Google Releases September 2019 Core Update

Google releases numerous algorithm updates every year, but with the trend they’re setting, only the big updates warrant an announcement from them. The most recent example is their announcement of the June 2019 Broad Core algorithm update. They’re now releasing a new core update which could result to either good or bad results for us SEOs. 

September 2019 Core Update

A few days ago, Google tweeted that they’ll be rolling out the September 2019 core update the same day. Here’s the tweet:

This isn’t a new move since they announced the June Broad Core algorithm update through twitter as well. However, for the September 2019 core update, they linked back to their article detailing on what we should know about their core updates. I’ve already written about this – about how to recover from Google’s Broad Core Algorithm Updates. 

So, as expected, there aren’t any specific factors that this core update aims to target. Since the current trend involves improving the E-A-T and content of the pages, I don’t think this will change any time soon. Just yesterday, they confirmed through a tweet that the September core update is now live and will be rolling out:

Based on the forecasting tools available to us, there are changes already happening in the SERPs:

Accuranker’s Google Grump Rating

SEMRush Sensor

CognitiveSEO’s Signals

Effects on our SEO

So far, most of our clients are not experiencing any major changes. Except for one, health-related website that we handle which was negatively hit by the June 2019 broad core update. It is currently showing signs of recovery, but it’s still too soon to tell since the September core update was just rolled out yesterday. But here’s what our traffic looks like now:

It’s not THAT significant, but after months of having no signs of recovery, this is definitely a good thing.  

Key Takeaway

I’m excited to see the results of this update, but it also serves as a reminder that we, as webmasters and SEOs need to always be on our toes when it comes to Google’s sudden algorithm changes. If we can’t keep up with all the changes that are happening, we’ll be left behind. So, I suggest we read up, keep our focus on the changes in the industry, and adapt accordingly. What about you? Have you noticed any changes with regards to the core update? Let me know in the comments below!

Google Releases September 2019 Core Update posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

A Quick Review on Optimizing Breadcrumbs for SEO

If you are one of the webmasters who have received a slew of emails from Google Search Console telling you to fix the breadcrumbs markup of your site, then I am writing this for you. Recently, Google Search Console has launched a new feature for the Breadcrumbs report which has alerted webmasters left and right. The Search Console’s new report will come in handy, especially if you want to stay competitive in the SERPs.

Let me be clear about one thing: structured data markups are not a generic ranking factor. However, you should still optimize for it because it can keep you looking good in the search engine. With that said, let’s take a look at how the recently announced breadcrumbs report in GSC can help us optimize these features for SEO.

What are Breadcrumbs?

According to Google, a breadcrumb trail helps in determining the page’s position on your site’s hierarchy. It is simply defined as a single line of text which marks the path from the indicated page back to the homepage. Breadcrumbs are a great way for users to identify your site’s structure. This is also true as search engines crawl your site.

Don’t believe those people who say that breadcrumbs are not an important part of your site. You would be a terrible webmaster for thinking so, believe me. Not only do breadcrumbs help in structuring your website properly, but it can also help you appear in the Google search results better.

Breadcrumbs look like this:

If you look at it, the breadcrumbs trail is simply the path from the homepage, through the secondary page, and finally to the landing page. The breadcrumbs trail makes users feel like they can easily navigate your pages even when you have a large site. Breadcrumbs are especially useful for e-commerce sites because of the large number of product categories and product landing pages. This is why it is essential to optimize your breadcrumbs not just for SEO but in maintaining a great website structure.

Fixing Breadcrumb Issues

After Google rolled out this update for the Search Console, there have been many discussions around the possible fixes for the detected errors. The breadcrumb markup can be applied using JSON-LD, RDFa, Microdata, or as an HTML value in the page’s design.

When Google Search Console emailed reports on errors in the breadcrumb structured data on different sites, there were webmasters who were puzzled on how to deal with these reports. One of the common errors that people have received is the “Missing field ‘id’” error which is a reference to a property that Google requires in order to show your page in the search results.

