from Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/352fv21
Google Tests How To Rich Results Results On Desktop Again
Google is once again testing how-to schema rich results on the desktop search results again. Brian Freiesleben first noticed this a couple of days ago. Google first tested this for a couple weeks back in late May and then discontinued the test.
from Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/352fv21
from Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/352fv21
Google Tests Ads In Google Maps Autocomplete Predictions
Google seems to be testing a new ad unit, this one is in the Google Maps search feature. So as you type, Google Maps gives you autocomplete search predictions. Google is also showing ads now for those autocomplete suggestions.
from Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/3dvmYdI
from Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/3dvmYdI
Google Will Disapprove Out Of Stock Products From Data Feed When In Stock On Site
Google announced that it will begin to preemptively disapprove free standard listings for products that are marked as out of stock in the product data in Merchant Center, but are in stock on their landing pages. I do not think this applied to paid listings, just the free listings.
from Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/2SXCOUT
from Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/2SXCOUT
10 Basic SEO Tips to Index + Rank New Content Faster — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
When you publish new content, you want users to find it ranking in search results as fast as possible. Fortunately, there are a number of tips and tricks in the SEO toolbox to help you accomplish this goal. Sit back, turn up your volume, and let Cyrus Shepard show you exactly how in this popular and informative episode of Whiteboard Friday.
[Note: #3 isn't covered in the video, but we've included in the post below. Enjoy!]
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard, back in front of the whiteboard. So excited to be here today. We're talking about ten tips to index and rank new content faster.
You publish some new content on your blog, on your website, and you sit around and you wait. You wait for it to be in Google's index. You wait for it to rank. It's a frustrating process that can take weeks or months to see those rankings increase. There are a few simple things we can do to help nudge Google along, to help them index it and rank it faster. Some very basic things and some more advanced things too. We're going to dive right in.
Indexing
1. URL Inspection / Fetch & Render
So basically, indexing content is not that hard in Google. Google provides us with a number of tools. The simplest and fastest is probably the URL Inspection tool. It's in the new Search Console, previously Fetch and Render. As of this filming, both tools still exist. They are depreciating Fetch and Render. The new URL Inspection tool allows you to submit a URL and tell Google to crawl it. When you do that, they put it in their priority crawl queue. That just simply means Google has a list of URLs to crawl. It goes into the priority, and it's going to get crawled faster and indexed faster.
2. Sitemaps!
Another common technique is simply using sitemaps. If you're not using sitemaps, it's one of the easiest, quickest ways to get your URLs indexed. When you have them in your sitemap, you want to let Google know that they're actually there. There's a number of different techniques that can actually optimize this process a little bit more.
The first and the most basic one that everybody talks about is simply putting it in your robots.txt file. In your robots.txt, you have a list of directives, and at the end of your robots.txt, you simply say sitemap and you tell Google where your sitemaps are. You can do that for sitemap index files. You can list multiple sitemaps. It's really easy.
You can also do it using the Search Console Sitemap Report, another report in the new Search Console. You can go in there and you can submit sitemaps. You can remove sitemaps, validate. You can also do this via the Search Console API.
But a really cool way of informing Google of your sitemaps, that a lot of people don't use, is simply pinging Google. You can do this in your browser URL. You simply type in google.com/ping, and you put in the sitemap with the URL. You can try this out right now with your current sitemaps. Type it into the browser bar and Google will instantly queue that sitemap for crawling, and all the URLs in there should get indexed quickly if they meet Google's quality standard.
Example: https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml
3. Google Indexing API
(BONUS: This wasn’t in the video, but we wanted to include it because it’s pretty awesome)
Within the past few months, both Google and Bing have introduced new APIs to help speed up and automate the crawling and indexing of URLs.
Both of these solutions allow for the potential of massively speeding up indexing by submitting 100s or 1000s of URLs via an API.
While the Bing API is intended for any new/updated URL, Google states that their API is specifically for “either job posting or livestream structured data.” That said, many SEOs like David Sottimano have experimented with Google APIs and found it to work with a variety of content types.
If you want to use these indexing APIs yourself, you have a number of potential options:
- Richard Baxter wrote an excellent post on using SEO Tools for Excel with Google’s API
- Google’s Indexing API documentation
Yoast announced they will soon support live indexing across both Google and Bing within their SEO Wordpress plugin.
Indexing & ranking
That's talking about indexing. Now there are some other ways that you can get your content indexed faster and help it to rank a little higher at the same time.
