Google has added several new technical and content quality guidelines to the math solver structured data help documentation over the weekend. The new guidelines list a number of requirements in order to be able to show math solver and practice problem rich results in Google Search.

Technical guidelines. The new technical guidelines call for your site to have the structured data, that your server can handle Googlebot crawling your site, how you deal with duplicate math solver elements and ensuring the content is visible and not behind a paywall.

Here are those guidelines:

• Add MathSolver structured data to the home page of your site.
• Ensure that your host load settings allow for frequent crawls.
• If you have several identical copies of the same math solver hosted under different URLs, use the canonical URLs on each copy of the page.
• Google doesn’t allow math solvers that are entirely hidden behind a login or paywall. Once users navigate from the feature on Google to your site, the solution and a step-by-step walkthrough for their initial problem must be accessible to them. Additional content can be behind a login or paywall.

Content guidelines. The new content guidelines aim to ensure that the content in your math solver problems are not promotional and also provide accurate and quality-based answers. Here are those new guidelines:

• We don’t allow promotional content disguised as a math solver, such as those posted by a third party (for example, affiliate programs).
• You are responsible for the accuracy and quality of your math solver through this feature. If a certain amount of your data is found to be inaccurate based on our quality review processes, then your solver may be removed from the feature until you resolve the issues depending on the severity. This applies to:
  • The accuracy of the problem types your solver is capable of solving.
  • The accuracy of your solutions for math problems your solver declares it can solve.

What practice problems look like. Google explained it as an “interactive feature that tests your knowledge of high school math, chemistry and physics topics directly on Search.” Here is a GIF of it in action:

Google added the structured data help documents back in March of this year. The company added these new guidelines late last week.

Another change made to the help document is that Google removed solution page markup instructions and said that it is fine to remove any existing solution page markup.

Why we care. If you are in the online education content business, you may want to leverage these new structured data types to get more exposure in the Google Search results. These may help increase your click-through rates on some of your snippets in the search results and it may help you gain more traffic to your site. It may also lead to fewer clicks, if the answer is solved directly on Google’s site but you should be able to track that within Search Console if they add this data to the performance report.

If you want to show up for math solver rich results, make sure you are in accordance with both the technical and content guidelines.

The post Google math solver guidelines require accuracy appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has updated its technical guidelines for Fact Check structured data saying that a page must only have one ClaimReview element and that multiple fact checks per page is no longer allowed.

The revised guidelines. The revised guidelines now say “to be eligible for the single fact check rich result, a page must only have one ClaimReview element. If you add multiple ClaimReview elements per page, the page won’t be eligible for the single fact check rich result.”

Previously the guidelines said “a single page can host multiple ClaimReview elements, each for a separate claim.” But that is no longer the case, now you can only have one ClaimReview element per page, not more, to be eligible to show fact check rich result in Google Search.

Before screenshot. Here is a screenshot of the guidelines before this change was made:

After screenshot. Here is what the page looks like now:

Why we care. If your site does show fact check rich results in search and you are using multiple ClaimReview elements on a single page, you may want to remove all ClaimReview elements but one. Google’s guidelines now only allow one per page and thus your rich results for Fact Check may stop showing if you are showing more than one per page.

Make sure to review the guidelines for Fact Check rich results over here.

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Google has confirmed it is fixing two search related bugs that impact what is shown and displayed in the Google search results. The issues are with review stars showing in the search results and how Google processes soft 404 documents. The two issues seem to be unrelated but are both being addressed and fixed by Google.

Soft 404 bug leading to de-indexing issues

A couple of weeks ago, we reported that Google changed how it detects soft 404 pages and that led to some pages being removed from the Google Search index. In short, Google said it now does soft 404 detection by device type, which caused some to see spikes in soft 404 errors but not clearly seeing if those pages were in the Google index or not.

Google has confirmed this morning both on Twitter and on YouTube that the company has pushed out a change to address the issue over the next few days. Google wrote “you may have noticed an increase in soft 404 error reports in Search Console the past few weeks.” “The team identified the classifier that was causing the issue and deactivated it while they fine-tune it,” the company added. That was written by Gary Illyes of Google.

John Mueller of Google said earlier this morning “we saw a bunch of these reports recently, in the past couple of weeks, and the team has been looking into that, and I think they turned one of classifiers off now based on some of the feedback that we got.” “So I would suspect that maybe this will catch up again and work out in the next couple of days and week or so.” John Mueller added.

So you should see improvements on this front in the upcoming days.

Review snippets and stars go missing

Over the past couple of days, Google Search has stopped showing, for the most part, review snippets. Those stars that are placed under some of the search results that have review structured data. Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed this afternoon that this is indeed a bug and Google will hopefully fix it soon.

I asked Danny Sullivan about this on Twitter and he responded “yes, it looks like there is a bug. We’re looking at it further and hope to correct soon.”

Here are screenshots that illustrate the before and after that I personally captured.

Review snippets from two days ago:

Review snippets from this morning:

As you can see, the stars are not showing up but Google is now aware and the issue should be resolved soon.

Why we care. All of these bugs can directly impact your traffic from Google Search. When Google resolves the bugs, it may lead to more traffic to your site from Google Search. In the first case, of the soft 404 bug, Google was not listing some pages in its search results that it will soon re-list after the bug is resolved. The second case, of the review stars, Google was/is not showing review stars in the search results that can lead to a lower click through rate from the search results.

Hopefully both will be fully resolved soon and you will see a positive impact in your traffic.

The post Google fixing two search bugs; review snippets and soft 404 detection appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google can now list several of the factors or reasons why it ranked a specific search result in its search results listings, the company announced. This feature is an expansion to the about this result box that launched in February 2021.

