SEO Bits & Pieces w/e 03 November 2017

I love this week’s SEO Bits & Pieces.

It’s an exciting cornucopia of SEO & search snippets covering some of the smaller things which happened during the week.

They entertained me.

Read more in this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 3rd November 2017.

#SEO #SEONews #GoogleSearchConsole #StructuredData #InternationalSEO #RichSnippets

• Uh-oh. A US court has instructed Google to pay no heed to the Canadian Supreme Court’s recent edict we covered a while ago: Canada Orders Global Google De-Indexation. Cue closed borders, and shrinking supply of loonies to the US. I told you it would get ignored. In reality, it was never going to happen. Courts are generally sovereign within their own borders, but not beyond.
  • H/ T Michael Geist
• Google recommends using the Fetch & Submit if you’re really having trouble getting a URL crawled and indexed. Of course, it’s still not a guarantee for indexing, but it may help if you’re having particular trouble.
  • H/T John Mu on Twitter
• Majestic is continuing the All Tools to All People development arms race, as all tools adopt each others features, by adding ranking data from Google Search Console into its rank tracking. As ever, use the GSC ranking data wisely. It’s useful, but can sometimes be misleading if interpreted wrongly. Still good on them for not being seen as a black hat scraper, which was Google’s old attitude to ranking tools. Next week, I expect them to give us back the Not Provided data in Analytics.
  • H/T Majestic
• PSA from Google: your ALT language pages do not need to to exact word for word translations. Well, of course not. HREF.lang has nothing to do with canonicalisation & duplication. The word in use has always been a “version” of your page. Version does not mean exact copy. The flip side is that if your international copy is an exact copy of each other, especially if same language, then getting indexed and ranked in that locality can be a challenge.
  • H/T Google WMC
• Google says structured data is not needed for Rich Snippets (see recent Structured Data post), but it is currently recommended.
  • H/T John MU on Twitter
• Click here to contact me to discuss these devilishly distracting SEO Bits & Pieces further.

Return to Top

We recently released the super-exciting The State of SEO in mid-2017. Read it now.

Return to Top

• The US tells Google to ignore Canadia.
• Sometimes, Fetch & Submit is a good way to get things into Google.
• Majestic scrapes Google Search Console.
• Different language versions of the same page can have different content. Who knew?
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
• Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

Return to Top