Microsoft Bing Page insights is now live in the Bing search results for the search results snippets, the company announced today. You will see a lightbulb icon on the right side of the search results that provides more details about the search result before you click on it.
Microsoft said that Page insights “provides a summarized insights from a page on your search results so you can find what you’re looking for faster.”
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this new feature, which you can see yourself for a search on [mars mission nasa] on Bing:
More on page insights. Page insights “helps you verify that the source is relevant to your needs, helps you get caught up to speed at a glance on top factoids you didn’t know about, and lets you jump straight to the relevant section of the page when you click ‘Read more’ for a specific question,” the company said. There is also a section to “explore more” to find more relevant search results.
Only desktop. Microsoft said this feature is only available on desktop search results because of the “screen size required to properly display the results.”
Months of testing. Microsoft Bing has been testing variations of this since June and the lightbulb variation since October.
Why we care. First, you might want to see if your site’s Bing snippet has this Page insight feature and if so, if the content and images within the Page insights box looks accurate and positive. So test it out for some of your more valuable keyword phrases.
Also, from a searcher feature, it is a fun little tool that we’ve seen variations from other search companies in various forms previously.
On November 17, 2021, Google began rolling out the November 2021 core update, this came about four and a half months after the July 2021 core update, which was a month or so after the June 2021 core update. So we had a total of three broad Google core updates in 2021.
We asked several data companies that track Google’s search results to send us impressions of this update. The results from this data showed that this rollout hit hard within the first 24 hours of the announcement and then slowed fast. Keep in mind, Google has not confirmed that this update is done rolling out yet. Most reports show that there are signs that the November 2021 update was more substantial than the July 2021 update.
The facts. Google began rolling out the November 2021 core update at around 11am on November 17, 2021. This update has not finished yet and is still rolling out as far as we know. We do however expect that the bulk of the impact of this update has been felt in the first day or so after this update, although there may be some residual affects that linger on for the next week or so. The timing of this November core update has a lot of us feeling a bit blind-sighted, as it was released right before the busiest time for most e-commerce sites.
The July 2021 core update started to roll out at around noon on July 1, 2021 and completed on July 12, 2021. The June 2021 core update, as we previously reported, started to roll out around 6:30pm ET on Wednesday, June 2nd. Like all core updates, this was a global update and was not specific to any region, language or category of web sites. It is a classic “broad core update” that Google releases every several months or so. The previous core update before the back-to-back June and July core update combo, was just shy of a six-month wait period, where the December 2020 core update took place on Dec. 3rd.
Semrush. Semrush data showed that the November 2021 core update hit hard and then slowed very quickly in terms of its volatility tracker, as screen captured below or you can view live at the the Semrush Sensor tool.
“This is similar to how the July update rolled out but the return to “normal” levels of fluctuations was even more dramatic here (i.e., less of a “slow down” period compared even to July),” Mordy Oberstein from Semrush told us.
The November update was “far more volatile” than what we saw back in July core update, the company told us. Specifically the November update was 12% more volatile than July core update on the desktop search results and 23% more volatile on mobile search results. So when digging into this update, make sure to check your mobile results, not just your desktop results.
Here is a chart plotting the different between the November and July 2021 core updates by sector:
You can see how the health sector saw 41% more volatility on both desktop & mobile in November 2021 core update than it did back in July 2021 core update. Often, the health sector is more impacted by core updates than some other sectors.
Even more so, 16% of the top 20 results were not listed in the Google Search results prior to the November update. Meaning, 16% of the ranking URLs between positions 1-20 ranked worse than position 20 prior to the update, Semrush said.
And here is a chart of the winners and losers from this November 2021 core update from Semrush:
RankRanger. The RankRanger team also analyzed the Google search results after this November core update rollout. They also found that this update rolled out pretty quickly, although it may not be done yet. Shay Harel from RankRanger said “this update shows similar levels of fluctuations to the July Core update.” But he said this is when you look at the the top three and top ten results. However, the top five results showed substantially higher fluctuations, Shay Harel told us. They also noticed that average changes over the top 20 positions the company saw slightly lower levels than the July core update update.
This chart below shows the changes based on top 3, top 5 and top 10 results:
Also, if you look at the health, finance, retail and travel niches, RankRanger is showing fairly even fluctuations, with the exception of the retail niche. It seems retail saw greater fluctuations in the top three and top five positions, the company told me.
