With COVID forcing many retailers online, there are more e-commerce options than ever. Google Search Central recently released new guidelines for developers to help improve search visibility for e-commerce sites. “When you share your e-commerce data and site structure with Google, Google can more easily find and parse your content, which allows your content to show up in Google Search and other Google surfaces. This can help shoppers find your site and products,” Google said in the guide.

The guide has seven pages covering the following topics:

Where content can appear. The guide says that e-commerce content can actually appear in more results than just traditional search. These include Google Search, Images, Lens, the Shopping tab, Google My Business, and Maps. “Product data is the most obvious type of e-commerce related content, but other types of information can also be useful to shoppers at different stages of their shopping journey,” according to the guide. Google recommends promoting content like product reviews, offers, customer service touchpoints and even livestreams.

Adding product data. Structured data can also help your e-commerce products show in Google search properties. The guide recommends the following ways to show Google what your products are:

• Include structured data in your site’s product pages.
• Tell Google directly which products you want to show on Google by uploading a feed to Google Merchant Center.

URL structure for e-commerce sites. “A good URL design structure helps Google crawl and index your site,” says the guide. A poor URL structure can cause confusion, though, resulting in missed content, content that’s retreived more than once, and crawlers thinking your site has infinity pages (and beyond!). The guide includes recommedations for a URL structure that helps search engines better understand your content and pages:

• Minimize the number of alternative URLs that return the same content to avoid Google making more requests to your site than needed.
• If upper and lower case text in a URL is treated the same by the web server, convert all text to the same case so it is easier for Google to determine that the URLs reference the same page.
• Make sure each page in paginated results has a unique URL.
• Add descriptive words in URL paths. The words in URLs may help Google better understand the page.

Make your e-commerce site navigation Google crawler-friendly. Both shoppers and search engines need to be able to easily understand what’s going on with your website and where to find what they’re looking for via navigation. What are navigation best practices for e-commerce? “For example, add links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and finally from sub-category pages to all product pages.”

Why we care. With many businesses starting e-commerce websites for the first time over the past year or so, this guide can help ensure that they’re following the best practices to get their products seen in the varying search experiences Google provides. It also gives SEOs who focus on e-commerce documentation to show their clients and stakeholders to help get their recommendations implemented for better e-commerce SEO.

The post E-commerce SEO guide: New documentation from Google appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has confirmed that it not only made a change to what title it shows in the search results but also disclosed how much of a change it actually was. For the past few weeks, Google said it was using your chosen HTML title tag 80% of the time. Now Google said it is using as-is title tags 87% of the time, a seven-point increase: “Title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before,” Google wrote.

Why the change. “We’ve used text beyond title elements in cases where our systems determine the title element might not describe a page as well as it could. Some pages have empty titles. Some use the same titles on every page regardless of the page’s actual content. Some pages have no title elements at all,” said Google. The company then listed off other reasons why it won’t use your HTML title tag:

• Half-empty titles (” | Site Name”)
• Obsolete titles (“2020 admissions criteria – University of Awesome”)
• Inaccurate titles (“Giant stuffed animals, teddy bears, polar bears – Site Name”)
• Micro-boilerplate titles (“My so-called amazing TV show,” where the same title is used for multiple pages about different seasons)
• and more.

Guidance. Google also gave some guidance on how to encourage the search engine to show your HTML titles: “Focus on creating great HTML title elements. Those are by far what we use the most.” Google reshared the help document on titles, that it recommended SEOs read. “Consider the examples in this post to understand if you might have similar patterns that could cause our systems to look beyond your title elements. The changes we’ve made are largely designed to help compensate for issues that creators might not realize their titles are having. Making changes may help ensure your title element is again used. That’s really our preference, as well,” the company also added.

But Google is not done and said, “Our work to improve titles will continue.”

Are titles getting better? Time will tell if these changes Google made actually made things better. We saw some SEOs earlier this week saying the titles were starting to look better. Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz recently published a large case study on the title rewrites as well, but it is hard to say when Google made the changes and when the case study data was pulled from.

