Fibre Marketing

Tag: Update

A Breakdown of Google’s Featured Snippet Deduplication

Posted on by Chloe

On the tail of their Core Update, the 22nd January 2020 saw Google make some rather large changes regarding featured snippet duplication, and, being rolled out without much warning, these updates have been met with some confusion, to say the least. Here we’re looking at what featured snippets are, what the new changes realistically mean for your SEO marketing strategies, and how best to respond.

What are featured snippets and how have they changed?

Simply, they’re the textboxes that show on Google search results above the result listings, answering users’ questions quickly; they’re now officially part of the main organic search results. Previously, if a site held a featured snippet, they would still be listed on the first page of search results as well. However, with the new change, sites can only gain either a featured snippet or a first page ranking, i.e. it’s been “deduplicated” so only one or the other appears. The regular listing will still appear along with a featured snippet, but it will now be on the second page, usually position 11.

What does this change mean for SEO?

Naturally, this has shaken a few things up, proving yet again that staying ahead amidst constantly evolving SEO trends is a skill that can no longer be underestimated. As more and more updates have followed, and Google’s Danny Sullivan answers concerned questions, people have begun to wonder which ultimately has more benefits for a webpage – a first page ranking or a featured snippet?

The answer is: it depends. If you’ve used snippets before, the change might mean a disadvantage since your URL will now only appear once instead of twice. If you haven’t used snippets, however, your competitors will essentially now have half the URL presence they had before.

Since the changes occurred, many studies have been published analysing the difference having a featured snippet can make, and if it’s worth it. Marie Haynes asked her non-SEO friends (who aren’t considered to be ‘tech savvy’) if they click on the featured snippet or if they scroll down – interestingly, many of the respondents stated that they avoided featured snippets as they thought it was an Ad.

Some more details


Google is overall attempting to declutter and streamline front page results, and the change makes sense for users, even if it has caused some upheaval for marketers. The updates now mean that snippets are counted as “position 1” in the ten positions on the SERP, and if a URL is in the featured snippets, Google actively prevents it from appearing elsewhere in the core search results. But it is possible to have a joint featured snippet and a front-page listing, so long as they both direct to different URLs.

Similarly, featured snippet images are not deduplicated, provided they have a URL different from the snippet text. Carousels, People Ask, Answers, top stories, local listings, Bubbles and other refined featured snippets are not deduplicated. Neither are vertical search integrations (these are not featured snippets), direct answers or knowledge panels. The updates will have no impact on your Search Console performance.

It gets a little tricky, however: right side featured snippets originally were deduplicated (reported as a bug) but as of this article they are not, and will eventually be positioned at the top left.

How to respond to the featured snippet deduplication

SEO marketers are no strangers to rapid changes like this one – after all, Google makes hundreds of updates a year. Skilfully keeping a close eye on traffic and performance will allow a swift response and the appropriate action, which will naturally need to be unique for every company. Featured snippets are a coveted “zero-click” spot and reach your audience even without them seeing your URL. However, there will be times when users actually prefer to click on a URL, and where a main listing would perform better than a featured snippet.

There’s no easy answer to predict which strategy will work best; as with any other SEO update, trial and error is inevitable, and experimentation will show your SEO team which position benefits you most. It’s not a given that a featured snippet will be valuable your site, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that Google’s new changes will damage your SEO marketing efforts. If you do decide to opt out of featured snippets, try to reduce the size of your snippet to prevent Google from displaying it. If you lose a featured snippet, you should be able to revert to a normal first page listing on the SERP.

Not including a few bugs and erroneous results as the updates were initially rolled out, the changes look set for now, with more likely to come regarding moving snippets from the right sidebar and into the main column. However, there’s no need for panic – SEO is all about creatively adapting to new challenges, and there are always intelligent ways to work around any limitation.

 

All You Need to Know About Google’s Jan 2020 Core Update

Posted on by Chloe

Google brings out around a thousand updates every year. Some of them, however, have more of an impact on the order of their search results than others.