The first step that you should do to get to the bottom of this issue is to determine whether your theme or plugin is generating breadcrumb markups automatically. The Yoast SEO plugin gives you the option to add breadcrumbs and if you are receiving errors because of it, then you should check if you have another plugin causing a conflict in breadcrumb markups.

If not, then you should check if you have generated a breadcrumb markup for the affected pages in your breadcrumbs report. If you are certain that your theme or plugin has sufficiently applied the markup then you should just run down the report and see if it is covered by the automatic generation of breadcrumbs.

Next, there is the option to add an absolute URL as the identifier. For example:

<a href=”https://seo-hacker.com”
id=”https://seo-hacker.com”
itemtype=”https:schema.org/WebPage itemprop=”item”>

The “id” element is not specified accordingly by the itemprop value which prompts the schema to adopt another link set without permission. So for this step, you should take it upon yourself to supply the link that serves as the absolute URL for it. This is also a way to update your unlinked breadcrumb templates that do not contain the schema.org markup.

It is also important to note that Microdata does not carry an identifier line. However, it can be found in the JSON-LD format which you can see below:

Lastly, a GSC error on your breadcrumb markup may mean that you haven’t taken the liberty to ensure that the proper breadcrumb markup is in place. I have seen that this can be prevalent in e-commerce sites with the breadcrumb error affecting the product pages. For this, Google has come up with a nifty guide to help you create your very own breadcrumb structured data markup for your site.

How Does Breadcrumb Markups Help SEO?

Markups help a lot in providing contextual relevance for a site. Google Search regards the breadcrumb markup as an important part of the web page to categorize the information from that page in the search results. Displaying breadcrumbs has been prominent in the search results but unfortunately, not a lot of webmasters have seen the urgency of doing so until the GSC update.

This is why it is important to check these important elements because having a valid markup can go a long way in your efforts to climb up the SERPs. Search engines rely on markups, so they can see the pages that are eligible to be seen in search results. It is good practice to provide information about your site as direct to the point as possible and the best way to do this is to optimize your breadcrumb markup.

A Quick Review on Optimizing Breadcrumbs for SEO posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

Everything You Need to Know About Nofollow, UGC, and Sponsored Links

Last September 10, Google announced that the link attribute “nofollow” is evolving and introduced two new link attributes: the rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc”. This announcement shook the SEO industry. 

This is the biggest update to nofollow since it was first introduced by Google in 2005. It was used to combat website comment spam and then was used to discredit paid links. It changed the landscape of link building and made dofollow links the holy grail of SEO.

The impact of this can’t be scaled yet but this would definitely have a tremendous impact on link building. Links have been one of the top ranking factors ever since search started. Other ranking factors have evolved throughout the years such us mobile-friendliness and content relevancy and it is just now that links have finally evolved. 

In this post, I will discuss everything there is to this announcement and give my thoughts on how this could possibly affect SEO.

Nofollow will now be used as a “Hint”

Ever since the nofollow attribute was introduced, nofollow links would not pass any authority and Google will not count these links as a factor for ranking websites. But as of this announcement by Google, nofollow links along with the two new link attributes will now be used as “hints”.

According to Google, they will use these link attributes to know which links to consider or exclude from search and to better understand and analyze the links in their system.

As of now, making these new link attributes as hints to be incorporated in the ranking system is already in effect and by March 1, 2020, Google will also use nofollow links for crawling and indexing purposes.

Rel=”sponsored”

Sponsored links or paid links have been against Google’s guidelines for a long time. Google requires that all sponsored links should have a nofollow attribute or you will have a risk of receiving a penalty.

Rel=”ugc”

UGC stands for User Generated Content and Google recommends using this link attribute to any link that is user-generated. This is most applicable to forum posts, blog comments, and guest posts.

Why Did Google Make This Change?

Google did not say exactly why they made this change but I personally think that this is a move to improve spam combat. As mentioned, the whole web used nofollow links to flag sponsored or user-generated links so it was hard to identify what category these links fall under and this update makes it easier for Google to identify them.