Many SEOs are still not pleased with Google making such wide-sweeping changes, even if it was only 20% of the time (and is now 13% of the time). And, this explanation doesn’t cut it for them:

It’d “be great if this is what [Google] was doing but it’s not what they are doing. They need to stop or give us a way to opt out. They take out brand names, move brand names, remove pipes make dashes, take out key terms from several of our good titles etc. Let us opt out,” tweeted Kristine Schachinger, digital strategist and SEO consultant. “Here we go…again,” added Tess Voecks, director of SEO project management at Local SEO Guide.

Others are more optimistic that Google took SEO feedback into consideration: “Wow, this is exactly what I asked for in yesterday’s post: (1) a more conservative approach, and (2) more transparency on the reasons for rewrites. Kudos to Google for listening and adjusting,” said Dr. Pete Meyers. “Interesting clarification of Title Tag ‘Update’ stating Google are trying to improve badly constructed or misleading Titles rather than update all your Title tags. Plenty of evidence to suggest that it has not rolled out perfectly (E.g. below) but I’m sure it’ll improve,” added Dan Nutter, head of SEO at Clarity At Speed.

Why we care. If you noticed changes to your click-through rate from the Google search results, it may be related to these changes. Hopefully, those changes are positive since it is a win-win for Google to provide titles that its searchers want to click on. If not, Google said it will keep making improvements. It’s critical that SEOs continue to provide feedback on the adjustments to the title tag system as well as any changes that play out in real-time.

The post Google explains why it made the title change to the search results appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, do you think of yourself as a brand?

“Thinking of ourselves too much as brands can take away from what’s human and real,” wrote Marketoonist creator Tom Fishburne. “If everyone acts too much like a personal brand manager, all communication can start to feel like marketing.”

Promoting yourself on places like LinkedIn or Twitter can help you further your career and open up new opportunities, but, “Communications that ‘feel like marketing’ is something that marketers work to avoid all day, every day, regardless of channel,” Chris Wood, my colleague and editor at MarTech, added.

“There’s a line between personal branding and self-promotion,” Fishburne said. “I think it’s less about what you say about yourself and more about what you do.” In a space where so many organizations and professionals rush to share their messaging about the latest industry news or current affairs, I can only recall two groups: the ones that totally botched their responses and the ones that actually went out there and did something.

If you’re interested in promoting yourself or your business and learning more ways to successfully engage on LinkedIn, Darryl Praill, CRO at VanillaSoft, will be leading a session on exactly that at our MarTech Conference, kicking off tomorrow at 11am ET. You can register for free for that session and much more, including sessions on marketing in the search-first era and proven methods for improving onsite search effectiveness.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Messy SEO Part 2: The importance of canonicalization

What do you do when you’ve merged two sites only to find that there are now a large number of canonical URLs pointing to now-non-existent pages? They don’t directly affect users like redirects do, which was what Corey Patterson, content and SEO manager for MarTech and Search Engine Land, covered in the first installment of our Messy SEO series. However, Google and other search engines rely on them to ensure that search results are up to date and meet users’ needs.

In the case of Marketing Land and MarTech Today, which we merged into MarTech.org back in May, Corey analyzed the URLs on each page via the Yoast SEO plugin and replaced the canonical URLs with the newly consolidated MarTech.org URL.

“​​This leaves many URLs out there, both in the SERPS and on the MarTech site itself,” Corey wrote, “Fortunately, the Third Door Media [our parent company] team already put in redirects from these domains to the new MarTech site, sending a pretty strong signal to search engines. But, with a domain as large as ours, it’s taken months for the index to cull the old URLs.”

Read more here. 

Microsoft Advertising is switching to a new feedback platform

Beginning in October, Microsoft Advertising will move to a new first-party feedback platform, the company announced Monday. Microsoft Advertising also plans to bring over existing feedback, status and votes from UserVoice, the platform it’s currently using, as part of the transition.

In addition to allowing advertisers to share their feedback and vote on feedback from other users, “This new feedback platform will enable [Microsoft Advertising] to listen and act on customer feedback in new and exciting ways,” Juan Carlos Ousset and Aaron Lauper wrote, although they didn’t provide any examples of what these “new and exciting ways” might be. Advertisers can still submit feedback via the existing platform until September 30, and all feedback will be migrated over.