4. Links from important pages
When you publish new content, the basic, if you do nothing else, you want to make sure that you are linking from important pages. Important pages may be your homepage, adding links to the new content, your blog, your resources page. This is a basic step that you want to do. You don't want to orphan those pages on your site with no incoming links.
Adding the links tells Google two things. It says we need to crawl this link sometime in the future, and it gets put in the regular crawling queue. But it also makes the link more important. Google can say, "Well, we have important pages linking to this. We have some quality signals to help us determine how to rank it." So linking from important pages.
5. Update old content
But a step that people oftentimes forget is not only link from your important pages, but you want to go back to your older content and find relevant places to put those links. A lot of people use a link on their homepage or link to older articles, but they forget that step of going back to the older articles on your site and adding links to the new content.
Now what pages should you add from? One of my favorite techniques is to use this search operator here, where you type in the keywords that your content is about and then you do a site:example.com. This allows you to find relevant pages on your site that are about your target keywords, and those make really good targets to add those links to from your older content.
6. Share socially
Really obvious step, sharing socially. When you have new content, sharing socially, there's a high correlation between social shares and content ranking. But especially when you share on content aggregators, like Reddit, those create actual links for Google to crawl. Google can see those signals, see that social activity, sites like Reddit and Hacker News where they add actual links, and that does the same thing as adding links from your own content, except it's even a little better because it's external links. It's external signals.
7. Generate traffic to the URL
This is kind of an advanced technique, which is a little controversial in terms of its effectiveness, but we see it anecdotally working time and time again. That's simply generating traffic to the new content.
Now there is some debate whether traffic is a ranking signal. There are some old Google patents that talk about measuring traffic, and Google can certainly measure traffic using Chrome. They can see where those sites are coming from. But as an example, Facebook ads, you launch some new content and you drive a massive amount of traffic to it via Facebook ads. You're paying for that traffic, but in theory Google can see that traffic because they're measuring things using the Chrome browser.
When they see all that traffic going to a page, they can say, "Hey, maybe this is a page that we need to have in our index and maybe we need to rank it appropriately."
Ranking
Once we get our content indexed, talk about a few ideas for maybe ranking your content faster.
8. Generate search clicks
Along with generating traffic to the URL, you can actually generate search clicks.
Now what do I mean by that? So imagine you share a URL on Twitter. Instead of sharing directly to the URL, you share to a Google search result. People click the link, and you take them to a Google search result that has the keywords you're trying to rank for, and people will search and they click on your result.
You see television commercials do this, like in a Super Bowl commercial they'll say, "Go to Google and search for Toyota cars 2019." What this does is Google can see that searcher behavior. Instead of going directly to the page, they're seeing people click on Google and choosing your result.
- Instead of this: https://moz.com/link-explorer
- Share this: https://www.google.com/search?q=link+tool+moz
This does a couple of things. It helps increase your click-through rate, which may or may not be a ranking signal. But it also helps you rank for auto-suggest queries. So when Google sees people search for "best cars 2019 Toyota," that might appear in the suggest bar, which also helps you to rank if you're ranking for those terms. So generating search clicks instead of linking directly to your URL is one of those advanced techniques that some SEOs use.
9. Target query deserves freshness
When you're creating the new content, you can help it to rank sooner if you pick terms that Google thinks deserve freshness. It's best maybe if I just use a couple of examples here.
Consider a user searching for the term "cafes open Christmas 2019." That's a result that Google wants to deliver a very fresh result for. You want the freshest news about cafes and restaurants that are going to be open Christmas 2019. Google is going to preference pages that are created more recently. So when you target those queries, you can maybe rank a little faster.
Compare that to a query like "history of the Bible." If you Google that right now, you'll probably find a lot of very old pages, Wikipedia pages. Those results don't update much, and that's going to be harder for you to crack into those SERPs with newer content.
The way to tell this is simply type in the queries that you're trying to rank for and see how old the most recent results are. That will give you an indication of what Google thinks how much freshness this query deserves. Choose queries that deserve a little more freshness and you might be able to get in a little sooner.
10. Leverage URL structure
Finally, last tip, this is something a lot of sites do and a lot of sites don't do because they're simply not aware of it. Leverage URL structure. When Google sees a new URL, a new page to index, they don't have all the signals yet to rank it. They have a lot of algorithms that try to guess where they should rank it. They've indicated in the past that they leverage the URL structure to determine some of that.
Consider The New York Times puts all its book reviews under the same URL, newyorktimes.com/book-reviews. They have a lot of established ranking signals for all of these URLs. When a new URL is published using the same structure, they can assign it some temporary signals to rank it appropriately.
