The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #17 - Weekly SEO Tips & News

June 19, 2022

Here are the weekly SEO insights for the SEOs Diners Club members. In addition, you can also join our free SEO Diners Club network to ask questions and share your thoughts on these topics and more.

The Complete Google Search Console Guide for SEO Professionals

Improve the health of your site and increase your search performance by using Google Search Console effectively.

Google Search Console provides the data needed to monitor website performance in search and improve search rankings. This tool makes it indispensable for publishers who want to maximize their online business and success. In addition, using free tools and reports makes it easier to take control of your search presence.

An article published in the Search Engine Journal this week provides answers to these questions:

  • What is Google Search Console (GSC)?

  • How to get started

  • How to Verify Site Ownership?

  • Troubleshooting with GSC

  • Leveraging GSC Features

  • Why is Search Console Good for SEO?

You can find answers to all these questions by reading the article. In this way, you can start using Google Search Console more effectively.

Get to know Google Search Console and unlock its power to improve your site health and search performance.

Google May 2022 Algorithm Update: Winners and Losers Analysis

Google's May 2022 core update is complete. Get insights on which sites saw the most significant changes in visibility and the scope of this update.

The first comprehensive analysis of Google's core algorithm update, which started in May and ended on June 9, was published by SEO expert Lily Ray.

In this article, Lily Ray stated which sites benefited from this update and which ones suffered losses, along with the winning and losing sites.

For example, she shared that some sites that lost the algorithm update that we call Medic Update, which hit health sites in 2018, recovered the situation with the last update and gained profit.

I think that with the pandemic period, these sites' giving more importance to content quality, author authority, and Google EAT may have a role in this.

Google's May 2022 core update is complete. Learn which sites saw the greatest changes in visibility and the insider insights this latest core update offers.

Keyword Difficulty: Quality Thresholds and Search Engine Predictive Ranking — SEO Case Study

Koray Tugberk Gubur added a new one to its mind-opening videos this week.

These are the questions Koray answers in his “Keyword Difficulty SEO Case Study” video:

- Can a small website get traffic from global authorities?

- Could a small Topic Map be good enough to drive traffic from big websites?

- How can I leave the leading websites behind?

- How To generate EAT Signals with authoritative and algorithmic authorship?

- Why is keyword difficulty a misleading metric?

- What to use instead of keyword difficulty?

Google Replaces Search Console "Warning" Tags

To help users focus more on critical issues, Google is simplifying how it compiles Search Console reports.

Google is simplifying Search Console reports so you can focus more on issues that affect how your website appears in search results. This update won't happen immediately; it will become visible in reports over time.

These changes will affect the "warning" tag for URLs and items. There is confusion over whether a URL that receives a warning notice should appear on Google.

Top-level items will be labeled as valid or invalid to reduce this confusion.

"Valid" refers to pages or items that do not have critical issues, while "invalid" refers to pages or items that have critical issues.

The following reports will be affected by this update:

  • Important Web Metrics: Pages will be grouped into good and not good tables while keeping the Bad/Needs improvement/Good categories.

  • Mobile Usability: Categories will be labeled “Not Available” and “Available.”

  • AMP report: Alerts will be replaced with “valid” and “invalid” tags.

  • Rich results reports: New tags will apply for Events, Fact checks, Logos, and other report types.

  • URL Inspection: The top-level decision for a URL would be:

  • - The URL is on Google

  • - The URL is on Google but has issues

  • - The URL is not on Google

You can find the details in the following blog post:

In an effort to help people focus more on critical issues, Google is simplifying the way it compiles Search Console reports.

11 SEO Tips to Improve Your Google Indexing

Not having your pages indexed by Google can negatively affect your website's SEO performance. Check out these 11 tips to improve your indexing!

I think "indexability" and "crawl budget" are the most critical concepts in SEO studies, especially on websites with more than a certain number of pages.

A website with indexability issues may be sending the wrong messages to Google.

If you think you can't or shouldn't devote the time to the unattractive task of fixing your site's indexability, I suggest you think again; it could be one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

Directory problems can cause your rankings to drop and your site traffic to dry up quickly. Therefore, you need to use your scanning budget effectively.

This article presents 11 tips to consider when improving your website's indexability.

Indexation issues can really trip up your website and cause your rankings to drop. Check out these 11 tricks for improving your indexation!

How and When Should Google Reviews Be Deleted?

When should you delete bad Google reviews? You can find out how to go about this issue in this article.

Not every negative review your business receives is eligible for removal.

If a customer has had a horrible experience with your business and is expressing their opinion in the form of a review, you cannot ask Google to remove that review. Google will only remove a comment that violates Google policies.

Fortunately for businesses, Google takes the review removal process pretty seriously, and there are several types of reviews it finds inappropriate. A few types of comments that are eligible for deletion are:

  • If the commenter has made a post that would harass other people or businesses or encourage others to engage in harassment, you can request that such comments be removed by Google.

