Summary of SEO 101 Episode 393
John and Ross discuss a few pieces of search news before diving into the important news that came out of the recent SearchOn event by Google. Discussed was the ground breaking news about “passages” that Google will be releasing in the New Year, followed by news on BERT, spelling detection, and the expansion of Key Moments on YouTube. The two end the show with answers to some SEO questions from listeners.
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NON SEO NEWS
Google Can Subscribe to Push Notifications
“Google’s automated web crawling service will occasionally subscribe to website push notifications if the push permission is requested.
Notifications that are sent to the automated Chrome instances, using Safe Browsing technology, will be evaluated for abusive content, and sites sending abusive notifications will be flagged for enforcement if the issue is unresolved.”
SEO NEWS
TRULY SEO 101: Google: Crawling Doesn’t Mean Indexing, Indexing Doesn’t Mean Ranking
- Correction from last week – Caffeine was for crawling
99% of Google’s indexing issues fully resolved
SearchOn Event
You can watch the whole thing at https://searchon.withgoogle.com/
Read Google’s breakdown of all the announcements here. https://blog.google/products/search/search-on/
The changes/updates discussed at SearchOn are almost all promised by the end of the year if they are not already in play.
Passages
Google introduced the concept of Passages. (Explain)
Clear up the confusion (Explain)
Impact on SEO Industry Long Term (Explain)
Passages will be a NEW ranking signal (Explain)
BERT
Launched October 2019 with 10% coverage
Now 100% of searches are impacted by BERT
Spelling Issues
Google has updated its spelling algo to better understand misspellings.
Expanding Key Moments
September of 2019, Google launched “Key Moments” with YouTube and Google Search. At the time is was in VERY limited release and now should be close to 10% of video search results.
Sub-Topics
This is the formalization of something that has been around for many many years: QDD (Query Deserves Diversity). It basically makes sure when a head term (shoes) is searched for there are a variety of variations on that topic represented in the results page. (Tennis Shoes, Dress Shoes, Hiking Shoes, etc. etc.)
QUESTIONS
Carl Busch: “Question about broken back link campaigns. How has been your success with these? Really what I am wondering is the conversation rate of emails sent out, to them actually updating their link with yours/clients. The reason I ask is because I have been doing Local SEO for the past 8 years and haven’t felt the need to do broken back link campaigns. I launched a personal website a couple months ago with a YouTube channel.
Most of the keyword difficulty is below 40 according to Ahrefs. Since I want my site to be seen worldwide that doing some broken back link campaigns would be a great way to help with my SEO. Any advice or tips are always welcomed.”
Lori Martin: “The podcast I heard mentioned an upcoming paid GMB listing. I have heard whispers about this. So if a business has a GMB listing do you think they will lose traction and have to pay to play?”
End of Show Notes
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