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.
Pro Tip: 3 common mistakes SEOs make when disavowing links
21/10/2019
Search Engine Land looks at common mistakes made when disavowing links, this includes looking at disavowing the wrong links, disavowing unnecessarily and relying too much on tools.
The future of search begins with a ‘V’
17/10/2019
Search Engine Land argues the future of search will be around visual and voice search. Whilst voice hasn’t grown as much as expected, Google has stated that within its app 20% of all searches are now by voice and adoption rates have grown significantly. Alongside this, visual search is advancing rapidly with Google and Bing introducing new ways for searching using images, such as Google’s tool Lens or recent developments in local image search. This highlight that marketers need to ensure optimisation of images, as well as ensuring businesses are prepared for voice becoming more dominant in the future.
Featured snippet synchronicity: URL match study
23/10/2019
A study by Rank Ranger has found that featured snippets on desktop show 86.6% of the time compared to 73.3% on mobile. The study looked at a dataset of 265 keywords over 30 days and also found that the URL within a featured snippet displays across devices 70.3% of the time, with the remaining time only displaying the URL on one device – this was attributed to Google placing more relevance to the URL on one device over the other which should be factored into any featured snippet optimisation.
Google begins testing Duplex internationally
22/10/2019
Google has begun testing its automated call booking service internationally – at the moment this will just include an automated call which will request the businesses opening hours which will then be updated on Google Maps and Search.
The reputation management revolution: a global benchmark report
23/10/2019
According to a report by Uberall, a review rating increase of just 0.1 stars can boost interaction rates of a location by 25%, this includes phone calls, website clicks or direction requests. This appears to improve exponentially as an increase from 3.5 to 3.7 saw a 120% increase in rates. This highlights the importance of gaining reviews from customers and providing a great user experience across the entire customer journey.
Accessibility and SEO: Where they overlap and how to optimize for both
21/10/2019
Search Engine Watch explores how to improve web accessibility of sites and why it’s important. Web accessibility refers to allowing content and it’s functionality to be usable by anyone, however despite being a key UX requirement for a significant part of the population, it is often not a priority. The article runs through different areas that can be improved to increase web accessibility, such as site and page structure, alt text for visual content, video transcripts and readability.
The value of nofollow links is changing: where do they fit into SEO?
21/10/2019
Econsultancy looks at the changing value of nofollow to act as “hints” and how this will impact search. This provides an overview of the changes, a review of the potential impact the change may have, what to do with old nofollow links and whether marketers should pursue new nofollow links. The conclusion is that marketers shouldn’t waste resource pursuing nofollow over dofollow links, as it’s likely most nofollow links will still be treated as “ignore”.
Google: manual actions are immediate but take time to process in search
18/10/2019
Google’s John Mueller has stated that when a manual action is removed from a site it takes some time for search to process this change, so there won’t be an immediate recovery of visibility.
