1. Bing can now answer queries with a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’
The yes/no summary uses natural-language modeling and comes with a carousel of sources.
Bing can now return a “Yes” or “No” answer for certain queries, the company announced Tuesday May 26, 2020. The new search feature includes the one-word answer as well as a carousel of related excerpts from various sources.
Certain queries will also trigger an option to refine the search for a more specific answer. Clicking on one of the refined search options takes you to the results for that query, which may also display the yes/no summary. This feature is currently live in the U.S. and will eventually expand to more markets.
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - April 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - March 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - February 2020
Google News Update - January 2020
2. Google Deindexing Your Site Might Be Related To Quality Issues
Google's John Mueller said in a video hangout from May 1st, that often when he looks into SEOs or publishers complaining about Google de-indexing issues, often the issue is with Google not finding enough quality on the pages it has deindexed. John said in these cases, Google no longer wants to index the pages because they do not meet the quality benchmark.
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - April 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - March 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - February 2020
Google News Update - January 2020
3. Basic requirements for successful search engine optimization
1. You need crawlable web pages
Google's Gary Illyes was very clear when he was asked about search engine optimization in an AMA (ask me anything). A crawlable website is the most important SEO task. If search engines cannot crawl your web pages, they won't get high rankings.
There can be many reasons for crawlability problems: your web pages might have the wrong HTTP status code, there can be an issue with the robots.txt file of your website, dynamic content cannot be parsed correctly, etc.
2. You need optimized web pages
Crawlable web pages are great. Unfortunately, they are not that great if search engines cannot find the right content on your pages. Your content must be related to the keywords that you target. If your web pages have a clear topic, it is much easier to get high rankings for individual keywords that are related to that topic.
Use keyword tools to find the keywords that will work best with your website. Then optimize the content of your web pages to make sure that your website is relevant to these keywords.
When you have created the basic content of your pages, it's usually a good idea to expand the content of your website. If you sell watches, do not just create pages for the individual watches. Write articles about the different watch types, when to wear with watch, etc. The more comprehensive your website becomes, the easier it will be to get high rankings for important search terms.
3. You need good links
It is important to have good web pages that are related to the topic of your website. Unfortunately, your website still won't get high rankings on Google and other search engines if other websites have content that is as good as yours.
You also need good links from other websites. Links from other websites show Google that your web pages are better than other pages. Pages with good links get much better rankings than pages that do not have good links.
The quality of the links is much more important than the quantity. A few good links are much better than hundreds of low quality links. You have to find the right link influencers that are related to your business.
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - April 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - March 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - February 2020
Google News Update - January 2020
4. Google releases May 2020 core algorithm update
Google has announced a core algorithm update on Twitter. This is the second core update of the 2020 year, the first update was the January 2020 core update.
What you should do now
Google's advice for core updates remains the same. Core updates do not penalize websites. For example, cleaning your links won’t help if your rankings drop after a core update. Instead, it’s likely that other websites do something better than your website.
If you want to get high rankings with Google's new ranking algorithm, just do the usual things that are needed to get high rankings:
1. Create web pages with good content
Your website should contain many pages that are related to the topic of your website. If the content of your website is unique, it will be much easier to get high rankings on Google (and other search engines).
2. Get good links from other websites
If your web pages have good links from related websites, they will rank higher than other pages that do not have these links.
If there are unnatural links to your web pages, you should remove these bad links.
3. Ensure that your website is mobile-ready
Most people visit websites on smartphones. For that reason, it is very important that your website works with mobile phones.
4. Use structured data markup code
5. April 2020 Local Algorithm Update
We have been observing massive local ranking fluctuations that seem to have started around April 23, 2020. There is an active discussion happening at the Local Search Forum. We started to see the second wave of massive ranking fluctuation that corresponds with the announcement of the broad core algorithm update on May 4, 2020
As of May 7, 2020, the Local Rank Flux tool score was the highest that we have seen in a long time. So whatever is happening has not settled down.
