If you search for [Moz] in Google Search, you won’t be seeing the moz.com home page, that page was removed from the Google index due to a DMCA takedown request. The takedown complaint cites that Moz’s home page, along with 185 other URLs were “distribute modified, cracked and unauthorized versions” of the Dr. Driving app.
The takedown complaint. The DMCA, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, takedown complaint can be viewed over here. You can see the Moz home page listed on line 122. As Cyrus Shepard posted on Twitter “Crazy! You can’t access the Moz homepage from Google right now. A search for “Moz” shows an incredible 8(!) removed results from an overly-broad DMCA filing. DMCA literally lets anybody abuse the system, and it breaks Google.”
Google is aware. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison responded saying “I’ve passed it on for review.” We suspect Google will reverse this issue really quickly – but so far, Moz is still not showing.
The Google search results. Here is a screenshot of the search results page showing the Moz blog coming up in the first position, not the Moz home page:
The footer of the Google results show that Google “removed 8 result(s) from this page” due to DMCA violations:
Should not happen but it does. You are all probably thinking, this should not happen – how can Moz not rank for it’s own name in Google Search. How can it be that easy for someone to use a DMCA request to take down a large respected brand from showing in the Google Search results? And you are right, this should not happen – but it does.
I guess mistakes happen, even in massive companies. But how? We don’t know yet. We have reached out for Google for a statement and if we hear back, we will update this story.
More on DMCA requests and Google Search. Google has its transparency report that says “It is our policy to respond to clear and specific notices of alleged copyright infringement. The form of notice we specify in our web form is consistent with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and provides a simple and efficient mechanism for copyright owners from countries/regions around the world. To initiate the process to delist content from Search results, a copyright owner who believes a URL points to infringing content sends us a takedown notice for that allegedly infringing material. When we receive a valid takedown notice, our teams carefully review it for completeness and check for other problems. If the notice is complete and we find no other issues, we delist the URL from Search results.”
You can dispute these requests and have them reversed but how long does that take? You can submit DMCA requests to Google over here.
Why we care. This is a nightmare for most SEOs and site owners. To be removed from Google Search for your branded term. It should not happen, it is really inexcusable and sad to see but it did happen.
I am sure Moz will return shortly but there is really nothing we can say on how to prevent this from happening to your site. The good news, Moz is a big enough brand that this caught Google’s radar quickly and likely will be fixed soon because of that. But for small brands – good luck.
Postscript. Moz is now back, less than 12 hours after this issue was first reported here:
A hub and spoke content marketing strategy can help you boost keywords rankings, increase website traffic and enhance downstream metrics like conversions, leads and sales.
Join Conductor in a live webinar and learn the basics of a hub and spoke model. You’ll also take away a four-step process you can use to rank higher.
Every time you type a question into Google, the results page can look completely different. Think videos, images, ads, graphs, and related questions.
Today there are more than 40 different interactive elements or SERP features that can appear. These responsive results offer an improved user experience, but pose a real challenge to search engine optimization (SEO).
So, how can you know what SERP features should be at the forefront of your strategic planning? In this report, Similarweb analyzed the most popular SERP features across various industries. It covers
Best practices to help you rank for key SERP features
Important factors that influence search behavior
Varying trends and growth rates of SERP features
Which SERP features are most prominent by industry
How branded and non-branded search impact SERP
Read it now to find out the best strategies to leverage and how.
Google today has turned off support for the URL parameter tool within Google Search Console. Google did notify us just about a month ago that this would be happening and it did – the URL parameter no longer functions today.
What happened. If you try to access a specific Search Console profile using the URL parameter tool, Google will tell you “this report is no longer available here.” It will show this warning icon along with it:
What is the URL parameter tool. The URL parameter tool launched in 2009 as a parameter handling tool, a way to communicate to Google to ignore specific URLs or combinations of URL parameters. Two years later, in 2011, Google upgraded to tool to handle many more parameter scenarios.