Here is a chart that shows that:
SISTRIX. The folks at SISTRIX, another data provider that tracks the changes in the Google search results sent me their top 20 winners and losers for the November 2021 core update.
Here is a chart comparing some of the websites competing in the dictionary space, seems like these four really saw some big gains with this update:
seoClarity. Mitul Gandhi from seoClarity told us that there is a “large amount of fluctuation lasting a few days,” which he said is common with most Google core updates. The seoClarity team shared some of the biggest changes they saw across some big brands.
For example in the e-commerce niche, Wayfair and eBay stood out to seoClarity with the initial data from November 16th compared to November 18th analysis as having significant drops. But there was a bounce back shortly after for some reason with Wayfair and eBay. Here is a graph from seoClarity of Wayfair’s search visibility:
Walmart and HomeDepot have seen their keywords in top three positions in Google Search increase by 10% and 19% respectively, “boding well for their holiday season,” Mitul Gandhi said. Bed Bath and Beyond saw a 45% jump in their top three positions in Google Search. But those top retailers selling footwear saw a drop, specifically Zappos lost 23% of their top 3 rankings while DSW lost 25%.
In other areas outside of e-commerce, Booking.com saw the strongest improvements in rankings in the seoClairty data set. Between 11/16 and 11/21 they are ranking for around 18,000 more keywords in the top three positions in Google Search. Whereas Skyscanner was the notable decline in travel, losing 23% of their keywords in top 3 positions. SnagaJob.com seems to have lost 60% of their top 3 rankings while SimplyHired.com lost 19%. Car and Driver lost 11% of its keywords in top 3 positions. And Pinterest lost 13% of its top 3 rankings, while Etsy gained 19% in top 3 positions.
Mitul Gandhi from seoClarity told us “don’t panic! Initial fluctuations are not where many will end up as Wayfair and Ebay have shown.” Mitual Gandhi also shared some early data on Twitter this past Friday, but the data above is fresher from its data set.
More on the November 2021 core update
The SEO community. The November 2021 core update like I said above was felt fast and hard. Not just in terms of the ranking impact but the timing. 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.
What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. There aren’t specific actions to take to recover, and in fact, a negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages. However, Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update. Google did say you can see a bit of a recovery between core updates but the biggest change you would see would be after another core update.
Why we care. It is often hard to isolate what you need to do to reverse any algorithmic hit your site may have seen. When it comes to Google core updates, it is even harder to do so. If this data and previous experience and advice has shown us is that these core updates are broad, wide and cover a lot of overall quality issues. The data above has reinforced this to be true. So if your site was hit by a core update, it is often recommended to step back from it all, take a wider view of your overall web site and see what you can do to improve the site overall.
We hope you, your company and your clients did well with this update.
That’s a pretty accurate account of the more than two dozen conversations we’ve had about Search Engine Land’s support of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages in the past few years. At first, it was about the headache in managing the separate codebase AMP requires as well as the havoc AMP wreaks on analytics when a nice chunk of your audience’s time is spent on an external server not connected to your own site. But, Google’s decision to no longer require AMP for inclusion in the Top Stories carousels gave us a new reason to question the wisdom of supporting AMP.
So, this Friday, we’re turning it off.
How we got here
Even when Google was sending big traffic to AMP articles that ranked in Top Stories, the tradeoff had its kinks. For a small publisher with limited resources, the development work is considerate. And not being able to fully understand how users migrated between AMP and non-AMP pages meant our picture of return and highly engaged visitors was flawed.
But, this August we saw a significant drop in traffic to AMP pages, suggesting that the inclusion of non-AMP pages from competing sources in Top Stories was taking a toll.
Our own analytics showed that between July and August we saw a 34% drop in AMP traffic, setting a new baseline of traffic that was consistent month-to-month through the fall.
Monthly AMP Page traffic to Search Engine Land from April 2021 to October 2021.
This week we also learned that Twitter stopped referring mobile users to AMP versions, which zeroed out our third-largest referrer to AMP pages behind Google and LinkedIn. We’ve seen LinkedIn referrals fall as well, suggesting that when November ends, we’ll be faced with another, lower baseline of traffic to AMP pages.
Publishers have been reluctant to remove AMP because of the unknown effect it may have on traffic. But what our data seemed to tell us was there was just as much risk on the other side. We could keep AMP pages, which we know have good experience by Google standards, and their visibility would fall anyway due to competition in Top Stories and waning support by social media platforms.
