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Good morning, Marketers, does this morning’s newsletter seem a bit off to you? It does to me…
Carolyn Lyden, our Director of Search Content, is off part of this week and the day I write the newsletter has been moved to the Friday slot – so everything just seems off to me. For me, having a consistent and strict routine helps me do my job better and more efficiently.
The same is true with SEO — consistency is key and to some, like Google’s John Mueller, the number one piece of SEO advice is to be consistent. Why? The goal with SEO is to not confuse Google by sending mixed, inconsistent signals. Make sure your navigation and URL structure match what you tell Google in your XML sitemap file and canonical tags or hreflang attributes. Make sure what you are showing your users is the same as what you are telling Google Search.
Consistency is key for SEO in that anything you can do to clearly define your site to search will help you rank better. The same is true in life, the more consistent you are with your family, your children, your business, your clients, the more they can all learn to rely and trust you. You need to earn Google’s trust too so that your site can perform its best in search.
Barry Schwartz,
Feeling less consistent today…
Google Search Console rich results status reports errors are more actionable
Google announced it has added a new set of detailed errors to the rich results reports in Google Search Console for some sites. These are called the rich results status reports and you will see a report only if Search Console has data for that rich result type on your site and Search Console implements a report for that type.
“The key is that it’s not new errors, just better details on a bunch of cross type errors,” Ryan Levering of Google said, “These are things that may have been exposed in SDTT but we haven’t had in reports yet. These are very common errors and now they should be more actionable.”
There are five new errors that were also added, they include: Invalid attribute string length
Invalid attribute enum value, Invalid object, Type conversion failed and Out of numeric range.
Google announces the new Analytics 360
On Thursday, Google announced a revamped version of Analytics 360, the company’s suite of products designed for enterprise-level companies, which builds on Google Analytics 4 as a foundation. The new features include the ability to create product line sub-properties, custom user roles and larger caps on dimensions, audiences and conversion types.
Why we care. Google Analytics 4 is the company’s vision for the future of analytics, and the new Analytics 360 is that same vision, but for enterprise-level organizations. The features Google announced emphasize flexibility and scalability, which may help the tool meet the needs of more businesses.
New bug impacts AMP links in Google Search for iOS 15 devices
Since the release of iOS 15, Apple’s latest mobile operating system, some have begun to notice that when you click from the Google Search results to a publishers site, you won’t be landing on the AMP URL anymore. Instead, you are taken to the main URL or even the publisher’s mobile app (if you have it installed on your device).
This is a bug and Google’s Danny Sullivan said this will be resolved soon. “It’s a bug specific to iOS 15 that we’re working on. We expect it will be resolved soon,” Sullivan said on Twitter.
Sadly, this is not a feature and AMP will still be the default URL for mobile searches, over the site’s main URL or app deep link URL. Of course, you have the right to remove AMP URLs from your site and many publishers have been doing that since the Page experience update rollout finished and AMP URLs are no longer required for top stories or other Google surfaces.
John Mueller’s cryptic tweet spins off penalty speculation
Above is a screenshot of what John Mueller, a Google search advocate, posted on Twitter the other day. SEOs, including myself, went off on speculating what this tweet can mean. Did it declare Google is going after a new link scheme with a set of new manual actions? Did Google algorithmically release a new version of the Penguin algorithm targeting these types of links. Or maybe John Mueller just liked the movie Blade Runner 2049.
Scaling Bing, the five local pack and healthier Google Ads
Bing scaling. Microsoft released a blog post that shows how Microsoft Bing has scaled to hundreds of petabytes of data and is still able to achieve sub-second data freshness. It is called RocksDB in Microsoft Bing — check it out.
Five pack in local. Google is testing, or maybe it is a bug, a five pack, five local search results in the local pack, instead of the typical three.
Healthier Google Ads. A new Google Ads policy prohibits the marketing of high fat sugar salt foods and beverages to minors in the EU and UK regions. Is Google making their ads healthier?
We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.