The tool essentially let you block Google from indexing URLs on your site.
You are currently able to access the tool over here but when you try to use it, that error will show up.
Why is it going away. Google said it has become “much better at guessing which parameters are useful on a site and which are —plainly put— useless.” Google added that “only about 1% of the parameter configurations currently specified in the URL Parameters tool are useful for crawling.” “Due to the low value of the tool both for Google and Search Console users, we’re deprecating the URL Parameters tool in 1 month,” Google said.
What do I do going forward. Google said there is nothing specific to do. Google said “going forward you don’t need to do anything to specify the function of URL parameters on your site, Google’s crawlers will learn how to deal with URL parameters automatically.” You can always use robots.txt rules, Google said “or use hreflang to specify language variations of content,” Google added. Plus, Google said your CMS and platforms handle building quality URLs these days.
The old rules will no longer function or be considered going forward.
Why we care. If you previously used the URL parameter tool, now that the tool is no longer being used by Google, you will want to annotate your reports to document the change. You probably should keep a close eye on your analytics and Search Console reports to see changes, if any, in crawling, indexing and ranking that may be related to this change. This might be a gradual impact, so keep an eye on issues over the next several days to several weeks.
Have you recently received a DMCA copyright infringement notice through email from a personal claiming to be a lawyer? Well, that email might be a scam and the lawyer who emailed you might not be a real person, but rather an AI generated persona for a lawyer at a fake law firm. That is what The Next Web uncovered in a recent report about such a DMCA request.
What is a DMCA request. A DMCA request is when someone requests the removal of content or a web page due to copyright violations. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it is used to have hosting companies, Google and web site owners remove content that infringes on copyright.
What is the scam. In this case, the fake machine generated lawyer is emailing sites claiming DMCA copyright infringement and instead of having the site remove the content, they are asking for a link instead. The email says first starts off threatening, as most legal notices sound, but it ends saying “our client is happy for their image to be used and shared across the internet. However, proper image credit is due for the past or ongoing usage.” The proper image credit should be done with “a link to” the site “within 7 days.” “Otherwise, we are required to take legal action,” the email continues.
In short, the scam is to threaten copyright legal action for a link to a site.
Here is a copy of the email:
Fake lawyers. It gets even more creepy, as this reporter dug into this issue, they investigated who Arthur Davidson Legal Services was. The law firms site looked legit but the domain name was only registered this year but the site claims the firm has been around for many years. He then dug into the profile of Nicole Palmer and learned that she never existed, that she was made up by AI, by a generative adversarial network, a deep learning model that can be trained to create faces, art, or anything else. This is her photo, notice how the earrings and other aspects don’t exactly line up:
It is just pretty wild how far scammers will go to manipulate the Google search rankings.
Why we care. Just beware of such legal threats, do your research to ensure the firm exists, the lawyer who emailed you is real and that this is not a scam. I can see many folks just reading the email, quickly adding the link attribution credit and emailing back saying this was done – without asking for more details or without verifying this is a real issue.
Online scams are only going to get more sophisticated and look more real with AI and machine learning at their disposal. So we all need to get more sophisticated in questioning everything we see, every email we receive and every request that is made from us.
SpamBrain. That is the name of Google’s AI-based spam prevention system that the search company launched in 2018, yes over a few years ago.
SpamBrain is credited by Google for catching about six times more spam sites in 2021 than it did in 2020, reducing hacked spam by 70% and reducing gibberish spam on hosted platforms by 75%.
SpamBrain. It is the first we are hearing the name SpamBrain, which Google said launched in 2018. Google referenced the 2018 Google spam report, specifically the spam trends section where Google talks about its “machine learning systems” to improve search spam detection.
Google confirmed that this is the first time they are talking about this name, SpamBrain, publicly. A Google spokesperson told us: “SpamBrain refers to our machine-learning/AI solution for fighting spam. Since we first started using it, we’ve been updating SpamBrain constantly, and it’s grown much more effective at detecting and nullifying both existing and new spam types.”
