Each week the Croud SEO team collate the latest news from relevant sources around the web so you don’t have to. Read through the top SEO news stories for this week below and follow us on Twitter or sign up to our newsletter.
Organic search improves the ability to map to consumer intent
18/09/2019
A new report by BrightEdge has found that organic search is responsible for 53% of all site traffic, with paid search around 15%. The report highlights the importance of organic search as a traffic driver compared to other channels, such as social and display advertising. Interestingly social media traffic has remained flat since 2014 at 5%.
Search helps you find key moments in videos
17/09/2019
Google has added key moment for videos in search – this essentially adds timestamps to how-to videos or long videos like speeches or documentaries in YouTube, allowing users to skip to the information that may be more useful later in the video.
Yoast SEO 12.1: Snippet preview updated
17/09/2019
Yoast has released an updated version of its tool that includes some new additions: custom favicon to mobile snippet previews, matching Google’s font size of desktop search results and new schema filters.
Social listening: What it is, why it matters, and how to make it work
17/09/2019
SEL looks at social listening and how it can be used to improve online performance. The article looks at how to engage in social listening, which tools to use and how to action any insights gained.
Google Search Console adds Datasets to the enhancement reports section
16/09/2019
Google has added Datasets to the section of its enhanced report, this allows webmasters to monitor how Dataset markups are performing on web pages and whether any warnings or errors are discovered.
Making review rich results more helpful
16/09/2019
Google has announced that it has applied algorithmic updates to reviews in the rich results, which may result in the loss of the review stars in the search results snippets. It is now only showing reviews for the following: a clear set of schema types, non “self driving” reviews and reviews that have the name property within the markup; a full list of the schema types allowed is listed. It would be worth reviewing any pages that have review snippets to ensure they are still present and if not consult the material provided by Google to understand why they may have been lost.
Elevating original reporting in search
12/09/2019
Google has updated its algorithm to show more original reporting in search and Google News results; this not only improves the prominence of original reporting but also keeps it there for longer.
Meta robots nofollow gets the hint treatment too
12/09/2019
Google’s Gary Illyes has stated that the meta robots nofollow won’t support the new UGC and sponsored link attributes, but it will still gain the new hint treatment.
Yes, you can add JSON structured data to the body of your pages
12/09/2019
Google’s John Mueller has stated that JSON-LD structured data can be added to the body of a page, not just in the head. This is useful to know as it gives more flexibility when implementing structured data to a page.
E-A-T and the Quality Raters’ Guidelines – Whiteboard Friday
13/09/2019
Moz’s latest Whiteboard Friday examines the E-A-T and Quality Rater’ Guidelines, describing exactly what it is and how it affects a site’s search performance. This includes analysing how Google fights disinformation and the three parts to E-A-T; expertise, authority and trust.