We know what a road to oblivion looks like, and our data suggests AMP visibility is on that path. Rather than ride that to nowhere, we decided to turn off AMP and take back control of our data.
How we are doing it
“If you are ready and you have good performance of your mobile pages, I think you should start testing.” That’s what Conde Nast Global VP of Audience Development Strategy John Shehata told attendees at SMX Next this month when asked about removing AMP.
Shehata suggested a metered strategy that starts with removing AMP on articles after seven days and then moves on to removing AMP on larger topical collections.
“If all goes well, then go for the whole site,” he said “I think it’s gonna be better in the long run.”
That, of course, hinges on the speed and experience of your native mobile pages, he said.
“Creating a reading experience centered around speed and quality has long been a top priority for us,” she added, pointing us to an extensive write-up its engineer team published this summer around its work on Core Web Vitals.
Because we are a smaller, niche publisher, our plan is to conserve our resources and turn off AMP for the entire site at once. Our core content management system is WordPress, and AMP is currently set for posts only, not pages. But that includes the bulk of our content by far.
Our plan is to use 302 redirects initially. This way we’re telling Google these are temporary, and there won’t be any PageRank issues if we turn them off (or replace them with 301s). We’ll then see how our pages are performing without AMP. If there’s no measurable difference, we’ll then replace those 302 redirects with permanent 301 redirects. The 301s should send any PageRank gained from the AMP URLs to their non-AMP counterparts.
Of course, if the worst-case scenario happens and traffic drops beyond what we can stomach, we’ll turn off the 302 redirects and plan a different course for AMP.
It’s a risk for sure. Though we have done a considerable amount of work to improve our CWV scores, we still struggle to put up high scores by Google’s standards. That work will continue, though. Perhaps the best solace we have at this point is many SEOs we’ve spoken to are having trouble seeing measurable impacts for work on CWV since the Page Experience Update rolled out.
Maybe it’s not about traffic for us
The relationship between publishers and platforms is dysfunctional at best. The newsstands of old are today’s “news feeds” and publishers have been blindsided again and again when platforms change the rules. We probably knew allowing a search platform to host our content on its own servers was doomed to implode, but audience is our lifeblood so can you blame us for buying in?
We also know that tying our fates to third party platforms can be as risky as not participating in them at all. But when it comes to supporting AMP on Search Engine Land, we’re going to pass. We just want our content back.
If you are noticing less traffic to your website’s AMP pages coming from Twitter, turns out there is a reason for that: Twitter has subtly updated its AMP guidelines page on its Developer site to say support for AMP will be phased out by the fourth quarter.
How that might affect you. Previously, if a mobile user clicked on a link to your site, Twitter would redirect them to the AMP version of that page if an AMP version was available. Now, that won’t happen and users will just load the native mobile/responsive version of your content.
Thanks for telling us. We’ve heard anecdotally that publishers have been seeing AMP traffic fall, especially since Google started putting non-AMP pages in its Top Stories section. But it was David Esteve, audience development specialist and product manager at Marfeel, and technical SEO consultant Christian Oliveira who spotted the update in Twitter’s documentation.
Looking at our own data, we’ve seen sharp Twitter referral declines since August. But, traffic completely bottomed out in November suggesting the rollout is complete.
Twitter referrals to Search Engine Land AMP pages in 2021.
We’ve seen similar declines in LinkedIn referrals to AMP pages and have reached out to the company to find out if it is also dropping support. We will update this post when we get a definitive answer.
Why we care. Since Google announced AMP will no longer be required for Top Stories, many publishers have been asking themselves if continuing to support AMP is still worth it. The main worry has been the risk of traffic loss if publishers rely fully on their native mobile experiences for ranking. But, if social media traffic to AMP pages is going to drop as support is lifted, the need for AMP seems to get smaller.
Google is rolling out a new broad core update today named the November 2021 Core Update. This is the third core update Google released in 2021.
The announcement. Google announced this rollout on the Google Search Central Twitter account, not the Search Liaison account, which it has done for all other previous announcements on core updates.
Later today, we are releasing a broad core update, as we do several times per year. It is called the November 2021 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates is here:https://t.co/0LAL28ueDq
Rollout started at about 11am ET. Google updated us that the rollout has begun at about 11am ET. Google said “The November 2021 Core Update is now rolling out live. As is typical with these updates, it will typically take about one to two weeks to fully roll out.”
