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Good morning, Marketers, do you love or hate change?
If there’s one constant in the search marketing industry, it’s change — and a lot of it, very often. Just in this newsletter, we’re reporting new changes Google made to its mobile results and Google Ads’ new policy violation rule, which will take effect in the coming months.
Search results, both paid and organic, are in a constant state of flux. Sometimes it’s the algorithms that cause these changes. Sometimes it’s the competition. Sometimes it’s something you do. But if there’s one guarantee in our space, it’s change.
We’ve seen strategies, especially quick win strategies, change dramatically over the years. The link-building industry has been turned upside down numerous times. The content marketing space has adapted countless times. AI, automation, and machine learning have touched all aspects of our work.
Embrace change and it’ll make your job easier.
Barry Schwartz,
Change management consultant
Google Ads to try three-strikes and you’re out policy
Starting in September 2021, Google Ads will begin testing a new three-strikes pilot program for accounts that repeatedly violate ad policies. It might actually be four strikes; it starts with a warning, followed by three additional strikes. Your Google Ads account can then be suspended.
Strikes expire after 90 days, according to Google. If you’ve accrued two strikes, fix the issues, send an acknowledgment of the issues and fixes, and do not violate another policy for 90 days after the fix, your account resets in a way, and the next violation will revert to the initial warning. As always, search marketers can appeal any violation and enforcement decisions.
Google may expand this three-strikes rule beyond just Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances, and Dangerous Products or Services policies in the future.
Why we care. The new ad policy pilot program provides clear actions and consequences for advertisers. While Google is testing this program for policies related to Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances, and Dangerous Products or Services, it will likely roll out to other policy areas in the coming year. The initial warning gives advertisers the benefit of the doubt, but penalties are increasingly stringent afterward. Many advertisers are concerned that the new policy will penalize those whose ads get mislabeled or mistakenly violate policies.
AMP labels gone for Google mobile search results
After five years of displaying the AMP icon in mobile search results, Google has retired it. Google is no longer showing the AMP label even for AMP pages in the mobile search results.
Google considered showing a page experience label instead, but so far, we haven’t seen Google display the page experience label that was tested for a brief period last December. Currently, no label is shown for either AMP-enabled pages or pages that meet the page experience update factors – at least not yet.
Why we care. It’s unclear what impact this change may have on your click-through rate to your AMP content from Google Search. Keep an eye out for those changes in your analytics and reporting tools.
Google illustrated what different types of traffic declines look like
Daniel Waisberg of Google has illustrated what six different categories of organic search traffic drops look like when viewing performance reports in Google Search Console. The categories include:
- Site-level technical issue
- Page-level technical issue
- Manual action
- Algorithmic changes
- Seasonality
- Reporting glitches
So if you see these types of traffic drops, you may want to investigate to find the cause.
Why we care. This is possibly the first time Google has visually described how various issues in Google Search can impact your traffic. It provides a clear way to understand what to expect from different SEO issues and how they might affect your traffic. It’s important to note that these illustrations are generalizations, and an experienced SEO consultant should diagnose any real issues with your website.
Math solver rich results filter in Search Console performance report
A new search appearance filter has been added to the Google Search Console performance report. This new filter works for math solver rich results and structured data. If your site displays math solver rich results in Google Search, Google can now report on your clicks, impressions, and other data within the search performance report in Search Console.
The Google Search Console performance report shows essential metrics about how your site performs in Google Search results: how often it comes up; average position in search results; click-through rate; and any special features (such as rich results) associated with your results.
Why we care. This gives us more data to determine if using Math Solvers markup is actually increasing our site’s visibility in search. More importantly, it shows whether the markup and rich results lead to more clicks to our websites.
Faster AdSense code, shared hosting, Google Posts for hotels, and deleting disavows
Deleting disavow files. John Mueller of Google warns against blindly deleting disavow files. He said, “Blindly deleting the file sounds as bad as blindly adding to the file :). Be thoughtful when making bigger changes.”
Google Posts for hotel listings. It seems Google might be testing Google Posts for hotel listings in Google Search. It’s unclear if this is a bug or an early beta feature, but SEOs in the hospitality industry are excited to try it out.
Shared hosting and SEO. Google’s John Mueller said in a video that shared hosting works fine for SEO and ranking in Google Search. He shared more details in this video, such as if the shared host gets overloaded and GoogleBot has issues crawling the site.
Google AdSense better code. Google announced new faster and better-performing AdSense code. If you want better-performing pages and for your AdSense code to not slow them down as much, you can replace your old AdSense code with the new one. Google is not eliminating the old code, so there’s no need to replace it if you don’t want to.
We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.
- How to Create Your Local Business USP with QUAAAC UGC – Moz
- Google Says Core Updates Can Impact People Also Ask Results – Search Engine Roundtable
- How to Succeed With Google Posts: What We Learned From Analyzing Over 1,000 Google Posts – Sterling Sky
- Ready for it? Olympics 2021 best practices for news SEO – WTF is SEO?
- Rewriting Keywords at Google for Paid Search – Go Fish Digital