If you have URLs that are high authority, maybe it's your blog, maybe it's your resources on your site, and you're leveraging an existing URL structure, new content published using the same structure might have a little bit of a ranking advantage, at least in the short run, until Google can figure these things out.
These are only a few of the ways to get your content indexed and ranking quicker. It is by no means a comprehensive list. There are a lot of other ways. We'd love to hear some of your ideas and tips. Please let us know in the comments below. If you like this video, please share it for me. Thanks, everybody.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Interested in building your own content strategy? Don't have a lot of time to spare? We collaborated with HubSpot Academy on their free Content Strategy course — check out the video to build a strong foundation of knowledge and equip yourself with actionable tools to get started!
Check out the free Content Strategy course!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/3j2X0j4
Google Announces AI Search Updates – Analysis via @martinibuster
This is how Google AI updates will dramatically impact how sites are ranked. Analysis of changes for SEO and publishing.
The post Google Announces AI Search Updates – Analysis via @martinibuster appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
from Search Engine Journal https://ift.tt/2SYmyDg
New Moz Local Plans Unveiled — With Reputation Management & Social Posting!
Posted by BarryYim
With listing and reputation management so essential for local businesses — especially in 2020 — we’re introducing new Moz Local plans that give you more options for review monitoring, review management, and social posting, depending on your needs.
While it’s always been important for local businesses to have accurate and complete online listings, it’s even more crucial in today’s environment. Google found that searches for “in stock” grew more than 70% globally in late Q1, indicating people were shopping locally more often, and Nextdoor found that 72% of their members believe they will frequent local businesses more after the crisis is over.
But consumers often rely on reviews of local businesses when deciding where to buy. High quality, positive reviews can improve your business visibility, and when you respond to reviews, it shows that you value your customers and their feedback.
Why is Moz offering new plans?
The new Moz Local plans — Lite, Preferred, and Elite — are designed to offer more features and flexibility to better meet the needs of local businesses and their marketers. Our previous plans limited reputation management and social posting to only the top-tier plan, and we wanted to make these features more widely available.
Customers on any of the new plans can now monitor reviews via alerts, and depending on the plan, respond to reviews and take advantage of social posting. It’s never been more important to actively engage and listen to the needs and concerns of your current customers — and potential customers will take notice.
We also wanted to offer flexibility with respect to local business aggregator submissions. While all of the plans include Factual, US customers can choose to add the other two major aggregators if they desire broader reach.
What’s new?
The new plans will help you maximize your online presence and engage with consumers more easily. Here’s what’s new:
Review monitoring
All 3 plans allow you to receive alerts and read reviews posted on Google, Facebook, and other sites in our partner network through a central dashboard. Since 82% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, you should be aware of what they’re saying.
Review management
Preferred and Elite subscribers can also respond to reviews posted on Google, Facebook, and select directories through the dashboard. Your ability to respond quickly can be the difference between keeping a customer or losing them to your competition. When it comes to negative reviews, 40% expect a response either immediately or within 24 hours.
Social posting
Preferred and Elite subscribers can share news, offers, and other content directly to Google, Facebook, and select directories from the dashboard.
For example, news posts can be shared on Facebook, and Questions & Answers and COVID-19 posts can be posted to your Google My Business page. Sharing news and offers enables you to engage proactively with consumers and attract new customers.
Local data aggregators
All three plans now include location data submission to Factual for broader location data distribution. Preferred and Elite subscribers in the US can add the other two data aggregators — Infogroup and Neustar Localeze — for $40 per year, per location.
Additional directories
The Elite plan includes a number of additional directories for listing management and location data distribution, such as Tupalo, Where To?, Brownbook, Opendi, iGlobal, Manta, and Cylex, to name a few. And each of the US, UK, and Canada plans include some local directories relevant to that region. For example, the US Elite plan includes Yellow Pages, Superpages, and DexKnows. A complete list can be found here.
The comparison grid below highlights the key features for each US plan. You can find all of the new US, UK, and Canada plans and pricing on our website.
How do these new plans impact current Moz Local customers?
If you’re a current Moz Local customer, you can either keep your existing plan or choose one of the new plans by clicking on “Change plan” and then “See plan options” in your Moz Local dashboard. Enterprise customers can contact their Account Manager to discuss the new plans.
Get started with Moz Local
The new Moz Local plans are designed to maximize your local online presence, increase consumer engagement, and enhance your visibility in local searches with minimal time and effort. You can get started with Moz Local for as little as $11 per month (billed annually). And if you want to learn more about best practices for listing and reputation management, check out our recent webinar on the ROI of Local Presence Management.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2GU8Q1X
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)