Associate Your Site With Google To Unlock More Functionality

Today, Google announced that Search Console has an enhanced Association Page which you see within the settings menu. This New Association Page is created to build a connection between a Search Console property, and some other entity or property in another Google service: for example, between a Search Console property and a Google Analytics account, a YouTube channel, or a Chrome Web Store account.

If you want to associate your Search Console property with another Google service then you need to connect with Google’s New Association Page to unlock more functionality for your site.

Google Association Page Supports Following Property Types:

• Google Analytics Property: You can view your Search Console data, such as organic search queries, in your Google Analytics property. Starting today, you can also link Search Console domain properties to Google Analytics and get better coverage of your organic search results. We recommend using this option as it can help you get a more complete picture in the Search Console reports in Google Analytics.
  Google Ads Account: View the paid and organic report in Google Ads.
• YouTube Channel: Link your videos to your associated website.
• Play Console App: Use App Indexing.
• Actions Console Project: Verify your brand and enable cross-platform functionality.
• Chrome Web Store Account: Publish apps and extensions to the Chrome Web Store on behalf of your site.

For questions or comments on the new Associations page, you can visit Search Central help forums and share your experiences.

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Responsive Search Ads Now The Default in Google Ads

Increase Conversions By Using Responsive Search Ads

Today, Google officially announced that Responsive Search Ads (RSA) will become the default ad type for Search campaigns in Google Ads, but the expanded text ads can also be created. Google said that due to COVID-19, search queries like “takeout restaurants” have grown over 5000%, and meanwhile searches for “online learning” have grown over 400%2 in the last year.

What Are Responsive Search Ads?

Responsive Search Ads are Google’s newest, largest, and most flexible search ad format. Unlike traditional search ads, where you write your headlines and descriptions together to create 1 static ad text, when writing a Responsive Search Ad you can write up to 15 different headlines and up to 4 different descriptions. Collectively, those headlines and descriptions can be arranged in 43,680 different permutations, which means the ad testing possibilities are nearly endless!

RSAs allow advertisers to input multiple headlines and ad copy variations, and Google Ads uses machine learning to determine which variations to use based on what queries people are searching for. The variations are tested to determine which combinations perform best. The Ad strength score lets search marketers understand how to improve their RSAs for better performance.

Google recommends that advertisers not using RSAs currently consider the following best practices:

• Use Ad strength when writing your headlines and descriptions to understand the effectiveness of your ads.
  Take advantage of location insertion and countdown customizers to show ads that are relevant and meaningful to your customers.
• Use Smart Bidding and broad match keywords with responsive search ads to help optimize the performance of your ads while maximizing your reach.
• Review cross-campaign asset reporting to understand which creative assets resonate most with your customers.

How Responsive Search Ads Works?

The more headlines and descriptions you enter, the more opportunities Google has to serve ads that more closely match your potential customers’ search queries, which can improve your ad performance. After you enter headlines and descriptions, the RSAs assembles the text into multiple ad combinations in a way that avoids redundancy, different from expanded text ads.

Next, in any given ad, a maximum of 3 headlines and 2 descriptions will be selected to show in different combinations and orders. Over time, Google Ads will test the most promising ad combinations, and learn which combinations are the most relevant for different queries.

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SEO vs SEM: What’s the Difference and Why Should You Care

As we all know that the search giant Google always makes changes in the algorithm and search ranking fluctuate. Today, early in the morning I saw some early signs of another Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update . The SEO community is chattering about ranking update and fluctuations and also some tracking tools are showing big signals on the changes to the Google Search rankings.

Last night I got noticed at WebmasterWorld and read some posts talking that Google Bot has been extremely active on yesterday and today. Some said that seeing a big spike in Google bot activities. Some SEOs are saying that this unconfirmed algorithm update is related to page coverage, and some site owners are claiming a massive drop in conversions and traffic dropping yesterday.

Here are some screen shots from the search engine monitoring tools that tracks these fluctations. Keep in mind that most are not confirmed becuase Google is still quite, so I may update this blog post with latest data later on throughout the day.