Timing before holidays. It is a bit shocking to see Google rollout this update before, and likely during (assuming this is a normal two week rollout), the biggest online holiday shopping season. Black Friday and Cyber Monday is less than two weeks away and Google is rolling out this update starting today.
Previously Google took breaks before the holiday shopping season, it was Google’s gift to webmasters said former Googler Matt Cutts.
Danny Sullivan of Google responded to the timing of this update on Twitter:
I totally get the concern some might have about an update, especially when there’s often any number of “The sky is falling!” tweets that people make, sometimes with fun GIFs, and meant to be fun, but others that act like an update is a negative event for everyone…
What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. There aren’t specific actions to take to recover, and in fact, a negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages. However, Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update. Google did say you can see a bit of a recovery between core updates but the biggest change you would see would be after another core update.
Why we care. Whenever Google updates its search ranking algorithms, it means that your site can do better or worse in the search results. Knowing when Google makes these updates gives us something to point to in order to understand if it was something you changed on your web site or something Google changed with its ranking algorithm. Today, we know Google will be releasing a core ranking update, so keep an eye on your analytics and rankings over the next couple of weeks.
Google has released version 9.0 of Lighthouse, the website auditing tool for developers, SEOs and site owners. With this release, Google has updated the API, added user flows, refreshed some reporting, added new accessibility elements, and more.
9.0 is available. You can access Lighthouse 9.0 using the command line, in Chrome Canary, and in PageSpeed Insights which began rolling out this week. Google said it will also be part of the Chrome stable release in Chrome version 98.
Here is what is new. Google has made some changes to the Lighthouse API saying if you use the Lighthouse report JSON, there “may be some breaking changes in 9.0 that you need to be aware of.” Those technical changes are listed here.
User flows: Lighthouse 9.0 supports a new user-flow API that allows lab testing at any point within a page’s lifespan. Puppeteer can be used to script page loads and trigger synthetic user interactions, and Lighthouse can be invoked in multiple ways to capture key insights during those interactions, the company said. “This means that performance can be measured during page load and during interactions with the page,” Google explained.
Reports: Google has refreshed some of the reports within Lighthouse. The refreshed reports aim “to improve readability and make the source of the report and how it was run clearer,” Google explained. A final screenshot has been embedded at the top of the report to make it obvious at a glance if the page being tested loaded correctly and is in the format expected. Plus, the summary information at the bottom of the report has also been redesigned to better communicate how Lighthouse was run and the report collected.
Accessibility: In 9.0 of Lighthouse, all the elements sharing that ID are now listed.
Why we care. Google recently updated the PageSpeed Insights report and a lot of the features it uses is based off of Lighthouse. Using these tools can help you make your website faster, more usable and more accessible. In terms of SEO or rankings, the changes might not make a huge difference but this is more about your users and making them happy.
Google is showing local news Tweets in certain queries now.
Google on Tuesday released new search features intended to give more visibility to local news content when searchers are looking for information about their communities.
The company said it has expanded a feature previously rolled out for COVID searches that adds a carousel of local news stories when relevant to a searcher’s query. For example, a search on “football” may bring up stories on local sports.
Why we care. Local news organizations depend on organic search traffic and, according to Google, queries like “news near me” have tripled in the past five years. Unfortunately, that also comes as local news companies continue to struggle for survival. According to The Poynter Institue, a journalism advocacy group, more than 90 local news organizations closed during the pandemic. That’s on top of declines that have stretched back years. In 2019, the New York Times reported that 1 in 15 U.S. newspapers had closed in the past 15 years.
So, it’s certainly good that Google is finding ways to give the surviving local news ecosystem more visibility.
Not just news sources. In addition to adding the local news carousel, Google also is adding a “Popular on Twitter” carousel for queries on local news topics. While local news organization tweets may be included, the feature will also pull in tweets from a range of sources it deems to have local authority on those topics.
Remaining questions. The new features are noble and timely, especially as COVID created closer bonds with homes and local communities. What will be interesting to see is whether the added visibility benefits the most vulnerable local publishers. While regional dailies and local TV affiliates have not been spared by declines in local publishing, community weeklies, alt-weeklies and other niche local publications struggle the most. Will they be able to compete for slots in these carousels?
“Any publisher’s content is eligible to rank within the carousel if their content is relevant to what a reader is searching for,” said Meghann Farnsworth, a Google spokesperson. “Publishers with more Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness for a given topic or location will rank accordingly.”
But Google acknowledged that the new carousel is not reserved for local publishers, just local content.
