The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #21 - Weekly SEO Tips & News

July 17, 2022

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

Google Search Console Hides Too Many Search Queries

After a report by Ahrefs.com that found the search queries provided by Search Console were not accurate, Google has updated its related help document.

A few weeks ago, Patrick Stox of Ahrefs published a report showing that on average 50% of queries in Search Console are classified as confidential, meaning anonymized.

GSC doesn't tell you all the keywords you're getting traffic from. In fact, the tool doesn’t show a term for nearly half the clicks.

Following this report, Google has updated the content of the following help page:

The Performance report shows important metrics about how your site performs in Google Search results, for example: See how your search traffic changes over time, where it’s coming from, and what

The following update has been made in Google's help document under the heading "Anonymized queries":

To protect the privacy of the querying user, infrequent queries (called anonymous queries) are not shown in these results. Anonymized queries are permanently excluded from the table. Anonymized queries are included in chart totals unless you filter by the query (queries with or without a specific string).

If your site has a large number of anonymized queries, you may notice a significant discrepancy between the totals (number of questions with a_string and the number of queries without a_string). This is because anonymized queries are omitted each time a filter is applied.

Based on this update, we can easily say that Google's statement is a confession. The search queries you see in Google Search Console are not 100% real. It would be helpful to keep this in the back of your mind.

A couple of weeks ago, Patrick Stox of Ahrefs released a bombshell report showing that on average about 50% of queries in Search Console are hidden, i.e. classified as anonymized. I reached out to Google, giving them a chance to respond to this, and the result led to Google updating its help document on anonymized queries and the export/API capabilities.

Google Fixes Search Indexing Issue

Google confirmed on July 15 that an issue in the search index affected many sites. The source of the problem is unknown.

I became aware of the problem thanks to the following tweet from Google Search Central. According to Google's statement, many sites encountered a serious indexing problem, and Google did not know the source of the problem precisely.

Hours after this tweet, Google posted another update tweet that they resolved the problem. So if you faced an indexing issue this week, it should probably be fixed by now.

You can find the most up-to-date information in the article on the subject in Search Engine Journal:

On July 15, Google confirms there's an issues with its search index impacting a large number of sites. The root cause is unknown.

Video Indexing Report Coming to Google Search Console

The new report will help us understand the issues Google faces when crawling web pages that contain video.

Google is adding a new report to Search Console to help you understand how your videos perform in search results.

You will be able to use the report to answer questions such as:

  • How many of your pages have Google detected a video?

  • Which videos have been successfully indexed?

  • What issues prevent videos from being indexed?

Like other reports in Search Console, when you fix a current issue, you can use the report to verify the fix and monitor how video pages are updated in Google's index.

Before this update, Google Search Console only reported on videos marked with structured data. The video indexing report does not depend on structured data to identify videos and therefore does not report on the validity of video markup.

This means that if you publish a video on your site, you will need to check both reports.

URL Inspection Tool Update

In addition to adding a new report to Search Console, Google is updating its URL Inspection tool with the ability to check the video indexing status of a particular page.

After you enter a URL in the inspector, if Google detects a video in the URL, you'll see the following in the results:

  • Details like video URL and thumbnail URL.

  • Page status indicates whether the video is indexed or not—list of issues preventing the video from being indexed.

Google will roll out the Video Indexing report gradually over the next few months. You can find more detailed information at the following links:

Google's new report in Search Console identifies issues Google ran into when crawling webpages with videos.

Video creation and consumption on the web continues to grow, and Google Search indexes videos from millions of different sites,

so people can easily discover and watch this content. To help you understand the performance of your videos on Google, and

identify possible areas of improvement, Search Console is launching a new report called

Video indexing.

We will roll out this change gradually over the next few months, so you might not see any changes for now.

Google's May 2022 Core Update: What's the Impact So Far?

Search Engine Journal did a sectoral analysis of Google's May 2022 core algorithm update.

You need to know this; As with speed updates or freshness updates in the past, no one knows the exact nature of core updates unless Google tells us.

To analyze the impact of a Google core update on organic search results, we can look at a visibility (SEO Visibility) and ranking variability (volatility).

Visibility tells us a domain's organic performance in Google's search results. When the visibility metric increases, a site ranks for higher volume keywords that are likely to attract clicks.

Conversely, a decreasing visibility metric means the domain is losing keywords. How much the visibility metric increases or decreases is known as “volatility.”

We can tell when core updates impact a website because the visibility metric increases or decreases drastically over a defined period following Google's announcement.

With these two terms in mind, Search Engine Journal analyzed the May 2022 update on the Semrush Sensor and Sistrix visibility index.

We analyzed the impact of Google's May 2022 core update to determine what you can learn from spikes and drops in search rankings across industries.