Why we care. Feedback matters — that’s how Google knew that advertisers weren’t thrilled when it limited search terms reporting, and that led to the recent addition of more query data for impressions without clicks. The search marketing community on Twitter is often generous with its feedback, but (as many of you have probably experienced yourselves), screenshotting a social media post and putting it into a report for your client or boss may not be as effective as feedback submitted through proper channels.

Featured snippets links, cover songs and worthy causes

Google is testing links in featured snippets (again). In November, Google was spotted testing contextual links in featured snippets and many SEOs were keen to highlight the new opportunities and risks that came with this potential change. Now, Google is at it again, but Brodie Clark, who first brought this to our attention, has said that, this time around, the links all go to Wikipedia or an internal page. If this is closer to the final version — if there even is a rollout, that is — publishers may have less to worry about, since the links won’t be going to competitors (unless you count Wikipedia as a competitor).

The Beatles x Google Ads. ETA, we are sad to see you go away… Kirk Williams busts out his guitar for a PPC-centric rendition of Yesterday. Kirk, if you’re reading this, we need the full version of the song.

Celebrate your colleagues and diversity and inclusion in marketing. As a person of color, I can’t tell you how much it means to me to feel welcomed in the search industry, but sadly, not everyone is met with that experience. That’s why I’m so proud to announce our second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing. Last year, Women in Tech SEO founder Areej AbuAli earned the accolade for her inspiring contributions to the industry. This time around, she’s a guest judge. There are a lot of advocates and organizations that deserve to be recognized for their allyship — if you know one, recognize them by submitting a nomination.

What We’re Reading: California’s challenge to Amazon’s labor algorithms carries potential ramifications for merchants

Last week, the California Senate approved AB 701, a bill that “would block Amazon and other companies from punishing warehouse workers who fail to meet certain performance metrics for taking rest or meal breaks,” Makena Kelly wrote for The Verge.

With numerous outlets reporting that warehouse employees are known to skip bathroom breaks in order to meet performance quotas, Amazon’s labor practices have been under intense scrutiny over the last few years. But, the bill doesn’t just affect Amazon, in fact, it doesn’t even explicitly name the company; however, “both Republican and Democratic lawmakers recognize that the e-commerce giant would be greatly affected by the enactment of the legislation,” Kelly wrote.

For businesses that use Fulfillment by Amazon, that may eventually mean a slower fulfillment process in California. If similar bills get passed in more states, the online retailer may have to rethink its labor practices on a larger scale. That’s potentially bad news for merchants that are reliant on Amazon, but Amazon isn’t the only platform out there — the new legislation could skew the math as retailers weigh their options, assessing not only fulfillment times but also seller fees, user bases and so on.

If signed into law, the bill would also force companies to be more transparent with their performance algorithms, revealing the quotas to regulators as well as employees, which should be…enlightening. Last Wednesday, after getting approved by the California Senate, AB 701 was sent back to the assembly for minor changes before it will be sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who hasn’t signaled whether he’ll sign the bill.

The post Your communications shouldn’t feel like marketing; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and we knew it was coming but that doesn’t mean we like it.

That’s the gist of what I’m seeing from PPC advertisers in response to Google’s announcement that they’re eliminating ETAs in 2022. The tone is a sad acceptance that their jobs might be getting a little harder in a few years:

“RSAs underperform ETAs almost universally in my experience,” said Collin Slattery, Founder Taikun Digital. “RSAs almost always under-perform ETAs, across millions in spend and over a year of testing. It’s not close, either,” agreed Sam Tomlinson of EVP Warschawski.

Is anyone hopeful or optimistic? “Hoping we’ll get cool customization features, assuming we’ll get cool reporting features,” tweeted Tinuiti’s Head of Paid Search Aaron Levy in response. “I don’t mind losing ETAs as much as I wish there was better reporting on the different events of an RSA,” added Menachem Ani, Founder at JXTGroup.

The good (?) news is that advertisers have a decent amount of time to test and prepare. And Google has time to hear the feedback and improve their tools for PPC professionals.