Google also said that SpamBrain “was built to be a robust and evolving platform to address all types of abuse.”
Spam improvements. Google said that in 2021 it made additional strides in detecting and thwarting search spam attempts. These highlights include:
~6 times higher identification of spam sites
70% reduction in hacked spam sites
75% reduction in gibberish spam on hosted platforms
99% “spam free” searches
More on spam. Google talked a bit about its spam-fighting efforts, saying that links are still important for ranking and that its link spam algorithm in 2021 helped “broadly identify unnatural links and prevent them from affecting search quality.” Google also released a two-part spam update, part one and part two of the spam updates in June 2021 and then a November 2021 spam update.
Why we care. You can check out the previous Google web spam reports from 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015 if you want to follow the progress.
In short, Google will continue to fight spam in order to try to keep its search results useful and of higher quality. While some sites may still get away with some spam tactics, Google is constantly launching new methods to detect and block those sites from ranking highly in Google search.
Long-term success in Google search should be about creating a spam-free site that ranks through the test of time. Build quality and build something you are proud of. Hopefully, your site will rank through all future spam and quality updates.
Google seems to be sending out notices through Google Search Console for sites that have intrusive interstitials. The notice tells the site owner to remove those intrusive interstitials in order to “improve page experience” for your site.
What the email says. We spotted a copy of the subject line of the email in the Google Webmaster Help forums and it reads “Improve your page experience by removing intrusive interstitials from domain.com.” We have been unable to find the full email or a screenshot of this notice yet.
What are intrusive interstitials. Google says “intrusive interstitials and dialogs are page elements that obstruct users’ view of the content, usually for promotional purposes. Interstitials are overlays on the whole page and dialogs are overlays only on a part of the page, sometimes also obfuscating the underlying content. Websites often need to show dialogs for various reasons; however, interrupting users with intrusive interstitials may frustrate them and erode their trust in your website. Intrusive dialogs and interstitials make it hard for Google and other search engines to understand your content, which may lead to poor search performance. Equally, if users find your site hard to use, they are unlikely to want to visit those websites again, including through search engines.”
What is page experience? Google has a detailed developer document on page experience criteria. In short, these metrics aim to understand how a user will perceive the experience of a specific web page: considerations such as whether the page loads quickly, if it’s mobile-friendly, runs on HTTPS, the presence of intrusive ads and if content jumps around as the page loads.
Desktop also. This can be an issue for desktop as well since the page experience update is now live for desktop pages.
Why we care. While this does not appear to be a manual action, intrusive interstitials do impact your overall page experience signals and can impact your rankings in a super lightweight manner. So if you get this notice, try to remove the intrusive interstitials from your website.
Messy SEO is a column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study.
This installment of “Messy SEO” details my process of working with our team to analyze indexing patterns for MarTech’s pages. In Part 6, we discussed the necessity of creating pillar pages to establish a better site hierarchy and rank for our most relevant topics.
MarTech.org has had many indexing issues since its creation last year. The most pressing one lately is that Google seems to be prioritizing outdated content in the SERPs, meaning many of the (now redirected) Marketing Land and MarTech Today URLs are still populating the index. As a result, the majority of MarTech’s top-performing pages are irrelevant to our brand as it exists today.
One of the ways we’re addressing this issue is by creating pillar pages that center on the main industry topics we cover at MarTech. This will help us establish a hierarchy of relevant topics.
We’ve primarily focused on Google’s indexation throughout this process, neglecting to review the ways other search engines have treated our content. So, we decided to compare the MarTech, Marketing Land, and MarTech Today data from Google with that from Microsoft Bing – and the discrepancies were telling.
Indexing status almost a year after migration and consolidation
There have been a lot of changes to MarTech’s indexing since the migration, most notably the title change issues. Thankfully, these were largely resolved, but there are some other issues we found when comparing the content indexed on Google and that on Bing.