“Local news includes sources with news about the user’s location, which is often local publishers but can sometimes include national reporting as well,” said Farnsworth.
News SEO. These new features also highlight why good SEO is essential for local news organizations. Inclusion in Google News (if you can even get in), authoritative news content that demonstrates E-A-T and a speedy website with good UX all help determine SERP visibility, even for smaller local audiences.
For the past several days, 2 million or so of the domains hosted on SiteGround were potentially not being crawled and thus indexed by Google Search. There was some sort of “network issue between AWS Global Accelerator service and Google,” the company said and as of this morning, the issue was resolved.
When the issue began. Matt Tutt first reported about the issue this past Tuesday, November 9th. So the issue started sometime before November 9th, Matt suspects it started as early as Monday, November 8th.
Here is a screenshot showing how Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool was unable to access sites hosted on SiteGround. As you can see from the screenshot below, Google is reporting that it failed to crawl the page. Matt posted more debugging details on his post.
Confirmation. Then on November 10th, SiteGround confirmed the issue and said it is investigating. “We have escalated the issue to Google and we are working to troubleshoot and identify the cause of the problem,” the company said.
We have escalated the issue to Google and we are working to troubleshoot and identify the cause of the problem. We will keep you updated once there’s more information or the problem is fixed.
The issue. On November 11th, SiteGround confirmed the issue was between Amazon Web Services and Google. The company said “we traced it down to a network issue between AWS Global Accelerator service and Google. We’re collaborating with engineers from both teams to fix it.”
Resolved. Then a day later, on November 12th, SiteGround confirmed the issue was resolved and that it can take a bit more time for DNS to update but once the update is propagated properly, Google will once again be able to crawl sites hosted on SiteGround. The company said “We are glad to inform you that we have implemented a fix for the Google bot crawling issue experienced by some sites. Websites are already being crawled successfully. Please allow a few hours for the DNS changes to take effect.”
Status Update: We are glad to inform you that we have implemented a fix for the Google bot crawling issue experienced by some sites. Websites are already being crawled successfully. Please allow a few hours for the DNS changes to take effect. Thank you for your patience!
Google advice. John Mueller of Google posted some advice on Twitter on how Google deals with these outages. In short, don’t worry too much, the issues you may have experience from the outage will auto correct and “settle down.” There won’t be any “lasting effects” to the outage, John added. John posted several tweets, here is the first one if you want to click on it to read through the rest.
We recently saw some sites that had DNS issues specific to Googlebot’s crawling, and I thought I’d do a short thread on how that works out for Google. tl;dr: don’t worry, it’ll settle down, there are no lasting effects.
Why we care. If you are one of your clients are one of the two million domains hosted on SiteGround, you may have been impacted by this. That means any new or updated content or pages on your site was invisible to Google for most of the work week.
The issue is resolved and those pages should be crawled by Google going forward. But you may want to annotate your analytics and reporting if you were impacted by this crawling issue.
The Google November spam update that began rolling out on November 3rd is now fully rolled out. Google has updated us 8 days after it first started to roll out that the rollout is complete.
The announcement. Here is the announcement about the update from Google on Twitter:
Impact. It is hard to say the full impact of this update, we feel this update “had legs” but you would have only noticed this update if you were doing some form of spam efforts that this algorithm targeted. Also, Google suggested this was about content spam and not specifically link spam.
Previous updates. Before this, the most recent confirmed Google update was back in July 2021 named the link spam update. Before that was the July 2021 core update, followed by the June 2021 core update, then part one and part two of the spam updates in June 2021. It’s been quite a year of updates.
Why we care. If you notice large ranking or traffic changes from your organic Google search results, you may have been hit by this spam update. Spam updates target specific guideline violations. This update may have been more focused on content spam efforts. Check your rankings and Google organic traffic over the past week to see if you noticed any big changes to your positions.
Google logo schema now supports ImageObject type, in addition to the URL type, according to updated information on the help document. Google said this provides “new flexibility” to specify an organization logo using these schema markup.
What is new. The logo required properties use to just say it accepted the URL property, but now it says both URL or ImageObject. Here is a screenshot of this section of the help document:
ImageObject type gives you the ability to add additional data to an image, such as width and height, or the author or a caption. Whereas the URL type did not give you these added values.
Why we care. Google is giving us a bit more flexibility with implementing logo schema and structured data going forward. So if you are using these schema, you may decide that going forward that you want to use ImageObject type over URL type – or not.
John 