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

How to write ad copy that actually converts (plus 3 major mistakes to avoid)

When it comes to creating ads that convert searchers into customers, many advertisers dive into structure, testing, and more, and gloss over one of the most important elements of any campaign: copy. Your ad copy is the very basic building block of your advertising. Getting it right can be the difference between a milquetoast conversion rate and driving huge value for your clients and stakeholders. In her session at SMX Convert, Alyssa Altman did a deep dive into writing ad copy that actually converts including understanding search engines, funnels, intent and more. Here are the high points:

• Search engines are now answer engines. Your ads have to compete with Google’s own in-SERP features.
• Funnels are not linear and intent isn’t clear. Awareness and consideration searches happen throughout the funnel. Plus, conversion searches might happen on queries that we may not normally consider “bottom-of-the-funnel” type of searches.
• Test ad copy for both ambiguous and obvious intent. Testing intent vs. the winning messaging are two very different paths to go down. Clearly identifying what your end goal is will help to drive your upfront testing strategy.

Read Altman’s 3 ad copy mistakes to avoid.

Check out our other SMX coverage:

• How to plan SEO content that actually ranks
• Three PPC targeting tactics that power every stage of the funnel
• SERP trends of the rich and featured: Top tactics for content resilience in a dynamic search landscape

Search Engines: Decentralized search comes to Android in Europe

Starting yesterday, private, decentralized search engine Presearch will be listed by Google as a default search engine option on all new and factory-reset Android devices across the U.K. and Europe.

One of the latest Google competitors vying for market share, “Presearch is a 2017-founded, pro-privacy blockchain-based startup that’s using cryptocurrency tokens as an incentive to decentralize search — and thereby (it hopes) loosen Google’s grip on what Internet users find and experience,” wrote Natasha Lomas for TechCrunch.

In 2018, the European Commission fined Google 4.24 billion euro for unfairly using Android to solidify its search engine dominance. Google agreed to make changes to its default settings, and earlier this year announced it would increase the number of search providers on its default settings page. It also stopped requiring competing search engines to pay to be included. Presearch is now one of those options, but the only search choice that’s powered by the cryptocurrency market.

Why we care. We’ve covered Google’s troubles with the search choice debate many times before, and a new player on the market probably doesn’t even shake them enough to notice. But Presearch’s advertising model is something completely different than we’re used to. 

Called keyword staking, “Presearch token holders can ‘stake,’ or commit, tokens to specific words and phrases. The advertiser that stakes the most tokens to a term then has their advertisement displayed whenever someone searches for that term. As a result, they receive the traffic when users click on that ad link,” wrote Kyt Dotson for Silicon Angle.

“Keyword Staking is just one more way Presearch is transforming the current online search paradigm. We are using blockchain to align the interests of advertisers and users while pioneering an entirely new compensation model for advertising,” said Colin Pape, founder and chief executive of Presearch.

Read also: The case for advertising on search engines other than Google

Search Shorts: Local keyword research, title rewrites, and new Google Ads annotations

How to conquer local keyword research. Even if you’re familiar with keyword research for standard SEO, there are a lot of things specific to local businesses and local SEO that you might not be aware of, but that can take your localized organic performance to new heights. Check out the latest course from Claire Carlile and BrightLocal.

Want to check quickly if Google has rewritten the titles of a list of pages? But don’t have access to paid tools? Jason M at SEOwl made one for you that’s free.

Google Ads is introducing new annotations to highlight fast shipping, easy returns, and new business identity attributes for the holidays. 58% of U.S. holiday shoppers said they will shop online more this season than in previous years and 59% said they will shop earlier to avoid an item being out of stock. Get ahead of the game now with these new Google annotations.

What We’re Reading: Ask the expert – Your top FLoC questions answered

In his highly-rated SMX Advanced session, “FLoC and the future of audiences,” Frederick Vallaeys, Co-Founder & CEO at Optmyzr, dug in to the technology behind Google’s privacy initiatives FLoC, FLEDGE, and TURTLEDOVE. After the sessions, Vallaeys took questions from attendees who wanted to know more about how FLoC will work for B2B advertisers, how Google is testing FLoC cohorts, and how advertisers can have their voices heard by big tech in these privacy initiatives.