In Cyrus Shepard’s article on Moz, he mentioned that Google wants to take back the link graph. When the nofollow was introduced, a huge portion of the web applied nofollow to all the links in their entire website and made the link graph less useful for Google.

Now, Google realizes that nofollow links can provide them with valuable information for improving their algorithms.

Here’s the statement from the Google Webmaster Blog:

“Why not completely ignore such links, as had been the case with nofollow? Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe the content they point at. Looking at all links we   can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be give the weight of a first-party endorsement.”

What is the Impact of Nofollow, UGC, and Sponsored Links to SEO?

Google said that this should not have any significant impact on ranking and links will be treated just like how they were treated before. But of course, the SEO industry is always curious. Here’s Danny Sullivan’s tweet on this:

I think a lot of people misunderstood this announcement. Nofollow will only be used as a “hint” and not directly a ranking factor. Would websites with a lot of nofollow links receive a ranking boost? It might be unlikely. But moving forward, I think this will have a significant effect once Google starts using nofollow links for crawling and indexing.

As for sponsored and UGC links, I think they might have a bigger effect on rankings and penalties. A website who has many sponsored backlinks might have a higher chance of getting penalized. For UGC, Google allows user-generated links as long as it goes through the approval of the webmaster.

In fact, I already applied the UGC link attribute to the SEO-Hacker Tribe once I heard the news. Since all content in the tribe is from users, I made all outbound links from the tribe rel=”ugc”. There has been no significant changes yet.

Should you Change Now?

If you are using nofollow links for user-generated content or sponsored links on your website, Google says that you don’t have to change those and you can keep them as nofollow links. However, Google recommends that webmasters follow this new scheme moving forward.

Would One Work with the Other?

Yes. According to Google, you can use a link attribute along with another. So for example, you allow guest posts on your blog, you can add rel=”nofollow ugc” to links in a contributed article. 

WordPress Integration

In a Twitter thread, WordPress Marketing and Communications Lead Joost de Valk who is also the founder of Yoast said he will make sure that the new link attributes will be integrated to WordPress on their next release. He also has his opinions about this change by Google in his blog.

Wrapping Up

On Twitter, Danny Sullivan, John Mueller, and Gary Illyes were very active in answering questions from SEOs. If you want to see a summary of the discussion on Twitter, I recommend reading Barry Schwartz’s article on Search Engine Roundtable.

At Moz, Cyrus Shepard posted a good infographic to summarize all of the changes to nofollow, sponsored, and UGC.

Making nofollow a “hint” and adding two new link attributes is big news but there is no significant impact yet. In my opinion, since Google just started last September 10, it might take time until we see any effects. Because of this, there is no clear benefit yet on why SEOs should start updating their links. 

I would still recommend applying all of these changes. If this could help Google refine their search algorithm, I would be more than happy to help them out. What’s your take on this announcement? Have you started changing link attributes on your website? Let me know if you’ve noticed any positive or negative impact on the comment section.

 

Everything You Need to Know About Nofollow, UGC, and Sponsored Links posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

How Google’s Recent Review Rich Results Update Affects SEO

Testimonials and reviews are important for businesses. This is especially true in the online market since users can’t have physical interactions with the products or services they’re intending to buy or pay for. Which is why most of us rely on the reviews and testimonials of the people who had physical experience with the product and we let these reviews affect our decision to proceed with the purchase. This is where the review rich results play an integral part. But with the recent update that Google made, we, as SEOs and webmasters, need to adapt immediately.

Review Rich Results

The review rich results have been available in the search results for a considerable amount of time now, and most business and services websites use these to affect a user’s buying process. This is what the review rich results look like:

Review Rich Results components:

• Star Rating – Signify the degree of satisfactions reviewers had while using or experiencing the product or service
• Votes – The number of users that had experience with the product or service
• Price Range – Symbolized by the dollar sign “$” that is meant to let users know the price range of the product or service

For the longest time, we’ve been creating review schema codes for all our clients since it’s much better for SEO and to further assist a user’s buying process. However, Google’s recent update to the Review Rich Results necessitates that we need to edit or tweak the markups that we’ve used and so should you.