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - April 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - March 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - February 2020
Google News Update - January 2020
6. How To Track Clicks On A Link In Google Analytics
Collecting data on various metrics across your site is fundamental, but many times we neglect to track the basic interactions on a site. It’s good to know how long a video was played, how many social shares a page has or how long a user spent reading your content, but how do they actually navigate through your site?
You can find some data through standard Google Analytics, but it’s much more useful to find out exactly which links get clicked with Google Tag Manager.
With Google Tag Manager
External Links
The focus in digital marketing is to keep users on your site, but external linking isn’t a bad thing. It helps greatly with user interactions and can do a great job of showing you what users want more information about when tracked – giving you further focus for your content and other marketing efforts.
Tracking all external clicks is an easy tag to set up and is recommended to be tracking as soon as possible. All you need to do is create an event which fires on link clicks that don’t contain your domain name. This can send the target URL through as an event into Analytics.
Setting up the Trigger
- Create the trigger and name it ‘Outbound Link Clicks’ or something similar
- Set the Trigger Type to ‘Click – Just Links’
- Set to Trigger firing on ‘Some Link Clicks’
- Use the built-in variable ‘Click URL’ and set as ‘does not contain’ and enter your domain name
Setting up the Tag
- Create the Tag and name it ‘Event – Outbound Link Click’, or whatever suits your naming convention
- Select Google Analytics in the Tag Type
- Set to ‘Event’
- Select appropriate Category, Action and Label as below:
- Category – External Link
- Action – Link Click
- Label – {{Click URL}}
Internal Links
Tracking internal links gives great insight for user experience purposes and when used with other metrics (scroll tracking, time on page, etc.), it can create a good user experience report without the need for extra tools.
The setup is similar to the external links above.
Setting up the Trigger
- Create the trigger and name it ‘Internal Link Clicks’ or something similar
- Set the Trigger Type to ‘Click – Just Links’
- Set to Trigger firing on ‘Some Link Clicks’
- Use the built-in variable ‘Click URL’ and set as ‘contains’ and enter your domain name
Setting up the Tag
- Create the Tag and name it ‘Event – Internal Link Click’, or whatever suits your naming convention
- Select Google Analytics in the Tag Type
- Set to ‘Event’
- Select appropriate Category, Action and Label as below:
- Category – External Link
- Action – Link Click
- Label – {{Click URL}}
- Extra step – Set up the ‘Value’ field
What to use for the Value field?
This is where you can add great extra value to these events. You can feed through any number of strings into the Value field, so make the most of it depending on your site setup.
It can be a simple {{Click Text}} field to show what the link says. With this you can conclude if it was a menu link, a blog post link, sale item, etc. This does leave them open to interpretation though, particularly if you have multiple links to the same page, such as top categories on an ecommerce site.
Using the {{Click Element}} variable can isolate it down to the element type. This can help you see if the clicks are in the header, body content or even the footer. This isn’t always 100% accurate, but it can give a clearer picture.
Using a custom variable can be complicated, but it gives the best results. This can be done from a Google Sheet reference table or through naming conventions across the html code. Tracking like this is best worked out on an individual basis and will often require development work as well.
Without Google Tag Manager
This isn’t recommended.
Previous news:
SEO and Google News Update - April 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - March 2020
Top Internet and Google News Update - February 2020
Google News Update - January 2020
7. Google: International Targeting Won't Affect Other Regions
Google Search Console, in the old version, has a feature for international targeting. It lets you communicate to Google that your site is more relevant in a specific region. Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit that this is a strong hint that "may help a little in that particular region, but won't affect your site in other regions."
He said "all you do with that doing is to very strongly hint us that your content is more relevant to users in the region you've set."
In short, if you set this, it should not negatively impact how well your site does in other regions but it may slightly improve of you do in the region you selected.
Avoid using it if you do not want to target a specific region.
Monday, June 1, 2020
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