What does FLoC mean for B2B advertisers? The problem is that a cohort by nature is less precise than an individual. The unfortunate answer is, no, we’re not going to be able to do some of these things. We’re at this juncture here where I think we still have the old ways and, as imperfect as they may be, how much can we pull out of it and make that third party relationship, the first party relationship, because then we can actually do something meaningful with it.

How does Google test cohorts? Google said, we’re going to put people in these cohort buckets. In one part of the split test, they used third-party cookie data. So where we know you, as an individual, unique, one user who’s done all these things. In the other, we only know every browser is part of exactly one cohort. But then there are many cohorts that Google could say they were targeting. In that test, they saw that there was actually a very close performance in terms of cost per conversion.

How can advertisers have their voices heard in these proposals? Visit privacysandbox.com. Google is involved in all the W3C standards and goes to meetings related to ads. We as advertisers can give feedback in the forums related to that. So, understand what’s happening. Put your point of view in because a lot of the people attending these meetings are big players with big vested interests. So the small people amongst them, the small players, we have to put our voice out there too. And we can’t really do that unless we understand kind of what’s happening.

Want more? Check out the full Q&A here.

The post What does crypto have to do with SEO and PPC?; Thursday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has completed the rollout of the link spam update it started just over four weeks ago. “The link spam update is now complete,” Danny Sullivan said via the Google Search Liaison account.

What took so long. Google originally said this update would “roll out across the next two weeks.” But as you can see, it took an additional two weeks to complete – a total of four weeks. Why did it take so long? Google did not say, but I suspect things got stuck a bit and the rollout hit some unexpected snags.

The original announcement. “In our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results, we’re launching a new link spam-fighting change today — which we call the ‘link spam update.’ This algorithm update, which will roll out across the next two weeks, is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by our algorithms,” Google wrote.

Nullifying link spam. You can see the word Google used here was “nullifying,” which does not necessarily mean “penalize,” but instead, to ignore or simply not count. Google’s efforts around link spam have been to ignore and not count spammy links since Penguin 4.0 was released in 2016.

Why we care. This might be a hard one to pinpoint for you or your clients since it took a month to fully roll out. But if you see any changes to your rankings, maybe in a big way, over the last month, it might be related to this new link spam update. Make sure your links are natural and in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work on improving your site, so it can naturally attract new links over time.

As Google wrote, “Site owners should make sure that they are following the best practices on links, both incoming and outgoing. Focusing on producing high-quality content and improving user experience always wins out compared to manipulating links. Promote awareness of your site using appropriately tagged links, and monetize it with properly tagged affiliate links.”

The post Google link spam update done rolling out appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has updated the How Google Search Works website portal today and with that informed us that the search company made 4,500 “improvements” to search in 2020. “There have been 4,500 such improvements in 2020 alone,” the company said.

4,500 changes. Google said in the year 2020, Google made 4,500 updates to Google Search. These changes can be ranking changes, user interface changes and much more. By comparison, in 2019, Google made 3,200 changes to Google Search. Looking further back, in 2010, we covered that Google had about one change per day. Google said in 2019 it made about 350-400 changes in 2009.

Clearly, Google has expedited those changes over the years and is increasing the rate at which it updates Google Search.

Updated How Search Works site. Google also launched a “fully-redesigned How Search Works website that explains the ins and outs of Search.”

In 2013, Google first launched its How Search Works site with an explanatory infographic. The site has some pretty cool features, including showing examples of pages Google took down because of spam. Google took down that spam feature and relaunched the portal in 2016 with more details on how normal people want to know how Google Search Works.

Google said in the 2021 version it has “updated the site with fresh information, made it easier to navigate and bookmark sections and added links to additional resources that share how Search works and answer common questions.” “The website gives you a window into what happens from the moment you start typing in the search bar to the moment you get your search results. It gives an overview of the technology and work that goes into organizing the world’s information, understanding what you’re looking for and then connecting you with the most relevant, helpful information,” Google added.

Check it out at google.com/search/howsearchworks

Why we care. It is nice to see Google document how many changes it makes from year to year in Google Search. It is also good for search marketers to review how Google Search works and do a deep dive into the language Google uses to describe how the search engine functions. Dig into the new portal and let us know if you find anything exciting.

The post Google made 4,500 changes to search in 2020 appeared first on Search Engine Land.