As quickly as it came around, January is just about in the rear-view mirror; and with it, a busy month in the SEO-sphere. “What’s happened?” I hear you ask. Allow me to explain…
Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
In the spirit of the new year, Google is sticking to the “new year, new me” mantra by implementing a few new changes to kick off 2023. An update has been added to the article structured data help document, removing the character limit for headlines.
Previously the document stated “The title of the article. The value should not exceed 110 characters.” The updated document now reads “The title of the article. Consider using a concise title, as long titles may be truncated on some devices.”
This means that headlines no longer have to adhere to the strict 110-character regime, and you will no longer receive errors regarding headlines being too long. However, Google wants you to consider how headlines will appear across devices. So while there are extra characters, it’s still best practice to keep them concise.
Products Making A Big Impression
An update to Google Search Console’s performance report this month may see an increase in impressions and clicks for products. The update came on the 6th of January to report on product results, even without structured data.
Googles say on the matter:
“Sites may see an increase in impressions and clicks for Product results search appearance type on their site. This is because Google now includes products found only in page content, without associated Product structured data.”
Picture Perfect
Google has updated two additional help documents this month; both the Get On Discover documentation and the image SEO best practices document received little tweaks.
The Get On Discover documentation received a new line to the feed guidelines for Google Discover’s Follow feature: “The most important content for the Follow feature is your feed <title> element and your per item <link> elements. Make sure your feed includes these elements.”
For those looking to succeed in Chrome’s follow feature, including the <title> element and the <link> elements in your RSS feed is best practice.
The image SEO best practices document also received an incremental tweak this month with Google clarifying that they parse <img> elements even when they’re enclosed in other elements when indexing images.
Previously the document stated: “Google parses the HTML of your pages to index images, but doesn’t index CSS images.” The document now reads:
“Using semantic HTML markup helps crawlers find and process images. Google parses the HTML <img> elements (even when they’re enclosed in other elements such as <picture> elements) in your pages to index images, but doesn’t index CSS images.”
When It Leaks It Pours
A Yandex source code repository has allegedly been leaked by a former employee. The leak contained over 1,900 factors used for ranking websites in search results. And whilst Google may not use the factors as Yandex (even if they did they may not carry the same amount of weight) the document is an interesting read for those who want to better understand how search engines work.
Many of the factors were as expected (PageRank, text relevancy, content age, etc). However, some were pretty interesting – notably number of unique visitors, percent of organic traffic, and average domain ranking across queries.
A handy tool has been launched to search the various ranking factors by Rob Ousbey which can be found here.
Return of The King
Don’t call it a comeback! Yahoo has been sending signals into the universe suggesting that it’s back in the search game.
The company recently posted a job listing for a “Principal Product Manager, Yahoo Search” *raised eyebrow emoji*. The job listing expresses that the gang over at Yahoo is looking for “folks that are interested in pushing beyond the status quo to change the way folks interact and use search.”
If that wasn’t enough to cement Yahoo Search raising from the dead like The Undertaker, they also reactivated their Twitter account which has been busy posting teasers:
Just popping in to remind everyone that we did search before it was cool.
— Yahoo Search (@YahooSearch) January 20, 2023
BRB making it cool again.
Your last Yahoo Search. No cheating.
— Yahoo Search (@YahooSearch) January 27, 2023
To Disavow or Not To Disavow
Google’s John Mueller came out guns blazing on Twitter, taking aim at marketing agencies that sell link-building and disavow link services. In a reply to a tweet regarding agencies that offer these services, John Mueller said:
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1620447184662704130?s=20&t=W9zuK1tRtOxt9J6rMs2xZg
Mueller wasn’t finished there. He goes on to suggest that disavowing links is a waste of time and that site owners should be focusing on practices that “build up your site” instead:
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1620447706610290694?s=20&t=uyvLi8ffxMG6z-SIW5Uqhg
Rolling to A Stop
Two of Google’s December updates have finally fully rolled out this month.
The helpful content update launched on the 6th of December and was designed to punish those webpages with low-quality content with no real informational merit. The helpful content update was built upon the initial version of the system which launched in August 2022, however this new update expands across languages globally rather than just English.
Also taking a wrap is the December 2022 link spam update which was launched on the 14th of December. The update aimed to “neutralize the impact of unnatural links on search results” by harnessing the power of SpamBrain: Google’s AI-based spam-prevention system. If you saw a decline in rankings in this time then it’s time to dust off the link-building handbook and get cracking on securing some natural links that adhere to the webmaster guidelines.
If you’ve been affected by these recent updates or need some help putting the right SEO practices in place, we’re always on hand help.
by Jack Bell
