The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #42 - Weekly SEO Tips & News

December 11, 2022

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

Google Releases December 2022 Useful Content Update

Google began rolling out a helpful content update on December 5, 2022, this time for all languages.

Google has confirmed that another helpful content update has started rolling out in search results. The update started on December 5 and will take up to two weeks to complete. This update differs from the others in that it applies to all languages.

The December 2022 proper content update builds on the helpful content system Google introduced in August.

In Google's new terminology, a ranking "system" refers to an augmentation of Google's algorithm, which runs continuously in the background. An algorithm "update" relates to improvements to the ranking systems.

Google's helpful content system is designed to reward web pages created for people rather than search engines. In addition, it aims to recognize content that adds unique value to the web beyond what other publishers typically offer.

This update to the helpful content system covers all languages and may include new signals or adjustments to previous signals. Unfortunately, Google does not provide specific details about updates to its ranking systems.

If Google's helpful content system affected your website in August and you've made efforts to improve your site, it's possible that you could see your rankings improve with the December update.

On the other hand, there are also adverse effects associated with algorithm updates. For example, if you received little or no positive impact from the August update, that could change with the December update.

Google's helpful content system received a lot of criticism over the summer for being too "ineffective." Does this mean that this update will be more noticeable?

We'll have to wait and see in the coming days and weeks. SEO expert Marie Haynes shares some thoughts:

Google's December 2022 Helpful Content Update is live. Here is what we know so far on who was hit and how to recover.

I recommend that you make the following questions from the Google reference page a checklist for evaluating the content quality of each of your pages. For example, if you are experiencing a ranking drop that coincides with this update, you should first identify which of your pages have been negatively affected by this update. You can then evaluate the content quality of these pages within the framework of the following questions.

Google's ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable, information that's created to benefit people. Learn how to evaluate your own content with the self-assessment questions.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Update - Version 18.0

With this new release, Screaming Frog has GA4 support.

You can now pull Google Analytics 4 data directly into Screaming Frog using the new GA4 API. Just follow these steps:

1. In Screaming Frog, go to Configuration > API Access > Google Analytics 4

2. In the "Connect New Account" section, select "Sign in with Google" and connect your Google account

3. Configure the "Select Your Data Stream" options to select the data stream you want to receive information from

4. Set the "Date Range" and "Metrics" tabs to pull the data you want from your target period

5. Run a scan on your site. You will see the data populated in the Internal > All report

This is a super powerful feature of Screaming Frog that I've been using for a long time with Universal Analytics data. It saves time as you no longer have to use VLOOKUP to match crawl and traffic data when analyzing.

It's also great for blending data from sources like Moz, Ahrefs, PageSpeed Insights, and Search Console. So, for example, you can easily find out which pages are the slowest on your site and see how that affects conversion rates.

I highly recommend checking this feature out, especially as SEOs need to continue to migrate to GA4 data.

We’re excited to announce Screaming Frog SEO Spider version 18.0, codenamed internally as ‘Willow’. We’ve been busy working on one major feature we wanted to release pre to the Christmas holidays, and a variety of smaller, yet much-requested features and improvements. Let’s take a look at what’s new in our...

Google Publishes Top Global and Local Search Trends in 2022

Google has released its annual top search trends report, including new local search categories.

Google has released its annual top search trends report, which includes new categories we haven't seen in previous years.

While it's interesting that Google publishes data on the top trending searches each year, you might ask, "What can I do with this information?"

As well as satisfying general curiosity, Google's annual summary of the year's top search trends offers exciting ideas for content publishers.

Explore the searches that shaped 2022, from Google Trends. #yearinsearch

Free SERP Similarity Tool from Keyword Insights

A brand new free tool perfect for keyword research enthusiasts.

Do you often wonder if two (or three) keywords mean the same thing and can be targeted on the same page? Can "architect fees" and "how much are architect fees" be covered in the same article? There is a tool that answers this for you.

Enter two or three keywords into Keyword Insights' SERP Similarity tool, select country and language, and click compare. The tool looks at the SERP results live and determines how similar the SERPs are for those keywords.

For example, below you can see how similar "translation service" and "business translation service" are in the US Google results:

Sometimes you quickly want to know whether you can rank two similar keywords in a single page or need to create separate article. Try our free tool now.

Google's Desktop Search Results Become Continuously Scrollable

Google is bringing continuous scrolling to desktop search results in the United States.

Google is making desktop search results more like mobile devices with an update that allows users to scroll indefinitely between multiple pages.

For now, the continuous scrolling feature is only available in desktop search results in the United States. However, we can expect it to be available in other countries soon.

While Google continues to fill the first page of search results with ads, featured snippets, media, 'people also asked about these' boxes and other features, this update is a win for regular web pages.

We do not expect this change to impact reporting. For example, after Google updated mobile search results to continuous scrolling last year, Search Console reported no difference. I think a similar situation will apply here.

Google brings continuous scrolling to desktop search results in the United States.