SEMRush is showing very high fluctuations:

Cognitive SEO:

SERPMetrics is swinging upwards:

RankRanger has been unsettled for a while:

SERPwoo is showing changes:

I am not 100 percent sure about this Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update. But if you noticed any changes to your ranking or organic traffic drop down so, please share them with me here in this post. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Google Core Update: What SEOs Need To Know

Learn about the three Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID, and CLS

Google makes lots of small changes to its search algorithms all the time, many of them go un-official and some are announced. In May 2021, Google said that they will update their algorithms to integrate a new ranking factor called Core Web Vitals. Google developed a new set of metrics including Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. These are the three main pillars of Google’s page experience update which means performance, responsiveness, and visual stability.

What Is Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vital is a new tool of Google to measure the user experience of a web page. It will become one of the key ranking factors in search engine optimization. So the better the UX, the more likely you are to rank on Google.

Web Vitals VS PageSpeed Insights

For PageSpeed Insights, Google crawls your page themselves and uses software to create a report. But Core Web Vitals only measures the experience of real-world users. That makes it super accurate and a great tool for UX web page creation.

What Does Google Mean By A Good User Experience?

They take things like load time, interactivity, and visual stability into account when considering UX. Core Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

The three pillars of page experience:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

The Core Web Vitals Live Here:

You’ll see 2 line graphs, one for mobile traffic, the other for desktop traffic.

You need enough traffic from either platform for Google to generate these graphs

Red lines are bad. Your page loads slowly.

Yellow lines are okay. You could do better.

Green lines are good. Your page loads quickly.

You need enough traffic from either platform for Google to generate these graphs

Core Web Vitals Measuring Tools:

Here are a few tools you can use to help measure the Web Vitals of your webpage on your own:

• Google Search Console
• PageSpeed Insights
• Lighthouse
• Chrome User Experience Report
• Chrome DevTools

Bottom Line

Core Web Vitals is the new way of emphasizing user experience, and it’s a great tool for web marketers who may want deeper insight into their performance.

Source: Google Web Vitals

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Google Core Update What SEOs Need To Know

An Intensive Analysis of Google’s Core Update

Like, I have said many times that Google updates its search algorithm after every few months. The most recent is the December 2020 Core Update which is still rolling out. Danny Sullivan also has confirmed to me on Twitter that Google Core Update is still rolling out. Danny wrote, “It’s still rolling out.”

If you deeply look at the search engine monitoring tools, they are still showing a massive spike over a 24-48 hour period, and then it died down in a big way. Previous updates seemed to have rolled out more gradually. So what things you need to take notice of and do the analysis of your website after the announcement of Google’s Core Update.

What is Google Core Update?

Google Core Update is an algorithm update that can impact the search visibility of a large number of websites. Each time an update is rolled out, Google reconsiders the SERP Ranking of websites based on expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness (E-A-T).

First, you need to know what the core update is about and read what is coming next. Then the most primary thing is you need to do your website audit. It will be:

• Content Analysis
• Backlink Audit
• On-page Analysis
• Technical Website Audit
• Competitor Analysis

The question is, why you need to do website audits? The answer is straightforward; you need to know about all things related to your website’s content, i.e., backlinks, on-page, technical, and competitor before any Google update rolls out. Once Google rolls out its update, then one should ideally wait for 7 to 14 days. Again, the question is raising why we need to wait for 7 to 14 days? As an SEO, we all know that Google rolls out its full update within 2 to 3 weeks and that is why it is best to wait.

After the completion of the core update, you need to do the same thing you have done before at the start of the Google update. Once you complete all the above-mentioned steps, the final task is to compare your website’s audit report from the previous one to the new one. Then you will learn how much your website is affected or not by this new Google Core Update and what effect your competitor has through this. After looking at the before and after analysis, you already know about the bugs and issues that need to be resolved. Hence, it will be straightforward to fix them.

Useful Tip:

If you don’t want your website hit by Google Core Update then you have to put in the work. Quality over quantity, relevancy over irrelevancy, keywords over intent, technical aspects, mobile responsive, Content, render time, and more.