Recently, a core algorithm updates, known as the January 2020 Core Update  was rolled out internationally and was ‘mostly done’ by the 16th. Known as a ‘broad update’, it’s an update that doesn’t apply specifically to any type of website, industry, region or language.

Reports have been coming in from many webmasters that saw a major impact on the rankings of their websites, and this is why here at Fibre we make it our business to fully understand Google updates and how they can affect our clients. Some of the industries which looked like they were seeing the biggest impact are arts & entertainment, finance, games and news & sports.

What Has Changed with the January 2020 Core Update?

Google’s main aim is to make it as easy as possible for its users to access the information that they are looking for and their updates to the search algorithms are mainly aligned to this. In the past few years, it has been mainly about content – following their E-A-T mantra: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

The January 2020 update builds on their other updates to ensure that websites that offer relevant, insightful and expert information get rewarded with higher rankings. If your website has slipped down the rankings it doesn’t necessary mean that you have done something wrong – just that someone else might be doing it better than you.

What is interesting to note is that there were fewer changes than the previous core update, which rolled out in September 2019. These decreasing fluctuations indicate that Google is becoming confident in how they assess a site’s quality and therefore, will not deviate as much from previous updates – they’re just furthering the changes they’ve been making over the past few years.

YMYL

One of the most common speculations is that this update involved yet another reassessing of YMYL (Your Money Or Your Life) sites, as reports across Twitter suggest that websites belonging to this category were victimised, particularly if they had thin content. As mentioned earlier, sites operating within the finance industry were affected, along with those involved in the health sectors.

If Google was targeting sites with Trust issues, then it only makes sense for YMYL sites to be hit as hard as they were. There were mixed results across the board – some saw improvements while others did not. Either way, it’s highly likely that they’ll be impacted again by future updates that will undoubtedly occur sometime down the line.

What Can You Do to Improve your Google Ranking?

According to Google, “One way to think of how a core update operates is to imagine you made a list of the top 100 movies in 2015. A few years later in 2019, you refresh the list. It’s going to naturally change. Some new and wonderful movies that never existed before will now be candidates for inclusion. You might also reassess some films and realize they deserved a higher place on the list than they had before. The list will change, and films previously higher on the list that move down aren’t bad. There are simply more deserving films that are coming before them.”

This means that there isn’t much that you can do that is new to ensure that your website is ranked up there near to the top of Google’s all-important search ratings. However, the same principals apply as before and making sure that your website is optimised is vital. An SEO consultant can help you to make your website effective and easily found by your customers and potential customers.

Content

The main key to having a good google ranking in January 2020 is all about content. You need to make sure that your content is reliable, authoritative and that you know what you are talking about. To need to make sure that your content is accurate and information taken from expert sources.

You also need to make sure that your content is completely original and not a re-hash of other content that already exists. Try adding a new perspective, one which uses information taken from a range of reliable sources, with concise titles – and titles that are accurate in the description of the body of your content. It appears that those websites which have been the most affected by the algorithm changes are those with content that is lacking in quality.

Links

You should also consider links in your content. Try linking to your ‘About Us’ page – showing that you are an authority in your field – and make sure that you ‘About Us’ page clearly states how you have grown to be experts as well as any credentials that you have.

Furthermore, if you don’t have one already, it would be a good time to implement an external link building strategy.

Mobile

It is also important, of course, to ensure that your website is fully functional for those who are using mobile devices – both in its navigation and display of content.

Although these changes in algorithm might seem to be disruptive, they are just an extension of Google’s quest to give their customers the best experience that they can. With a good content strategy and attention placed on the quality of your website, you can make sure that you don’t suffer from these changes.

 

All You Need To Know About The Google Update To Reviews Rich Results

Posted on by Chloe

Making your business stand out online can be tough what with all the competition out there – it’s therefore vital that your search listings stand out in search results. Rich results, created by schema markup has always been one of the best and most popular ways to do this as it allows for prices, dates, star ratings and more to show underneath your meta title. These features can work wonders for your organic performance, as over 80% of local business consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

However, on Sept 16th 2019, Google implemented changes to their reviews rich results policies and procedures, affecting how it shows review rich results and rating stars. The overall aim of this change is to improve the rich results for search users as well as addressing abusive implementation (e.g. ‘self-serving’ reviews) that have occurred over the years.

