Welcome to episode #70 of the SEO Newsletter by #SEOSLY!
Here I’ve created for you the latest and the most important news from the world of SEO from the last two weeks.
Follow me to always stay up-to-**** with the world of SEO:
The SEO Newsletter by #SEOSLYis sponsored by JetOctopus
JetOctopus is a cloud-based website crawler and SEO log analyzer. The tool allows you to analyze your website structure, check for broken links, detect technical SEO issues, and monitor your website’s ranking in search engines.
JetOctopus is the fastest and most affordable SaaS crawler and logs analyzer without limits.
Check my latest guide on using ChatGPT for SEO
I’ve been diving into ChatGPT for the past two months and I’m blown away by all the amazing things it can do. Here I am sharing with you 50 ways you can use ChatGPT for SEO to supercharge your SEO efforts and streamline your workflow
Top SEO news
Here is the latest and hottest SEO news.
Bulk data export in Google Search Console
Google has announced a new feature in Search Console called bulk data export, which allows users to export data to Google BigQuery on an ongoing basis. This feature is particularly useful for large websites and those receiving traffic from many queries a day, providing users with the ability to explore their data to its maximum potential through advanced analysis and visualization techniques. Read more on Google Search Central.
February 2023 Google Product Reviews Update
Google has released the sixth product reviews update, the February 2023 update, which includes several new languages besides English. According to Google, the rollout process will take around two weeks.
https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1628153197515661312
Google Updates Reviews Guidelines For Personal Information & Fake Engagement
Google has updated the Google Maps User Contributed Content Policy around prohibited and restricted content. Specifically, Google updated the definition of personal information under the Civil discourse section and fake engagement under the Deceptive content section. Read more (Search Engine Roundtable).
Join SEO Cash Flow
More and more SEO experts are choosing to become freelancers or consultants. Everyone talks about how to level up your skills but nobody talks about $$$.
We, Myriam Jessier from Pragm and me, Olga Zarr from SEOSLY are teaming up to talk money in SEO, and discuss insights and strategies to help you maximize your earnings.
SEO Cash Flow aims to empower professionals like you to confidently negotiate their worth. So what next?
More episodes and more info coming soon!
Other SEO News
Google’s Gary Illyes: Authorship, Links & Disavows Less Important Than SEOs Think
Gary Illyes from Google gave a keynote and a Q&A session yesterday at PubCon and while the keynote was pretty vanilla stuff, the Q&A did reconfirm a lot of what has been said in the past around authorship, links, and disavowing links. Read more (Search Engine Roundtable).
Updating Search Console users and permissions management
Google has announced updates to Search Console’s user and permissions, which now include ownership and user management functionalities. This marks another step towards migrating all functionalities from Webmaster Tools to Search Console, providing users with a modernized and improved experience. Read more on Google Search Console.
Bing Webmaster Tools to gain Bing Chat and index coverage reporting
Microsoft said they will be adding reporting and tools to Bing Webmaster Tools to help publishers understand how Bing Chat users interact with their sites. Read more (Search Engine Land).
Google updates its SEO link best practices guide
Google has released an updated version of their SEO link best practices guide, which now includes additional tips on anchor text placement, writing effective anchor text, and internal and external linking. This update expands on the previous guide, which only focused on making links crawlable. Read more (Google Search Central).
Do Services in Google Business Profiles Impact Ranking?
Joy Hawkins and her team recently conducted a study that found adding services to your Google Business Profile can have a positive impact on local rankings, much more so than in 2019. By adding more services, including custom services, businesses can potentially improve their local search rankings. The impact seems to vary based on the industry and market, but the study found that services can affect both explicit and implicit keywords. Check the study.
Microsoft explains how Bing AI Chat uses ChatGPT and Search with Prometheus
The company reveals details about how its Prometheus AI model makes Bing Chat so fast, current, and impressive. Read more (Search Engine Land).
Google featured snippets gain blue highlighted text
Google seems to have rolled out a new blue highlight feature for some featured snippets in the Google Search results. Google may highlight specific text that is important in answering your query, directly in the featured snippet result. Also, the font size of the featured snippets with blue highlighted text is larger than featured snippets without blue highlighted text. By Barry Schwartz.
Latest SEO interviews
SEO for ****** & ******** sites with John Wright
In-house SEO vs agency & more with Arnaud Mangasaryan
Let’s talk about a headless CMS with Lidia Infante from Sanity
The future of SEO & AI with Rad Paluszak
Top SEO Tips
And here are the SEO tips for you.
#1: Don’t use 403s or 404s for rate limiting
Google noticed an increase in website owners and some content delivery networks attempting to use 404 and other 4xx client errors to try and reduce Googlebot’s crawl rate. Google warns against this and instead advises website owners to use the documentation provided by Google on how to reduce Googlebot’s crawl rate effectively, either by using Search Console to temporarily reduce the crawl rate or returning a 500, 503, or 429 HTTP status code to Googlebot when it’s crawling too fast. Read more.
#2: Not All Googlebots Use the Same Rendering Engine & Render JavaScript
Google’s John Mueller clarified that not all Googlebots need to do rendering, and not all of them use the same rendering engine. Although main Google search crawlers can render JavaScript well, not all the Googlebots need to do the rendering. Therefore, not all Googlebots fully, partially, or at all render your pages, just because they are Googlebots. Read more (Search Engine Roundtable).