Google: Is There a Risk to Deleting the Disavow File?

Google has stated that regular sites can stop using the disavow tool by deleting their disavow files.

John Mueller of Google answered a question about whether the use of the disavow file is now mandatory because Google has gotten so good at evaluating backlinks.

Disavow Tool

Google introduced the reject tool in response to popular demand from the SEO community, which was looking for an easier way to deal with thousands of sites suffering from the Penguin algorithm. 

Google introduced the Penguin algorithm to deal with the large number of manipulative links businesses use to influence search results in their favor, especially paid links. In addition, the disavow tool offered SEOs an easy way to deal with links they couldn't remove.

John Mueller answered this question: "As long as you don't face a manual penalty, there's no harm in deleting your disavow file once you've recorded it. Our systems have become extremely successful at detecting automated and garbage backlinks that every site gets naturally."

Google explains why normal sites can stop using the disavow tool and delete the disavow file.

Huge Drop in Questions Listed in “People Also Asked” on Google SERPs

Google has started to show fewer "people also asked" questions in desktop search results.

According to Semrush and RankRanger, Google began listing fewer questions in the "users also asked" section of desktop results. While the "people also asked" section appeared in approximately 60% of the previous search queries, this rate has decreased to 30%.

The decline began on Thursday, July 7, according to Seroundtable. It is a pretty severe drop, and it's worth following. I share the charts of both SEO tools below.

You can read the article on the subject below.

Google seems to be showing the people also ask feature a lot less often now on desktop. According to Semrush and RankRanger, it was at about 60% of queries showing people also ask and now it is closer to 30%.

Top 10 Sitemap Generators for Faster Crawls

Make sure more of your pages are indexed and crawled.

Sitemap (XML Sitemap) is a powerful tool for SEO professionals and webmasters. They help Google and other search engines navigate a website and find new pages and content.

Search engines do not guarantee to index pages submitted with Sitemaps, but telling search engines which of your pages are essential can make a significant difference.

Sitemaps can help you:

  • Get an overview of your website structure.

  • See which pages are crawled by Google and other search engines.

  • Know how often pages are scanned.

  • Identify non-indexed pages.

  • Identify which pages have errors that need to be fixed.

With the help of sitemap generators, the search engine crawls of your website will be faster and more efficient. If you have a site smaller than a few hundred pages, it is possible to manage your sitemap on your own.

But if you have a medium or large site and are adding a significant amount of new content regularly, you may want to consider adding a dynamic sitemap to your site or looking for a sitemap generator. A dynamic sitemap automatically adds new pages to the sitemap file. It is generally faster and requires fewer resources than writing to a static file.

You can find the ten best sitemap generator plugins and software in the following article:

Ensure more pages are indexed and crawled. Get it done with these top 10 best sitemap generators (with recommendations for every budget).

Google: Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) Make a Difference in Rankings?

Could your CMS choice affect your Google rankings? John Mueller from Google answers.

Google's John Mueller answered a question about whether choosing one content management system (CMS) over another makes a difference in terms of SEO.

This question was asked in the latest episode of the “Ask Googlebot” series on YouTube. It is common to hear that WordPress is the best CMS for SEO, which can lead site owners to believe they are at a disadvantage if they choose another CMS. But Mueller made it clear that the choice of CMS doesn't make any difference when it comes to ranking signals.

Can your choice of CMS impact search rankings? Google’s John Mueller answers.

Free Google AI Image Analysis Tool for Image Recognition

Learn how Google's free Google AI image analysis tool can use to understand how it categorizes and interprets images at scale.

I have to say that this tool is just a machine learning model and not a tool to reverse engineer Google's image ranking algorithm. So it's unrealistic to use this tool and expect Google to reflect something about its image ranking algorithm.

However, it can be a great idea to understand how Google's AI and Machine Learning algorithms can understand images and will provide essential insights into how advanced Google image algorithms are today.

The information provided by this tool can be used to learn how a machine learning model evaluates how an image makes sense and how well that image fits into what a web page is talking about.

You can find more detailed information on the subject in the following article:

Learn how Google's Vision tool classifies images at scale and how you can use it to see the way Google interprets your images.

Book Of The Week: "How We Decide?" - Jonah Lehrer

The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions.

Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we “blink” and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind’s black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they’re discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of feeling and reasonâ, and the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it’s best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we’re picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to use the different parts of the brain; to do this; we need to think harder (and wiser) about how we think.

Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research and the real-world experiences of a wide range of “deciders" from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players.

Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal is to answer two questions of interest to just about anyone, from CEOs to firefighters: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?

Buy How We Decide on Amazon.com â FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders

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

Best,

Mert Erkal