andrew.riker

M Posted 3 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

Happy October, all! We’re here to share with you some updates that happened in the search world over the last month, curating some of the more interesting and important happenings that could affect your digital marketing strategy as we quickly approach the end of the year. 

A lot happened in search over the last month, starting off with Google’s annual search conference Search On, which happened in late September. This event usually gives marketers insight into what is coming down the road from Google and can help inform yearly planning and strategies. 

October also marks the second month after the Helpful Content Update, giving writers the perfect creative brief with how to write for humans, which the community has determined a softer landing than originally anticipated. 

SEO News at a Glance: 

• Think beyond text for content, it’s important to leverage other media 
• Google update (continues) to crack down on spam, no surprise here 
• Importance of Alt Text and Accessibility, verdict: humans first, search second 
• Google Ads are now more differentiated and will likely cause shakeups in click-through-rates 
• Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the recent updates and how it might affect you. 

Google’s “Search On” Annual Conference 

Google is continuing to commit and innovate to deliver a better search experience for its users as outlined in its annual 2022 conference this year. Here are a few takeaways worth noting: 

1. Images are getting more importance in crawlability and in delivery 
2. Localization matters with improved functionality for maps 
3. Google Shopping experience improvement 
4. First-hand experiences being surfaced from community sites 
5. Google going green with eco-friendly search elements 

What Does This Mean for Marketers? 

Well, diversity is something that Google is continuing to show is important when it comes to search results, and being the data giant that it is, they are using their own data to serve their users better. For businesses, this means that optimizing images, video, hyper-local schema, and improving your brand image is going to be increasingly important. 

As crawlers get smarter and information is learned, the search world gets disrupted as people start thinking outside just content writing on a web page and start to think about media and its role in search. Searchers are going to get improved search results when shopping, looking for events, understanding complex subjects, etc. To think not that long ago we were happy with the 10 blue links! 

Google Updates Spam Guidelines 

Google’s Search Central announced an update to combating spam earlier this month, likely for their spam prevention system, SpamBrain AI. This update is global in release and affects all languages. 

With this spam update coming off the heels of the Helpful Content Update early in August, it is no surprise Google are continuing to take measures to cut down on the gamification of their search engine. For businesses that are engaging in tactics that would associate with these low-quality sites, it is recommended to put a stop to that. 

If you have been listening to BrightEdge’s position on spam, you’ve got nothing to worry about :) 

Optimize your Image Alt Text 

The regular chat with Google’s John Mueller has rewarded marketers with some insight on what to do when optimizing. alt tags. To rank well in Google’s image search, optimized image alt text has been a SEO 101 tactic for years but has become increasingly important for some brands as certain queries will show up in Universal Results and can be an effective use of branding if done right. 

The sum of what was said was ultimately:  alt text matters for SEO and accessibility, which might not be news to some people, but regardless it’s good to get clarification. Accessibility is a huge concern, as there are more than 61 million adults in the US that live with a disability, of which 60% are in a household with internet. 

It’s about the purpose of the image and how it’s intended to be used. If you’re using stock imagery, does it make sense to go through all your images on your site to optimize the alt text using your brand? Probably not, as it’s better to serve differentiated or branded media if you can. John goes on to say adding something into the alt text field is a worthwhile endeavor, and “something is better than nothing.” 

What does this mean for marketers? Check out your universal search listings and find out how frequently images on your site are being shown in search, because there’s a dual-purpose in optimizing for users (accessibility) and keywords (SEO). 

Google Distinguished Paid and Organic 

In the long-contested debate of organic vs. paid and which is better, (both are crucial for different businesses/outcomes!), Google has given SEO marketers a win this month by making paid adverts more differentiated in search. This is something that should impact searcher behavior as data starts to pour in. As of October, these changes are being rolled out for mobile, and are planned for desktop release in the future. 

This is huge for marketers, as click-through-rates will start to change as the change starts in mobile and gets introduced to desktop. As this gets rolled out and people start noticing what is “natural” and what is an ad, it’ll be interesting to see CTR changes. We expect this will likely make some brands revisit their messaging for paid ads if clicks start to slip, whilst businesses owning organic real estate could see an uptick in clicks. 

Time will tell what changes this paid ad differentiation will make, and as marketers we welcome the change to help distinguish organic versus paid results, as brands vie for searchers’ attention. 

That’s the quick digest of search news this month, we’ll be back in November with the next batch of updates to serve you better in all things search. 

andrew.riker

M Posted 3 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

The way search engines index sites hasn’t changed substantially over the last three decades. 

While it is important for web admins to consistently update their processes in line with best practices if they wish to maintain fast, comprehensive indexing, the underlying search engine technology has remained largely the same at a fundamental level. 

But that may be about to change. 

IndexNow, a protocol that allows for direct communication with search engines, has the potential to dramatically alter the search landscape. 

Having control over your website is empowering, and taking a firmer grasp of how your content is indexed will lead to broader and faster visibility in search engines. 

This post explains some of the latest developments in indexing and how fostering greater autonomy over content crawling is a net win for SEOs, webmasters, search engines and, ultimately, users. We’ll also outline the current indexing best practices. 

What Role Will IndexNow Play in the Future of Search?

IndexNow is a hot topic in the SEO space. If you haven’t already encountered it, it is essentially a notification service that web admins use to alert search engines when they publish content on their sites (or delete old content). 

Because the technology holds the potential to save significant amounts of resources for search engines (by reducing the need for ongoing “exploratory” crawling), many SEO experts consider it extremely likely that it will be universally adopted.

It also presents an attractive proposition to SEOs because it allows them to let search engines know about changes to their sites instantly. It can sometimes take weeks or months for new pages to be discovered with traditional crawling. 