All website developers should strive to understand these new changes to ensure that their knowledge is up to date and relevant.

What Are Reviews Rich Results?

Reviews rich results are those results which show at the top of the Google Search Results. They are based on the reviews and ratings of a product, service, or production that have been produced by

Rich Results

a well reputed and established website. There are many different types of products and services for which a review can be left, including books, events, guides, local businesses and establishments, software and applications, recipes, and other similar features.

Reviews rich results tend to look similar to the image shown on the right.

The Google Update

The changes that Google have released, at their very simplest, are designed to limit the number of reviews rich search results that can be made; notably, self-serving reviews are no longer allowed.

The schema that are now allowed are:

  • Book
  • Course
  • Creative work session
  • Creative work series
  • Episode
  • Event
  • Game
  • How to
  • Local business
  • Media object
  • Movie
  • Music playlist
  • Music recording
  • Organization
  • Product
  • Recipe
  • Software application

Clarification

Google’s primary goal with the new regulations were based on preventing businesses from self-promoting their own material, content, services, and the like – hence, creating ‘self-serving’ reviews. For example, reviews about business A that have also been posted on business A’s website will no longer feature as a reviews rich result; only reviews which have been made by unbiased third party individuals will be considered.

A more detailed case could be a search result featuring the review markup showing something like 5000+ reviews, when realistically they actually have 100. These extra reviews have been generated by the business themselves, and therefore do not count.

This update therefore is to protect the integrity of the content and ensure that the results are of the most relevance and use to the searcher as possible; biased self-reviews, unsurprisingly, do not meet this requirement.

This algorithmic update was met with confusion amongst the SEO community, and so the team at Google Webmasters updated their blog to clarify the regulations more clearly. They stated that, essentially, you can’t review your own local business and then host it on your own website. See the Twitter discussion here.

But Why Do We Care?

You might be wondering why you might need to be worried about these new changes. While they don’t necessarily need to be all that consequential, it should be considered as they could impact a page’s ability to show its own star rating. This means that everyone should always work to ensure that they have reviewed and analysed the new changes to ensure that their markup meets the regulations in order to avoid their rich results being dropped.

In addition, for people who make use of these reviews rich results when making a search, the new changes could also be beneficial. The changes are heavily based on the idea of making it easier for people to use the system without having to worry about reviews from biased sources. This means that search users can feel confident in the quality of the reviews that they are finding for the products or services that they are searching for, thus receiving a better user experience from Google.

How should you respond to rich results review display limitations

Even though this update is only a small change, it may have an indirect impact on a site’s ranking as these reviews can affect organic performance. Therefore, if your website uses review rich results, you should strive to understand the new changes.

Elimination of self-serving reviews

The changes to self-serving reviews are now in place for entities that are a local business, organization, or anything in between. The same will be the case for third party reviews—such as a TripAdvisor review—that are embedded into a business’ website. Already, there have been a large number of cases of sites losing their review rich results, as reported by numerous tools including Mozcast (35.8% rich results, down from 39.2%) and SemRush (47.6%, down from 52%) – statistics dated two days after Google’s announcement.

It should be noted that there will not be any penalties for businesses who still display these self-serving reviews; rather, the case will simply be that the snippet won’t appear in the Google Search results.

Mandatory “name” property in featured snippets

In addition to this, Google have also announced changes that have been made to the ways in which you name your reviews. In order for a review to be eligible for showing  as a reviews rich result, they will now need to feature the name of the product or service in their markup—and failing to do so will mean that the review won’t be possible for being a reviews rich result.

Final Thoughts

If you’re deeply involved with SEO, you’ll know that review rich results are not a ranking factor, so it won’t your site’s position. But, adding this markup took websites a long way as it can affect the number of sales and users, information that search engines use when selecting the best results for the search user. So this small change will likely have a significant impact amongst the SEO community and search results, as we’re already started to see. It is therefore vital that you get to grips with the latest regulations to ensure that your organic performance isn’t affected a great deal.