Google’s indexing
Despite many lingering indexing issues, Google has made some adjustments to MarTech’s indexation over the past year. The search engine removed virtually all of our duplicate URLs after we set up our redirects, and a good portion of Marketing Land and MarTech Today pages have been removed as well. However, we’ve recently noticed some interesting performance and indexing trends.
Performance. The majority of the top pages from the past three months in terms of interaction are legacy pages that have little to no relevance to our MarTech brand. Aside from the homepage, the “What is MarTech” page, and our CDP platform page, the top URLs are largely irrelevant to our target audience.
Granted, these articles have been live for years, building up authority on the Marketing Land and MarTech Today domains. But, after almost a year of MarTech being live, it’s odd that there are so many old, less relevant pages sitting at the top of our performance lists – especially when our team has published so much good content since then.
Indexed pages. Google has roughly 29,000 MarTech URLs in its index. The majority of these are relevant links we’ve placed in our sitemaps. However, there are over 7,000 URLs in the “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” category. Many of these URLs are irrelevant — a disconcerting number have parameters that look like either tracking code or, in some cases, spam.
URLs with parameters in the index.
The prevalence of URL parameters isn’t surprising, but it’s not clear why Google is including so many of these in the index. The more alarming trend, however, is the number of Marketing Land and MarTech Today URLs that are still in Google’s index as well.
Marketing Land URLs on Google.
MarTech Today URLs on Google.
We know that there are plenty of Marketing Land and MarTech Today URLs online, both in our older pieces of content and on other websites. But it’s strange to see so many still in Google’s index.
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Bing’s indexing tells a different story. Though there are still plenty of irrelevant content pieces, they’re much less prominent in the SERPs.
Performance. MarTech’s top-performing pages on Bing look somewhat similar to those on Google. The homepage, “What is MarTech” page, and legacy pages are still there, but we also found one of our more recent news articles in the mix. The importance of the piece to our industry undoubtedly helped bring it to the forefront, but it’s peculiar that Google didn’t treat it the same way.
This newer article’s numbers are encouraging, but, just like the results on Google, our more relevant topic pages are failing to perform well.
Indexed pages. Bing has indexed fewer of our MarTech pages (roughly 17,000 URLs), which isn’t surprising, given how much smaller it is than Google. However, after analyzing these URLs, we found the ratio of relevant content to irrelevant content to be much lower. We’re not seeing a huge number of indexed URLs with parameters.
The most glaring difference between the two search engines is their indexing of our old domain pages. While Google still retains over 2,000 URLs from Marketing Land and MarTech Today, there are only 143 of these URLs left in Bing’s index.
Marketing Land URLs on Bing.MarTech Today URLs on Bing.
Yes, Bing had fewer of these pages to begin with, but the inconsistency is still shocking.
A discrepancy between Google and Bing’s indexing
Of the two search engines, it seems Bing is doing a better job of crawling our old URLs and adjusting its index accordingly. This makes sense — there are fewer pages indexed on Bing, so the search engine has less to clean up.
But why is Google holding on to so many of these old URLs? One possible explanation is that it simply hasn’t crawled all of the old URLs yet. This would mean it hasn’t found the 301 redirects we put in place, believing the old sites are still live.
This seems unlikely, however, as we migrated the site almost a year ago. Google has had plenty of time to crawl our pages. Yet, we’re still open to this possibility.
Another explanation could be that there’s a structural issue on the MarTech site that is somehow telling Google the old domains are still live. We’re conducting some deep technical audits at the moment to determine if this is true. Until we know more, we’re going to continue to create good content and do all we can to help it rank higher than the less relevant pages.
Have you noticed discrepancies in indexing between Google and Bing? How are you addressing the issue? Email me at cpatterson@thirddoormedia.com with the subject line “Messy SEO Part 7” to let me know.
More Messy SEO
Read more about our new MarTech domain’s SEO case study.