Review Rich Results Update

Yesterday, Monday (September 16th), Google published a new post on their blog that details on the algorithmic changes they made to the reviews in rich results. The update aims to make review rich results more helpful and meaningful. They also want to address some invalid or misleading implementations that us, webmasters, have flagged to them such as this one:

I found this schema markup in the search results. See the 5000+ review count? I was extremely doubtful of the reviewCount so I investigated it and from their Business listing, Facebook page, and other review sources, the review count doesn’t even reach 100. I immediately reported it to Google, but so far, no action has been taken and this review rich result is still in the search results.

Applicable Schema Types

Historically speaking, you can attach the review markup in any schema type. But the update, Google aims to limit the schema types that can potentially trigger review rich results. This is because they don’t want random review rich results appearing in a keyword or topic that doesn’t add much value to the user’s journey. Here are the updated types that review markups are applicable:

• schema.org/Book
• schema.org/Course
• schema.org/CreativeWorkSeason
• schema.org/CreativeWorkSeries
• schema.org/Episode
• schema.org/Event
• schema.org/Game
• schema.org/HowTo
• schema.org/LocalBusiness
• schema.org/MediaObject
• schema.org/Movie
• schema.org/MusicPlaylist
• schema.org/MusicRecording
• schema.org/Organization
• schema.org/Product
• schema.org/Recipe
• schema.org/SoftwareApplication

I’m assuming that if you apply a review markup in any other schema type, then your review rich results has little to no chances of showing up since they limited it to the types mentioned above. 

Self-serving Reviews

Self-serving reviews, by its very name, are your reviews to your own products or service. This is misleading and it doesn’t add much value to the users, hence, Google will not count self-serving reviews anymore. Here’s how Google defines “self-serving reviews”:

“Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren’t in the best interest of users. We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A – either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget.”

Although, it is important to note that this change to self-serving reviews is limited to LocalBusiness and Organization schema types and their subtypes.

Name Property

Lastly, this update involves Google requiring webmasters, SEOs, and developers, to include the name property to their review markup.

“With this update, the name property is now required, so you’ll want to make sure that you specify the name of the item that’s being reviewed.”

They did not specify what would happen if you didn’t put in the name property, but I suggest we put it in any way since we don’t have anything to lose by adding it.

How the Review Rich Result Update Affects SEO

We all know that Review Rich Results are is not included in the top ranking factors. Your website can still rank well without having the review markup but this doesn’t mean that it’s not an important factor to increasing sales, assisting users, and serving information to the search engines (and users).

Review markup is only a small part of SEO and even CRO, but little changes like these goes a long way. Take the character limit for title tags. It was a small change, but it affected the bigger picture of SEO. Review markups are the same, these little changes that Google makes can, potentially, have a bigger effect in the future. I suggest we adjust accordingly and not suffer the consequences in the future. 

This update primarily affects publishers and webmasters, but we, as SEOs, still need to take note of this change. One of the core values that SEOs must have is experimentation and the ability to adapt to the constantly changing algorithm. So, if we can’t even adapt to this minor change, we’ll have difficulty adapting to the bigger changes.

How Google’s Recent Review Rich Results Update Affects SEO posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

Taximail: Improve Email Marketing One Business at a Time

Being successful in business is all about building relationships and one way to do this is to delve into email marketing. The digital age evolves as we go along but you cannot deny that Email has a stronghold in their position as an effective communication tool.

Taximail recognizes this and this is why they make it a point to help businesses grow through email marketing. Our team at SEO Hacker decided to jump from one email marketing tool to Taximail because we have seen how powerful its features are after taking it for a test drive. Take a look at our comprehensive review here!

Why Email Marketing?