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Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update 23 November 2020

Google Announced A New Core Update After Seven Months

Google is rolling out a new core update, called December 2020 Core Update. This is the third time that Google announced a core update in the year 2020. The first one was released in the month of January 2020 and the second one was in May 2020.

SEOs and Webmasters know that Google has released a core algorithm update after every few months. It has been just about seven months since the May 2020 core update, which took place on May 4, 2020. So this one took a lot longer than previous updates to roll out.

The Announcement:

Here is that tweet in which Google announced and said “later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the December 2020 Core Update.”

Previous Updates:

The previous core update was announced in the month of May 2020, which was big and broad and took two or three weeks to fully roll out. Before May 2020 Core Update, Google announced January 2020 core update, which was analyzed by many SEOs and Webmasters and said that it didn’t have a big impact like the previous September 2019 core update. Google also released an update in November 2020, but that was specific to local rankings.

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 recovery between core updates but the biggest change you would see would be after another core update.

Why Do 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 website 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.

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Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update 23 November 2020

Google Search Ranking Shuffles on Thanksgiving 2020

As we all know that the search giant Google always makes changes in the algorithm and search ranking fluctuate. Same like this on November 23rd, many SEOs and Webmasters noticed that Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update like 23rd January 2020.

But I am seeing that SEOs are chattering about the latest changes in the Ranking Algorithm on Thanksgiving Day. Also, there are many search engine monitoring tools are showing big signals.

I just want to remind you that Google has not confirmed any update prior to Thanksgiving and it seems wrong on so many levels. So I also do not know that this is a real big Google update or if some websites are having issues.

Let’s first start with the tracking tools, again, most of them show big swings.

MOZCast:

SERPMetrics:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accuranker:

RankRanger:

Cognitive SEO:

SERPstat:

SEMRush Sensor:

Here I like to share the screenshot that what SEOs are chattering at WebmasterWorld:

I want to say that this is not normal because these tracking tools are showing really big changes but right now the SEO community is pretty cool. Maybe webmasters are taken off due to Thanksgiving week and not obsessing over it. I am not 100 percent sure about this Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update. I did ask a few SEOs who track a lot of sites and they said it seemed pretty calm.

If you have noticed some big changes in the Ranking Algorithm Update so, please share them with me here in this post. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update on 18 June 2020

Grow your Business and Reach More Customers

Google My Business has added a new option that says “Connect in real-time, with video conferencing.” It says you can “grow your business and reach more customers when you use video conferencing providers.” Then a “set up” button to start to configure it.

I guess this is activated if you have updated your service availability option in Google My Business to specify you offer video appointments but it is not 100% confirmed.

Here is a screenshot of the box on the main home dashboard of Google My Business after you sign in and select a specific business:

After you click on “Set up” you are given these online video service providers including Google Meet, Webex, Skype, and Zoom. Here is a screenshot:

But after that, there does not seem to be a way to set it up more beyond that yet. When you click on Google Meet, it takes you to google.com/meet which I already use all the time. In fact, all the links take you to those service providers. Google does link to this help document with more details on how to configure it. There is a lot of Local SEOs that are chatting about this as well in the Local Search Forums.

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Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update 18 June 2020

Google Search Ranking Shuffles on Thursday, June 18th

Like we all know that Google always changing search results and update algorithms continuously. Right now I am seeing over the past couple of days that Search Engine Monitoring Tools showing usual changes in the Google search results and also SEO community is chattering at WebmasterWorld about the latest Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update on Thursday, 18 June 2020.

Search Engine Monitoring Tools:

RankRanger:

CognitiveSEO:

As you can see, the above two screenshots show the changes in the algorithm, bigger changes, around June 17th. But not all are seeing such big changes on the 17th or this week:

SEMRush:

Accuranker:

Advanced Web Rankings:

SERPMetrics:

Mozcast:

Are you noticing any changes since around yesterday, Thursday, June 18th?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update on 23rd Jan 2020