SEO can be broken down into clear, repeatable steps.
We know that:
Content is king and user experience is queen.
Google wants us to create unique, relevant, comprehensive content so that searches can find exactly what they are looking for.
Websites should load fast and make it easy for users to perform their desired actions.
The content and experience of the site should be worthy of being mentioned and linked to by other relevant, authoritative websites.
In this way, optimizing for SEO can be distilled into four stages:
Research
Audit
Create
Empower
Want to learn a repeatable, step-by-step marketing program that will allow you to develop and implement a successful digital marketing strategy? This will be the first article of a new series that will deliver just that. This article will provide a general outline of the “what” and “how.” Future installments will go into much more detail.
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Before starting any SEO campaign, you need to spend a significant amount of time researching.
Here are a few key elements to examine at the start of any campaign:
Baseline research:
What: How is the site currently performing? What keywords are you currently ranking for? How much traffic is the site receiving monthly?
How:
Semrush Domain Overview
Semrush Organic Research
Semrush Benchmark Report
Competitor analysis:
What: Start by identifying who your top competitors are. Then, perform a gap analysis to see what keywords they are ranking for and that you aren’t, and vice versa. At this stage, do some backlink sleuthing too.
How:
Semrush Keyword Gap
Semrush Organic Research
Semrush Saved Report
Semrush Backlink Analytics
Keyword research:
What: Having looked at the keywords you are currently ranking for, what keywords your competitors are ranking for, and having a clear understanding of your target audience and buying stages, it’s time to build your keyword list.
How:
Semrush Keyword Magic
Semrush Keyword Gap
Semrush Organic Research (Competitors)
Google Search Console
Google People Also Ask
Google Search Suggestions
Target audience research:
What: Who is your target audience, and what do they look for at every stage of the buying process? At this stage, you’ll want to create buyer personas and map out their buying journey.
How:
Customer Service Data
Google Analytics Demographic Data
Surveys
Audit (analyze, align, activate)
Now that all the background research is complete, it’s time to move on to the auditing stage. You’ll need to perform several audits to ensure your site has all the correct elements.
Technical SEO audit:
What: You’ll need to run the site through several tools to understand how the code is built and how it impacts performance and rankings. You can use multiple tools to get a comprehensive list of data points and then send these findings to the relevant team members.
The number of data points in performing a technical audit could be endless, so we will focus on some of the most important ones that will make a significant difference when optimizing for Google.
How:
Tools:
Semrush Audit
Screaming Frog
SiteBulb
Critical CSS
Cloudflare
GTmetrix
Pingdom
Website Auditor
Google tools:
Google Lighthouse
URL Inspection
Structured Data Markup Helper
Rich Results Test
Chrome Dev Tools
Content audit:
What: Unless you’re launching a brand new website, you will likely inherit a lot of “content baggage” when you do SEO for your website. Your website may have hundreds of outdated pages or pages that are not receiving any traffic and bog down your content score.
It’s common for people to cannibalize content, which means they have multiple articles targeting the same keywords. Thin content is also very common, including pages with little to no text or does not cover a subject comprehensively.
How: Use Screaming Frog or Semrush to create a list of your site’s page, add metrics and analytics data, and label pages to keep, delete, revamp or consolidate.
E-A-T audit
What:
Expertise: topic expertise for an author
Authority: inbound links, social followers, inbound links, citations, social shares, topic authority
Trustworthiness: SSL, contact info, privacy and disclaimers, refund policy, about us page, links to authorities, credentials on about page
Does your site have toxic backlinks? Do you have a disavow in place? Has your site been the victim of a negative SEO attack? If you have toxic backlinks, your rankings could be suppressed.
How:
Semrush backlink audit: Start by running the links using their filters and send every link to the disavow or whitelist. Once done, review any that weren’t part of a pattern. Finally, run both the whitelist and disavow list through a metrics finder so you can check if any can be moved over. When done, export to disavow and upload to Google Search Console.