When it comes to online leads and conversions, nothing beats a simple email to reach your ROI. Oftentimes, we look at different digital marketing tactics for this goal but it is very important that we remember that we have email marketing at our disposal. Emails are a great way to reach out to your target market and it does not even matter what their demographic is, as long as they have access to an email account then everything should be in place.

Prospecting and nurturing leads can start with a great email marketing campaign. If you are providing insightful information for your market, having a campaign in place can be your best bet in making sure that you are reaching quality leads. Better yet, you can automate your email campaigns so you wouldn’t have to resort to the tedious task of making sure that the bulk of your subscribers receive your message.

Simply put, email marketing still works even if there are people who are skeptical of its business value. This is the same vision that Taximail has in encouraging businesses to drive their ROI forward.

Taximail for Growing Businesses

Transitioning to Taximail has been a great experience for SEO Hacker. We have seen how easy it is to start email marketing campaigns even for an email database of 1.8 million subscribers. Its user interface can be well-understood at a glance. The beauty of Taximail is that you don’t have to switch between apps to start your email marketing because they do it all for you.

Taximail hails from Bangkok, Thailand and it is led by founder, Phaiboon Trikanjananun who specializes in online campaigns and website development. His connections with professionals have validated the digital advertising age as a playing field for businesses. The face of Taximail recognized that email marketing is a flexible digital marketing tactic because it offers numerous benefits such as a trackable campaign and further enhancements to user experience as well.

The idea was to create an email marketing and automation solution that would be tailor-fit to businesses from SMEs to Enterprise-level companies. This is how Taximail was launched in 2012 and since then, they have built a large network of clients who trust that this email marketing platform can achieve great heights for them.

The team of email marketing experts promotes powerful email technology for Taximail client satisfaction, which allows clients to build simple email experiences with a powerful impact. Taximail is continually growing and this is why its clients continue to rave about their impactful platform and exceptional customer service.

Getting Started with Taximail

Three steps. That is all it takes to create a campaign. With many readily-available templates from their end, you can choose to drag and drop your details to get started with your email marketing campaign.

Here is a preview of getting started on the account:

Here is a quick preview of the features that they offer:

• Drag-and-Drop Email Editor
• Customization and Segmentation of Emails
• Multi-Screen Resolution Test and Device Simulation Preview
• Real-time Reports
• Email Templates
• Automated Email Marketing Tool
• SMS Marketing Campaigns

With these features, you can also be assured that you can also import lists, do A/B Tests, and schedule sending of emails.

What I find the most useful in the app is its automation feature. Although they offer a lot of benefits for businesses, this is what I’m going to highlight here.

You can start by entering a trigger so your email marketing campaign can take off.

Once you have determined how your contact should be counted through their activity, then you can start your email marketing campaign. Here is the list of actions that Taximail supports from their features:

Here is a sample of their pre-designed templates that you can choose from if you don’t want to start from scratch for your campaign. You can achieve the process in just a snap.

Taximail gives you the freedom to choose between a template or inserting a code if you want to follow this for the design of your email campaign. If you are going to go with the former, then you are well on your way to a great email marketing campaign. You can just drag and drop the necessary elements for your email which saves you a lot of time in creating this campaign. 

What’s next for Taximail?

Taximail is one of those apps that you have to try for yourself to see how it can significantly change the way you do things. It has helped the biggest companies in Thailand such as AIS Business, Bangkok Airways, Yves Rocher and many others. 

These companies enjoy the same benefits that 5,000 other companies experience with Taximail. And SEO Hacker is proud to be the one to bring Taximail here to the Philippines to help businesses engage better with their customers. 

Let me just end with this: whatever email marketing platform you have now, drop it. Taximail is one of the best partners you can have for your digital marketing efforts. 

Taximail: Improve Email Marketing One Business at a Time posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

Links Analysis Made Easy: Linkody Review

Blog SEO: Guide Questions to Writing Your Blog Posts

Why Should You Start Optimizing Videos for Your Blog?