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Good morning, Marketers! With all these ranking algorithm changes, I thought it would be fun to chat a bit about them.
As you might already know, we had the June 2021 core update roll out between June 2 and June 12, and then the page experience update started to roll out on June 15. That one will continue through the end of August. We are also expecting another core update next month, the July 2021 core update. Even over the weekend, we saw a bit of a ranking tremor, which I doubt was related to the page experience update.
Why are core updates so much more impactful than the page experience update? Well, core updates are about quality and relevance, whereas page experience is more about how the site is built. It doesn’t look to see if the site may be relevant or the best to answer the query — it just measures the technical makeup of the site, but not the content.
So, when it comes to wanting to really do well in Google Search organically, you want to make sure that your site is of the highest quality and that your content is better than everyone else’s. How fast or smooth your site loads is important, but it is not even close to as important as Google’s relevancy and quality algorithms.
Barry Schwartz,
Director of Quality Management
Google Top Stories carousel now showing non-AMP listings
We are now seeing the Top Stories carousel on Google mobile search results show non-AMP content. Google did tell us this would happen last Thursday, but it did not seem to appear until Monday afternoon. Now that the page experience is live, Google no longer requires AMP for the Top Stories news section. You just need to ensure your pages do well in terms of page experience scores, but AMP is not a requirement.
Why we care. This change enables more publishers to show up in the Top Stories carousel section on mobile. This means more competition for your traffic and keywords. However, it also means you can optimize your non-AMP pages to do well in the mobile Top Stories section and outrank your competitors who may have decided to use AMP. If you dislike using AMP and maintaining AMP pages, you can opt to use your normal mobile pages and still rank in the Top Stories section.
Google may suspend merchant sites that show invalid product availability
Google Merchant Center has a new policy named “Inaccurate availability” that is caused by “inconsistent availability between the landing page and checkout pages on your website,” the company said. This policy replaces the existing “Delivery issues” policy violation and goes into effect on September 1, 2021.
Google explained that a Google Merchant Center account can receive a warning or suspension when “one or more of your products show as unavailable for purchase at checkout even though they’re displayed as being in stock on your landing pages.” If you are showing users that a product is in stock on the product landing page, but when they click to add it to the cart and it becomes unavailable, it can lead to violating this policy.
“It’s a bad customer experience if product availability changes from ‘in stock’ on the landing page to ‘out of stock’ or ‘unavailable’ after the product has been added to a cart. Customers will be less likely to try and purchase from your store in the future,” Google said.
Interviewing John Shehata, the Global Vice President at Condé Nast on Search
I had the opportunity to speak with John Shehata, the global vice president of audience development strategy & CRM at Condé Nast. Below is just under 40 minutes of video content of the two of us discussing SEO and related topics. John Shehata has a deep knowledge of SEO, making for a fascinating conversation.
We discussed the early days of SEO, tips on ranking in Google News and Discover, his Newzdash software, some aspects of Google AMP, and advancing your career in SEO.
Quality, quality and robots
Google Ads missing quality score metrics. Ginny Marvin from Google said there are two possible reasons why Google Ads may not show quality score metrics on your campaigns: The keywords don’t have enough exact match impressions, and the keywords need recent exact match impressions to maintain a quality score, which may revert to null when there isn’t enough recent traffic.
Robots and structured data help docs updated. Google has made several changes to the robots.txt help document and various structured data help documents over the past few days. You can see the full list of changes documented on June 18th online.
Quality changes take time. John Mueller of Google said it can take several months for Google to reprocess quality changes made to a site, so keep that in mind with core updates.
We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.
- Google SEO Tools (A List Of 49 SEO Tools From Google) – SEOSLY
- Google Testing Country Filter In Google News Search – Search Engine Roundtable
- How to Make Newsworthy Content – Moz
- International SEO: 5 key factors to a successful strategy – Rise at Seven
- Sundar Pichai Faces Internal Criticism at Google – New York Times
- What Google’s FAQ Schema Update Means For Your SEO Strategy – Brodie Clark Consulting
