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Good morning, Marketers, let’s catch you up on the latest rumblings around the unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. Yes, Google is always updating, but sometimes those updates are larger and more widespread than others.
It has been a while since we had a core update—the last one being the December core update—and it has been five months with no new official core update announced by Google. We did see the product reviews update which finished rolling out on April 22nd, and we are still awaiting the upcoming page experience update.
That being said, there were some unconfirmed updates since April 22nd, specifically around April 23rd and 24th, and April 30th and May 1st. There’s speculation that these updates were tweaks to the product reviews update released in April, but Google has not confirmed this. It appears those two updates were significant, and many in the SEO industry noticed ranking changes during these time frames—some specifically around recoveries related to the product reviews update.
Barry Schwartz,
Google algorithm watcher
Google Local Service Ads bug changes your bid mode
Google has a bug in its Local Service Ads program where it may change your bid mode from “Maximize Leads” to “Max Per Lead.” Google is aware of this bug and is working on a fix.
If you are using Local Service Ads, ensure your bid modes are set correctly and that this bug didn’t lead to them being changed without your knowledge.
Len, an advertiser, said this “issue has impacted 100% of the law firms I work with.” David Kyle, another advertiser, said, “I had all of mine set to Max Per Lead already, and set them to the max bid that was allowed at the time. These bids were also dropped to the minimum.” This does not sound good, and if this impacted your clients’ spend or budgets, reach out to Google for a remedy.
Read more here.
Google’s advice on optimizing images with SEO in mind
With all the concern over making your pages faster these days, many are not thinking about what happens to your image search traffic if you just change your images. Many are changing their images from .png or .jpg formats to .svg for performance reasons. But that is a brand new image, and if your site gets traffic from Google Image Search, that traffic can disappear with those changes. Google Image Search is super slow when it comes to processing redirects and finding new or updated images, so be careful when making these changes.
Google’s John Mueller posted a thread of advice on Twitter on how to optimize your images while keeping in mind image search traffic. The advice starts with trying not to change your file names and just optimize the image under the current format. There is more advice on how to optimize your images and communicate any changes to Google in the most efficient manner.
The hypothetical search engine named Steve and its ranking factors
Hypothetical search engine. Google recently published its hilarious Search Off the Record podcast where they discussed what ranking factors they would use in their hypothetical search engine named Steve. It seems they dropped a lot of hints suggesting the page experience update may not have a significant weight as a ranking factor. Listen for yourself.
Scroll to text Search Console reporting. It appears Google is removing the scroll-to-text fragments in the Google Search Console performance data reports, so you can no longer see if people are clicking on scroll-to-text featured snippets, images, and so on.
Google Analytics does not hurt your rankings. Google’s John Mueller is often asked if Google uses Google Analytics data as a ranking signal, and the answer has always been no. Recently, he was asked if using Google Analytics would harm your site because of the page experience update. The answer is also no, but not because it is a Google service, he clarified.
We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader
- Machine Learning For a Ranking Model – Go Fish Digital
- Natural Language Query Responses – SEO By The Sea
- Rachel Maddow Of MSNBC Calls Out Google For Hiding Search Ads, It Sounds Like She Has Malware – Search Engine Roundtable
- The B2B Marketers’ Perspective on Measuring Content Marketing Performance – KoMarketing
- What Are Heading Tags and Why Are They Important to SEO? – BruceClay