Microsoft and Yandex are leading the way when it comes to giving webmasters control over how and when their sites are crawled. IndexNow accounts for 7% of new sites indexed in Bing. Seznam.cz also adopted IndexNow in early 2022. Over 16 million websites use the protocol, and it is offered through major WordPress plugins like Yoast. Cloudflare and Duda have also integrated it into their services. 

However, IndexNow will likely only become relevant in a significant way if Google chooses to support it. Google has confirmed that it is currently in an experimental phase. Until then, it will not be the kind of earth-shifting technology it could be. In our opinion, at least. 

How to Use IndexNow

There are no downsides to using IndexNow on your site. This is particularly the case if you run a smaller site and indexing is a slow process. Big brands like LinkedIn and eBay already leverage and benefit from the protocol.

Follow the steps below to start using IndexNow:

• Create and host an API Key: You need to generate an API key to verify ownership of your site and any submitted URLs. You can use Bing’s API generation tool to do this. You must then host an encoded .txt file at your website's root directory containing the key.
• Submit URLs: Once you have set up verification for your site, you can submit an HTTP request to the following URL: https://<searchengine>/indexnow?url=url-changed&key=your-key
• Check Submission success: Verify the success of submitted URLs using Bing Webmaster Tools or your tracking software. 

IndexNow has published extensive documentation. Alternatively, you use a WordPress plugin or content delivery network (CDN) that supports IndexNow. 

Other Key Indexing Trends

The growing presence of IndexNow isn’t the only indexing trend worth talking about. Here are three more that SEOs should take note of: 

• Programmatic SEO and AI-generated content: The rise of AI-generated content and programmatic SEO (the auto-creation of huge quantities of pages targeting individual or small sets of keywords) presents an issue for search engines in terms of crawling. If there are millions of auto-generated pages, they will be unable to crawl the web effectively. This perhaps explains why Google penalized AI-generated content with its latest update in awarding content written for humans.
• The continued presence of crawl bots: Crawl bots are not going anywhere. They will still remain key to the way search engines index websites. Google currently uses HTTP/2, which is a low-resource transfer protocol. It’s critical to understand how robots traverse your website to gather data. With this understanding, you can structure your site accordingly to streamline indexing.
• Wider availability of tools for checking indexing status: It’s becoming easier for SEOs to check the indexing status of their web pages and digital assets. One key example is the recently launched video indexing report in Google Search Console. This trend will likely continue as SEO software becomes more granular and advanced. 

Indexing Best Practices Checklist

The process that search engines typically use to index content is relatively straightforward. After a webpage is published, search engines crawl the web pages and, assuming no policies are broken, index them in their database. 

Here is a quick-fire, comprehensive checklist of indexing best practices: 

• Set up IndexNow pings: There are various ways of alerting search engines about new and updated content via IndexNow. Consult the published documentation for an overview of these.
• Ensure your site is mobile friendly: Google operates a mobile-first indexing system, meaning that it prioritizes mobile sites when crawling.
• Noindex appropriate pages: If you have pages that you don’t wish to appear in search results, use the “noindex” tag. You are less likely to encounter errors in indexing reports (such as those in Search Console) if you noindex pages correctly.
• Remove misplaced noindex tags: You should run regular checks to identify pages on which noindex tags have been incorrectly placed.
• Monitor your pages’ index status with Search Console: Check that your pages are indexed in Google with Search Console. Google likely provides the bulk of your traffic.
• Submit sitemaps to major search engines using applicable webmaster tools: Create and submit sitemaps to search engines, especially if you have a large site.
• Create a robust internal linking architecture: Link internally to enable effective crawling. Using a logical, category-based, human-intelligible URL structure is also good practice.
• Eliminate duplicate content: Duplicate content slows crawling. If necessary, use software to run checks and remove unnecessary content. Use rel=canonical labels if you need to publish duplicate content.
• Account for stand-alone web pages: It’s important to link to stand-alone web pages, especially landing pages, that aren’t accessible from other areas of your site.
• Optimize for page speed and size: Ensuring you follow best practices in relation to minification and JavaScript will mean that you don’t inadvertently exceed search engine crawl limits.
• Add a robot.txt file if necessary: A robot.txt file tells search engines which pages should be crawled. It is used when you want pages to remain indexed while restricting crawler activity that might overload your servers.
• Ensure metadata is correct: The addition of accurate metadata to web pages makes crawling more efficient. This includes meta titles and descriptions, robots, googlebot, SafeSearch and rel attributes.
• Optimize multi-language sites: Use location-based URLs or hreflang tags to specify which pages apply to different locations.
• Use Google crawl rate settings (if necessary): This won’t be an issue for the vast majority of web admins, but Google does afford web admins some degree of control over how it crawls their websites. Emergency crawl limits can be set in certain circumstances. 

Using BrightEdge for Better Indexing

Indexing can be a real issue if you have large quantities of errors on your site, as it prohibits search from crawling, limiting your organic performance. BrightEdge ContentIQ takes identifying technical errors to the next level and has the power to support site crawls for millions of pages. It enables marketers to catch, prioritize, and fix website errors and issues at scale before they impact organic performance. The Recommendations engine in platform makes it easy to be alerted on these prioritized issues, and clear steps on resolving them.

Conclusion

Effective site indexing is a core part of search engine optimization, particularly for larger organizations for whom issues are more likely to arise. 

Staying on top of changes and consistently updating your process according to best practices helps you ensure that all pages on your site are indexed and that you can effectively troubleshoot issues. 

SEOs should also stay abreast of the evolution and growth of IndexNow. It is likely that Google will either adopt IndexNow or develop its own technology, in which case it will benefit you to adopt new protocols as early as possible. 

More Resources

• Google's Helpful Content Algorithm Update Showcases Quality Content Written for People First