Analytics audit:
What:
Is your GA set up properly? Are you tracking conversions and/or goals? Do you have funnels set up? Do you have call tracking installed and working? Are you a/b testing and launching the pixels correctly?
How:
Review your Google Analytics account and make sure all of the above is set up properly.
Create (captivate, capture, compel)
Now that all of the foundational research is in place, you can move on to the fun part: creating captivating, compelling content.
Build your editorial strategy:
What:
Create an editorial strategy including the keywords from your KW research, trending topics, and content that addresses each target persona’s top, middle, and bottom of the buying stages.
How:
Plan:
Determine Cadence: How often will you publish?
Determine Resources: How many writers/editors are available?
Determine Formats: Micro-posts, Long-form posts, infographics, video graphics, ebooks, tutorials?
Trending Topics: Use Feedly, BuzzSumo or Google News to create a list of relevant, trending topics.
Editorial calendar:
Based on the cadence, assign a keyword or topic to each deadline/due date. Make sure you cover all target personas, buying stages, and relevant keywords.
Manage:
Editorial workflow
Add details to each content order: Primary and Secondary keyword, URL/meta title/H1, length, content type, author, author due date, scheduled to publish date.
Review content for readability, check for keyword inclusion, add similar keyword variants and check for the use of bullets and paragraphs.
Check for duplication of content.
Review for on-page SEO elements.
Make sure there are outbound links to authoritative sources.
Add links to other relevant pages of your site.
Publish
When publishing, make sure the article doesn’t have any formatting errors and that all of the on-page SEO elements are in place.
Track:
Create an experiment/annotation with the publish date to track the article’s performance at 60, 90, and 120 days.
Optimize:
Trending up/down: Perform monthly and quarterly audits where you optimize your pages that are trending up and down.
Consolidate: Content that isn’t performing can be consolidated with content that is doing well.
Update Meta Titles for CTR optimization using GSC
Outreach
Link Building:
What:
With all of your content assets in place, you can start outreach to promote your content with other publishers, websites or editors. Use direct email and social media outreach to connect with other relevant sites. Offer them an incentive to get them to agree to link to your site.
How:
Manual: Build a list of targets by searching for relevant sites in Google, grab their email and social profiles, offer a content piece, link exchange, or just ask for the link, follow up on all conversations.
Tools:
Pitchbox
Linkedin
Influencers and Brand Ambassadors:
What:
Many people already have popular sites that attract your target audience. Reach out to them and negotiate a partnership.
How:
Manual: Build a list of influencers and target them via email and social media
Tools:
Izea
Buzzsumo
Media:
What: Reach out to the media to promote your content, events, or campaigns.
How: Use Cision or other PR software to identify media members you can connect with.
Empower (engage, enthrall, earn)
Finally, you have all the building blocks to watch your website thrive and watch your traffic grow. You should be watching your site traffic, rankings and revenue increase at this final stage. You’ve done all the hard work and can now build on your success. At this final stage, you’ll want to focus on empowering your customers to trust you and become your customer.
Data analysis
What:
This stage is all about data-driven analysis and insights. You’ll have data coming from various sources. You want to focus on using that data to empower your consumers, buyers, brand ambassadors, sales team, and marketing teams at the empowerment stage. You’ll want to use data to determine the best keywords to focus on, campaigns that are resonating, brand ambassadors gaining traction, and more.
How:
GSC: Find pages or keywords trending up or down and optimize with additional content, keywords, inbound links, and visual assets.
BuzzSumo: What pages/articles are getting lots of social shares? Create more relevant/similar ones, or do outreach on those
Backlinks: What pages are getting lots of natural backlinks? What about your competitors? Look at these and surface those for increased outreach. Use Semrush backlink analytics to get this data.
Conversions: Which pages are converting best? What elements do those pages have that you can replicate? Use Google Analytics to determine this.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO):
What:
Conversion rate optimization is critical at this stage. You want to start getting into the weeds of how users are interacting with your content, landing pages, and checkout process. Run continuous experiments so you can maximize all of your existing traffic and improve your bottom line.