15 E-commerce SEO Experts Revealed Their Most Important Insights for a Successful 2023

As part of its E-commerce SEO research, Search Engine Journal interviewed 15 SEO experts to get their insights, tips, and lessons learned.

As they do at the end of every year, SEO experts have started to share their predictions and projections for the new year.

Search Engine Journal asked 15 e-commerce SEO experts about their expectations for 2023. I think personal predictions and opinions should be approached with a bit of skepticism as we enter a year full of such uncertainties. However, it is still worth reading.

Get the ecommerce SEO insights you need to inform your strategy next year from 15 digital growth and SEO experts.

2023 Edition: Google Says Update Date Only When You Significantly Update Content

Before you update your 2022 titles to 2023, heed this warning.

Many SEO experts, myself included, think they can fool Google by simply updating the year in the page title. However, at the level Google's algorithms have reached, it's worth thinking twice about this.

We have entered the most critical month of the year when content creators take their well-performing content and update it from version 2022 to 2023 :)

But updating 2022 references to 2023 is not enough, and Google says to do this only when you make a significant update to the content.

This topic comes up every year; SEOs acting on some kind of SEO scenario do it by default; they update their 2022 version to the 2023 version with some minor changes in the content.

However, Google has warned against reactivating old content as new for years, saying only update dates when there is a significant change in content. Google says that most of the so-called evergreen, long-standing content does not require date changes.

Naturally, the issue has come up again. Google's John Mueller was asked about it on Twitter and replied, "Update dates if there is significant new content. If there is no significant new content, then don't update dates. Unfortunately, we see a lot of SPAM and low-quality content that arbitrarily updates dates. There's nothing wrong with updating content and updating the date (or using an update date) when you make significant changes. Serious sites do this. Don't just tweak it and think it will still be valid in 2023; we won't buy it."

It is that time of year when content creators take their content that has been performing well and updates it from the 2022 edition to the 2023 edition. But updating the references of 2022 to 2023 is not enough, and Google says only do that when you make a significant update to that content.

Crawl Errors and Crawl Budget: Are They Ranking Factors?

Google determines rankings based on many factors; are crawl errors and crawl budgets ranking factors?

Crawling is the first step in any page's journey to the results page.

Search engines must discover your page before evaluating it and deciding where to place it in the results.

Crawling the web is a resource-intensive process. Search engines like Google utilize hundreds of billions of web pages, videos, images, products, documents, books, etc., to deliver query results.

Therefore, they prioritize their crawling efforts to conserve resources and the load on the websites they visit.

There is a limit to how much time crawlers can spend for you.

The amount of time Google allocates to crawl a site is called the site's crawl budget.

Technical glitches that interrupt Google's crawling of your site are called crawl errors.

Remote sites are unlikely to be affected. However, once you reach more than a few thousand URLs, it becomes essential to help Googlebot discover and prioritize the content to crawl and when and how much of the server resources to allocate.

Since it's the starting point, you might wonder how well Google can crawl my website as a ranking factor.

Crawl Errors and Crawl Budget are Not Ranking Factors

Google determines rankings based on many factors. However, crawl errors and crawl budgets are not one of them.

You can think of crawling as the entry point into Google's search results.

Search engines need to be able to crawl your website to index your pages. Therefore, indexing is necessary for ranking. However, an increased crawl budget does not necessarily lead to better positions in search results.

Google determines rankings by many factors, but are crawl errors and crawl budgets one of them? Read on and find out.

How to Analyze Log File with Search Console Data?

Thanks to server logs, we can easily detect problems that Google and other search engine bots encounter while crawling a site.

Access to server logs is not always easy. Your client's IT team may not be too eager to share them. This is where Search Console's crawl statistics section can come to the rescue.

The article below explains step by step how you can do this. Moreover, you can automate this with a Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) template.

Let's start with my favorite tweet of all time: the one from John Mueller in April 2016:

@glenngabe Log files are so underrated, so much good information in them.

— John Mueller is mostly not here 🐀 (@JohnMu) April 5, 2016

I did tons of log analysis especially while working at Oncrawl

Book Of The Week: Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life - Jill Bolte Taylor

Understanding how your brain works can help you live a more productive and happy life.

For half a century, we have been trained to believe that our right brain hemisphere is our emotional brain and our left brain is our rational thinking brain. However, emotional limbic tissues are evenly distributed between the two hemispheres of our brain. So each hemisphere has both a feeling and a thinking brain.

In her book Life with the Whole Brain, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor presents these very different cell modules as the Four Characters that make us who we are.

Each of these Four Characters exhibits specific abilities, feels specific emotions, or thinks particular thoughts. Dr. Taylor also gives us the tools we need to uncover the different characters within us, to choose which of these characters we want to be, how we want to behave, and to recognize and relate to them in others.

As we become more familiar with the Four Characteristics of ourselves and others, we gain more power over our thoughts, feelings, relationships and lives. We discover that we can choose who and how we are in every moment. And when our Four Characteristics work together and balance each other as a whole brain, we can become our best selves and live our best lives.

Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life [Bolte Taylor, Jill] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life

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