through Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (yes, I read…

Buck Up, Even Google Screws Up Technical SEO

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I am located in the U.S. yet yesterday afternoon when I searched for “Google My Business” in Google, the first result I got was the UK URL for GMB: https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/business/. It wasn’t like that yesterday morning. So what changed? A canonical tag. According to Archive.org, yesterday morning the canonical tag for the URL that usually ranks #1,  https://www.google.com/business/, was https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/business/. But looking at the source of that URL now shows the canonical tag has changed to https://www.google.com/intl/en_ae/business/:

Before You Kill That Mobile Subdomain…

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Funny Kill It With Fire GIF from Funny GIFs Most SEOs I know hate sites with separate mobile URLs. They served their purpose back in the early days of mobile browsers, but over time the maintenance overhead combined with the SEO uncertainty brought on by having two different sets of near duplicate URLs has caused many of us to advocate for migrating to a single set of URLs for both mobile and desktop. But maybe we shouldn’t be the ones…

Did Local Review Spammers Just Get Self-Served?

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See Betteridge’s Law of Headlines for the answer. For those looking to procrastinate, feel free to read on. Yesterday’s Google announcement about it’s new “algorithmic updates” review mark-up caused a fair amount of Local SEO Twittering and Slacking. Today, we’re introducing an algorithmic update to review snippets to ease implementation:– Clear set of schema types for review snippets– Self-serving reviews aren’t allowed– Name of the thing you’re reviewing is requiredMore details: https://t.co/NwZ4unzoOF — Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) September 16, 2019 My…

10 Local SEO Predictions for 2019: Job Security For Local SEOs

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SMBs As a Group Will Continue To Not Get SEO A little over a year ago, my dentist moved his office but never thought about updating his listing in Google Maps, Apple Maps or his website. I showed him how to fix the issue, but this morning on the way to my end of the year teeth cleaning, not only was his old location back on Apple Maps, but he had also decided to change his business name from Joseph…

How Long Does It Take SEO Traffic To Recover From Blocking Googlebot?

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Two weeks ago a client reset its bot-blocker, unintentionally blocking Googlebot. We had SEORadar monitoring the site so we quickly discovered the problem and alerted the client. Unfortunately, by the time they fixed the bot-blocker settings, they had lost about 100,000 daily visitors from Google. Of course, the first thing they asked was: How Long Will It Take Our Google Traffic To Recover From Blocking Googlebot? While your mileage may vary, in this case the answer is about one week.…

The Ultimate Guide to Google Cache Text Strings

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We have a client site whose SEO often defies description, along with canonicalization. We often have to check Google’s cache of various URLs to see what in fact Google is getting, but sometimes when you view the Full Version of the cache it just rapidly reloads like a blinking strobe light. Kind of like this: And there’s no way to get to the Text-Only or View Source versions of the cached URL as the links don’t stay in place long…

Google Still Has A Lot of Work To Do When It Comes To Location…

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One of the perks of international travel is getting to see what the SERPs really look like in other countries. Check out this query for “Sams Club”* I did while in Barcelona yesterday: So Google thinks the “Barcelona” line of Sam’s Club furniture is relevant to me simply because I am in Barcelona. Note my query never specified location. Google just knows there’s a page called “Barcelona” which matches the name of city I am in. If had been in…

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

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Seriously Google Search Console, why do you do this to me? I want to like (trust) you, despite the historically numerous discrepancies in your data. I’m delighted you are addressing the feature lag that SEO’s love to complain about. But seriously, can we get internally consistent URL level data? Please?