How:
Vwo
Optimizely
Figpii
Hotjar
Heap.io
Monitor trends
You can never rest on your laurels when it comes to your SEO strategy. It’s important to continuously build content, outreach and monitor the performance of your website. Google is constantly changing its algorithms, so it’s important for you to keep monitoring trends and to modify your website accordingly.
Here are some of the biggest shifts:
Voice and question-based queries. Smart devices, such as watches glasses and wearables advance, interactions with search engines may increasingly take place via voice. You should always be using questions as keywords and optimizing for voice search. Answers would come from the Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panels, so it’s increasingly important to get your pages ranking in these Google features.
Quality over quantity, based on crawl prioritization. Crawl priority will become increasingly relevant and important as more content is consistently created and indexed. You may choose to produce fewer pieces of content but make sure those pieces provide the best, most comprehensive user experience. Promote your articles to build links as often as you publish content so that your link growth velocity is congruent with your content publishing ratio.
User engagement signals, especially SPEED. Google introduced Web Core Vitals to break down the elements of site load speed, from “how quickly a page loads” to “how quickly do users see the first thing on the page”? How quickly is the page interactive? How quickly is the page fully functional?
Indexing and crawl prioritization: The number of pages indexed grows exponentially, and Google is moving away from indexing everything to indexing quality content. They are prioritizing crawls to pages that are trusted and authoritative.
Link building: Following their overall shift towards authority, receiving mentions from media and trusted sources will become increasingly important. If your friends all say you’re the best chef, everyone knows this can be biased. However, if people that don’t know you say you’re the best chef, this has more weight and value. Focus primarily on gaining authoritative links that your competitors don’t already have.
Deep dive
This article has given you an outline of the elements required to establish a successful SEO campaign. However, the devil is in the details.
The articles to follow in this series will go through each of the elements mentioned above, with in-depth information and processes to accomplish each of these stages.
On March 23, 2022, Google begun rolling out the third product reviews update that added additional ranking signals to that ranking algorithm. It seems like the March 2022 product reviews update is just about done rolling out now, so we asked some of the data providers that track the ranking volatility, to tell us what they are seeing. In short, Semrush and RankRanger are showing that the March 2022 product reviews update was less of an impact than the last update, the December 2021 product reviews update that we analyzed over here.
It is also important to note that the March 2022 product reviews update is not officially done rolling out yet, it should be done any day now. We do believe the bulk of the changes should have been felt by now, so we are reporting on the changes we saw today. Google initially said this rollout will happen over the “next few weeks.”
Both providers looked at the highest point of volatility, which was on March 31st and not the March 23rd volatility, as a comparison of this update to others.
Data providers show March was smaller than December
Semrush. Semrush data showed that the March 2022 product reviews update has less Google search ranking volatility than the December 2021 product reviews update. When you compare the December 2021 product reviews update to the March 2022 product reviews update, Semrush said “there’s no comparison in the levels of peak volatility.” “The December 2021 product reviews update saw volatility levels reaching around 9/10 whereas the March product reviews update sees volatility levels between 6-7,” the company added.
Here is a chart comparing the volatility by vertical/niche for March vs December:
But Semrush data went one step further and sent us data on the difference or the change between the volatility levels before a product reviews update and after. You can see in the chart below that the April 2021 product reviews update was directly responsible for increased rank volatility at that time, Semrush explained. In this case you can see the difference between the volatility levels before and after the update is upwards of 3 points for many of the verticals. When you compare this to both the December product reviews update and the March product reviews update, you will see none of the verticals studied showed a difference of more than 2.5 points.
This shows while volatility levels may have been higher overall in December of 2021 – it was not necessarily the product reviews that was the cause, Semrush explained.
In short, the March 2022 product reviews update levels of volatility were “nowhere near what we saw during the December 2021 product reviews update,” Semrush told us. But the caveats mentioned above are important to note.