#3: Core Web Vitals Shouldn’t Be Top Of The List For Most Small & Local Businesses
John Mueller, a Google spokesperson, advised small and local businesses that, in most cases, improving core web vitals should not be a priority as the page experience ranking factor is not significant. Furthermore, Google does not usually have CrUX data for sites with very few pages, and thus the data is not used in those cases. Read more (Search Engine Roundtable).
4: Nofollowing links does not hoard link equity
John Mueller from Google debunked the myth that the nofollow attribute on links can be used to hoard link equity. John confirms again that making links nofollow doesn’t hoard anything, and internal PageRank sculpting is a waste of time.
New articles on SEOSLY to read
How to audit an XML sitemap
In this article, I’m showing you how to audit an XML sitemap as part of doing an SEO audit to make sure the XML sitemap contains all the right URLs.
How to audit page headings
In this article, I am walking you through the steps for auditing the structure of headings on a website.
How to view the website without JavaScript
Learn how to view any website without JavaScript to learn how much it relies on JavaScript and whether this can potentially harm SEO.
How to get SEO clients (my story & tips)
Here are my tips on how to get SEO clients and my story of how I’ve been doing it successfully for the last 2.5 years.
Videos to watch this week
You don’t want to miss any of these videos from other brilliant SEOs either.
Exporting Search Console data to spreadsheets
JavaScript product page problems
Site moves: Are they getting any easier?
Other articles & guides to read
And you need to allocate some time to read these articles from other SEOs. They are brilliant.
How to improve semantic SEO with disambiguation
In the past, Google used keywords to determine the relevance of a page, but due to spamming, they’ve improved their ranking system by using “entities,” which are concepts that represent places, people, things, and events, among others. Read the full article to learn more about how entities and semantic SEO work. By Michael Fortin.
Use keyword matrixes for long tail eCommerce SEO success
As eCommerce businesses strive to get in front of potential customers, using long-tail keywords can make all the difference. Whether customers are searching for the best vacuum for pet hair, tile floors, or their car, addressing their specific needs is key. Read more about the importance of long tail keywords in this article. By Myriam Jessier.
SEO fails: Horror stories from some of the world’s smartest SEOs
We all make mistakes in SEO and it can be comforting to know that even the biggest names in the industry have had their fair share of failures. To mark the 100th edition of Rich Snippets, a group of SEO experts, keynote speakers, and marketers shared their biggest SEO fails. By David Broderick.
January 2023 Google SEO office hours
This is the transcript for the January 2023 edition of the Google SEO Office Hours. It really contains a lot of juicy SEO tips. Read more.
Datasets in Google Search
Having access to datasets is crucial for scientific research, business analysis, and public policy. Sharing data is important for transparency and reproducibility in these fields. To make it easier to find datasets, Google now offers a search function for datasets that allows users to easily find relevant information. Read more (Google Research).
The Keys for Ecommerce SEO Success for 2023
Here is the presentation about the keys to e-commerce SEO success for 2023 from PubCon by Aleyda Solis. Check the presentation.
ChatGPT and SEO content: Where do we go from here?
ChatGPT is a tool, not a one-size-fits-all solution. Learn its benefits and drawbacks from an SEO content perspective. By Bruce Clay.
How the YouTube algorithm works: What marketers need to know
This guide will help you get the most out of YouTube, understand the platform’s algorithm, and gain visibility for your best videos. Read more (Search Engine Land).
Google Explore – The sneaky mobile content feed that’s displacing rankings in mobile search and could be eating clicks and impressions
There are a few very interesting observations by Glenn Gabe around Google Explore – a super-interesting feature that not many people talk about. Read more (G-Squared Interactive).
E-E-A-T Is the New E-A-T. What the New “E” Means for SEO
Google’s quality raters use the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) concept to evaluate search ranking systems, but in December 2022, Google added “experience” to the criteria. This means that certain types of content must be created with personal experience to be considered trustworthy, and this has implications for SEO. Read more (Ahrefs).
Can AI Content Rank on Google?
Google has confirmed that AI-generated content can rank on its search engine as long as the content is of high quality. The company’s focus is on the quality of the content, not how it was produced, and AI can be used to create high-quality, relevant, and authoritative content that ranks well on Google. Read more (WordLift)
How Google’s Latest ‘Helpful Content System’ Update is Impacting SERPs
As AI captures the consciousness of organic search in the early part of 2023, Google continues to make updates to its ranking systems that require assessment and attention. Dive deep into these updates, and how to future-proof your content strategies and build sustainable organic traffic growth. By Lily Ray.
Google Product Reviews Update Feb 2023 – Examples of losing domains.
With the series of Product Reviews Updates, Google has been trying to improve the quality of product ratings and recommendations in the search results. So far, these updates were only relevant for English-language content – but with the latest update, effects could be seen in many countries. Here’s the latest data from SISTRIX for UK and US, with links to local reports from other countries. Read more (Sistrix).
SEO Twitter nuggets
And before we end, here are a few Twitter nuggets for you.
https://twitter.com/olgazarr/status/1631684650413244422
https://twitter.com/MordyOberstein/status/1630225403867725824/
https://twitter.com/DarrenShaw_/status/1631023967640211459
https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1631285299232817155/
Thank you for reading my newsletter! I hope you found the information useful and informative. If you enjoyed this issue, be sure to check out the next one next week.
I can help you with SEO.