  • Google also provides credit card information, medical records, etc. It also deletes comments that contain personal information, such as

  • Google considers it misleading if the review is not based on experience or does not accurately represent your location or product.

  • Google will remove any obscene comments that use profanity, are obscene, use adult themes, or contain adult derogatory, violence, or brutality.

Having said this, I can say from my experience that Google's procedures for removing comments are not very healthy. For example, our requests to remove threatening and abusive comments from a sick ex-patient who wrote fictional comments on my cousin, a plastic surgeon, on his Google Business Profile to extort money were unsuccessful. My cousin convinced her to remove her comment on the condition that she re-examines her.

I will say that Google comments are always open to manipulation, and Google is unwilling to remove them by saying "free thought."

InLinks Keyword Research Tool Updated

InLinks, one of the tools we can use for semantic SEO, has been recently updated.

InLinks is a tool that redefines the rules of the game regarding Semantic SEO. InLinks has helped me better understand the entity concept mentioned in Semantic SEO and how Semantic SEO works.

The Keyword Research section of the tool recently received a significant update. I wanted to share the video below so you can discover this new tool and what InLinks can do. In the following sections, I plan to introduce the tool to you in a broader context through applied examples. If you decide to use the tool, I will ask you to buy it via my affiliate link. That way, you can earn me extra InLinks credits. Thus, you will allow me to do the more extensive practice.

Google: Don't Publish Blank Pages on Your Site

John Mueller recommends that pages that don't yet have content should not be published, with the thought of indexing a URL in Google as soon as possible.

This week, an SEO expert asked Google's John Mueller if it's okay to post blank or blank pages for Google to index. John Mueller replied that we should not publish blank pages on the web.

The question was: "Is it a good idea to make a website live even if some pages have no content?

I'm trying to think about why this is considered a good idea. Although this page has no content, I think you want to speed up the indexing of the URL by reporting a URL to Google. However, this approach will likely backfire because if Google doesn't see content, it may decide not to check that page for a while (or even classify it as a duplicate) — John Mueller.

Soft 404 Errors

As Stradiji, we have a customer with an e-commerce site supported by Shopify, which we are still working with, and we could not improve the performance. The product range of this customer's supplier company is extensive, and the products can be removed from the site very quickly; this leads to blank collection pages on the site.

Collection pages correspond to the category of a regular e-commerce site in Shopify jargon. Empty collection pages are created due to products that are suddenly wasted or not supplied, and we regularly receive Soft 404 errors from Google Search Console.

Although we informed our customer that these collection pages should not occur, we could not devise a solution for this issue. We put a "noindex" tag on the collection pages where we receive a Soft 404 error every week and turn them off for Google indexing. Despite this, I think Google has a wrong impression of the site's overall quality. It's like trying to stop the blood flowing from a deep cut with a Band-Aid.

I will say that publishing blank pages can have a worse effect on your SEO performance than you might expect. You don't have to be John Mueller to guess that.

An SEO asked Google's John Mueller if it is okay or even a good idea to publish blank or empty pages so Google can find those URLs? John Mueller said no, don't publish empty pages to the web.

Running Screaming Frog SEO Spider in the Cloud

While Screaming Frog SEO Spider is usually desktop software, it can crawl millions of URLs thanks to its configurable hybrid storage engine.

Did you know you can run Screaming Frog in the Cloud?

One of the main advantages is that you can run as many SEO Spider instances as you want in the Cloud with one license.

This means, for example, a much faster crawling of a site with millions of URLs, or the simultaneous crawling of many sites, large and small. So although it costs £149 per year, it can be a fruitful investment, especially for SEO agencies.

Running in the Cloud gives you access to ongoing or finished scans from anywhere, so you can quickly get the information you need. The following article describes in detail how you can do this.

Our latest guide looks at running the Screaming Frog SEO Spider in the cloud using Google Compute Engine. With the ability to scale up Virtual Machines, the crawling potential is endless.

Book of The Week: What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveries―and Reveal How Today’s Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World

Science fact, not science fiction, on the cutting–edge developments that are already changing the course of our future.

Every day, scientists conduct pioneering experiments with the potential to transform how we live. Yet it isn’t every day you hear from the scientists themselves! Now, award–winning author Jim Al–Khalili and his team of top-notch experts explain how today’s earthshaking discoveries will shape our world tomorrow—and beyond.

Pull back the curtain:

  • genomics

  • robotics

  • AI

  • the “Internet of Things.”

  • synthetic biology

  • transhumanism

  • interstellar travel

  • colonization of the solar system

  • teleportation

  • and much more

What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveriesâand Reveal How Todayâs Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World [Al-Khalili, Jim] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveriesâand Reveal How Todayâs Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World

I hope you enjoyed my weekly SEO insights. Hope to see you the following Sunday in the new episode. I wish you all a great week.

Best,

Mert Erkal