Google Search can show the terms it matched on the web page and your query, including the terms that were related but not direct matches. Google also lists if links from other websites influenced the ranking, if the results had related images, if there were geographical reasons for the result ranking and more. In fact, Google said there are several factors this section can disclose when it comes to why Google ranked a specific page in its search results.

Google also lists search tips in this area to help you refine your query, if you find the result to not meet your desired outcome.

What it looks like. Here is a screen shot of what this looks like. As you can see in the “your search & this result” section, Google lists numerous bullet points for why it ranked this specific snippet. The section above, the “source” section is old and that was launched in February, as mentioned above.

What factors does Google show. Google did not tell us all the factors it shows but here are the ones I spotted while testing:

• Search terms that appear in the result. In this case, Google will show you what terms were matched from the searcher’s query to the content and/or HTML on the web page that Google ranked. Matches are not just the visible content but also can be words in the HTML, like the title tag or other meta data.
• Search terms related to your search. So not only will Google match based on your exact query but also terms “related” to that query. In the example above, the query was [shot] but Google expanded that to mean “vaccine.”
• Other websites with your search terms link to this result. This is where sites that have these search terms on their pages and links, actually link to the result listed in the Google Search results. Yes, clearly links are still used by Google for ranking purposes.
• This result has images related to your search. Google will also look at the images on the page to determine if those images, maybe the filename of the image, are on that page and are related to your query.
• This result is [Language]. Language is important and right now this is an English only feature, but when it expands, Google can show other languages. So if you search in Spanish, Google may be more likely to show you Spanish results. Or if you search in Spain, Google may show you Spanish results as well.
• This result is relevant for searches in [region]. Google may use the searchers location, the site’s location and the query to determine if the searcher wants to find a web page that is more relevant to a specific region. In the example above, someone searching in Vermont to [get the shot] probably wants to get local vaccine websites in Vermont. Sometimes queries can be down to the city level and sometimes the region is not relevant. Google will show those details in this area.

Search tips. Google will also let searchers hover their mouse cursor over the underlined words in this box to get search tips on how to narrow their search results better. In the screenshot below, you can see Google suggesting the search may want to add a minus sign to the word running in order to filter out those words in their search.

Google can offer a number of search tips that are specific to the query and the “about this result” box for that page.

Rolling out now. Google is now rolling this out in the U.S. for English results. By the time this story goes live, we expect it to be visible in 10% of the US based queries but by next week in about 100% of queries in the US. Google said it will expand this to more countries and languages overtime.

Google would not say how many searchers actually use this “about this result” feature but clearly Google is investing it expanding its feature set. Google did say the about this result feature has been viewed hundreds of millions of times but would not share what percentage of users have used it.

Why we care. SEOs and marketers always wanted to know why Google ranked a specific site for a given query. Well, Google is now giving you pretty detailed clues into why it ranked that site for that query with this new box. Of course, this is not detailed ranking weights and signals, but it does tell you if the words match or match closely, if people link to the site, if there are geo-specific reasons and more.

From the searcher’s perspective, it might help a searcher understand why Google ranked that result and provide more trust through transparency for Google and its searchers.

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Daniel Waisberg, a Search Advocate at Google, described and illustrated what various types of organic search traffic drops look like in the performance reports in Google Search Console and how you can address those traffic drops.

Types of traffic drops. Google posted sketches of “examples of drops and what they could potentially mean.” This shows you visually what a site-wide technical issue or a manual action looks like compared to normal seasonality in search traffic, compared to a technical issue on a page level or an algorithm change (like a core update) or simply a reporting glitch in Search Console.

Here are those sketches:

With technical issues that are site-wide and manual actions where a Google employee gives you a manual penalty, you can generally see a massive drop off in your organic search traffic from Google. This is illustrated in the image at the top left above.

With technical issues that are on a page by page basis or an algorithm change like a core update, you would see a slower decline in your traffic, and it would then level off over time.

Then there are seasonality changes that you see recover with the change in seasons for your business cycles. Also, Google has been known to have reporting glitches in Search Console, where you see things bounce back to where they are.

How Google defines these categories. Here is how Google defined these categories of traffic drops:

• Technical issues: Errors that can prevent Google from crawling, indexing, or serving your pages to users – for example server availability, robots.txt fetching, page not found, and others. Note that the issues can be site-wide (for example, your website is down) or page-wide (for example, a misplaced noindex tag, which would depend on Google crawling the page, meaning there would be a slower drop in traffic).
• Security issues: If your site is affected by a security threat, Google may alert users before they reach your site with warnings or interstitial pages, which may decrease Search traffic.
• Manual Actions: If your site does not comply with Google’s guidelines, some of your pages or the entire site may be omitted from Google Search results through a Manual Action.
• Algorithmic changes: Google is always improving how it assesses content and updating its algorithm accordingly; core updates and other smaller updates may change how some pages perform in Google Search results. To keep track of future updates, subscribe to our Google Search News YouTube series or follow us on Twitter.
• Search interest disruption: Sometimes changes in user behavior will change the demand for certain queries, either as a result of a new trend, or seasonality throughout the year. This means your traffic may drop simply as a result of external influences.

What to do. The remainder of the blog post from Google dives into how to dig into the reports to analyze your search traffic drop. This way you can understand which category your traffic drop falls into. Was it a reporting bug or an algorithmic update or maybe it was a Google manual action.

Why we care. I believe this was the first time Google described visually how various issues in Google Search can impact your traffic. It gives you a way to clearly see what to expect from various SEO issues and how your traffic may be impacted.

It is important to note that these illustrations are generalizations and that you do need an experienced SEO consultant to diagnose any real issues with your website.

The post Google categorizes what organic search traffic drops look like appeared first on Search Engine Land.