RankRanger. RankRanger showed similar results, where the March 2022 product reviews update was less impactful than the December 2021 product reviews update. RankRanger said “average fluctuations for the March 2022 update were slightly lower than that of the December 2021 update.” Here is a chart showing that:
If you break it down by position levels, RankRanger showed the fluctuations for the December update were higher in the top three and top five results:
Then they also broke it down by vertical or industry, showing the top three and top five results, volatility were greatest for the retail niche but in the top ten positions, the niches evened out those fluctuations.
Both companies, Semrush and RankRanger looked at March 31st as the peak of this update, here it is illustrated in this RankRanger chart:
RankRanger did also note that the first product reviews update in April 2021 was less impactful than the March 2022 update as you can see from the overall comparison chart below followed by the comparison by ranking position.
So overall, it seems like the March 2022 product reviews update was less of an update compared to the December 2021 product reviews update. Don’t get me wrong, if you were hit by any of these updates, you likely saw a 20 to 40% or more change in Google organic traffic to your site. But how widespread the update was, well, that seemed not as big as previous updates.
More on the March 2022 products reviews update
The SEO community. The March 2022 product reviews update seemed to have a slow start, with some volatility as early as March 23rd but then most of the volatility showed up on March 31st. I was able to cover the community reaction in one blog post on the Search Engine Roundtable. It includes some of the early chatter, ranking charts and social shares from some SEOs. In short, if your site was hit by this update, you probably felt it in a very big way but this was not as widespread as the December update in terms of the chatter within the community.
What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by this product reviews update. We posted that advice in our original story over here. In addition, Google provided two new best practices around this update, one saying to provide more multimedia around your product reviews and the second is to provide links to multiple sellers, not just one. Google posted these two items:
Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review.
Include links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice.
Google added the following criteria for what matters with the March 2022 product reviews update:
Include helpful in-depth details, like the benefits or drawbacks of a certain item, specifics on how a product performs or how the product differs from previous versions
Come from people who have actually used the products, and show what the product is physically like or how it’s used
Include unique information beyond what the manufacturer provides — like visuals, audio or links to other content detailing the reviewer’s experience
Cover comparable products, or explain what sets a product apart from its competitors
Google added three new points of new advice for this third-release of the products reviews update:
Are product review updates relevant to ranked lists and comparison reviews? Yes. Product review updates apply to all forms of review content. The best practices we’ve shared also apply. However, due to the shorter nature of ranked lists, you may want to demonstrate expertise and reinforce authenticity in a more concise way. Citing pertinent results and including original images from tests you performed with the product can be good ways to do this.
Are there any recommendations for reviews recommending “best” products? If you recommend a product as the best overall or the best for a certain purpose, be sure to share with the reader why you consider that product the best. What sets the product apart from others in the market? Why is the product particularly suited for its recommended purpose? Be sure to include supporting first-hand evidence.
If I create a review that covers multiple products, should I still create reviews for the products individually? It can be effective to write a high quality ranked list of related products in combination with in-depth single-product reviews for each recommended product. If you write both, make sure there is enough useful content in the ranked list for it to stand on its own.
Google product reviews update. The Google product reviews update aims to promote review content that is above and beyond much of the templated information you see on the web. Google said it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings.
Google is not directly punishing lower quality product reviews that have “thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” However, if you provide such content and find your rankings demoted because other content is promoted above yours, it will definitely feel like a penalty. Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty against your content, Google is just rewarding sites with more insightful review content with rankings above yours.
Technically, this update should only impact product review content and not other types of content.
Why we care. If your website offers product review content, you will want to check your rankings to see if you were impacted. Did your Google organic traffic improve, decline or stay the same? Long term, you are going to want to ensure that going forward, that you put a lot more detail and effort into your product review content so that it is unique and stands out from the competition on the web.
We hope you, your company and your clients did well with this update.
