This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Google Updates Review Guidelines
Changes made to Google’s review guidelines occurred on December 14, 2017 and can now be found as part of the Maps User section of the Help Center versus Google My Business. The policies govern all of Google content where previously it was just reviews. The new policies are much more extensive and are outlined explicitly to avoid confusion. A big issue that many business owners faced with Google’s old review guidelines was the inability to remove negative reviews from former employees. The new guidelines however, disallow this type of review and many others to ensure reviews are honest representations of the customer experience. Source: Sterling Sky
AdWords No Longer Supporting Review Extensions
Starting in January 2018, Google AdWords will no longer show review extensions with ads. With this change, all review extensions and their data will be removed from all AdWords accounts in February, so Google recommends downloading ad extension data prior to February if they want to see their historical Review Extension performance. Google did not mention if any replacement extensions will be released in the near future. Source: Search Engine Journal
Google Will Stop Following Links on Long Term Noindex Pages
In a Webmaster Central Office Hangout video, Google’s John Mueller explains that in the long run noindex directives will lead to nofollow on links. When a page includes a noindex directive for an extended period, Google will just remove the page completely from search thus not be able to follow the links on the page. Since noindex and follow is essentially the same as a noindex, nofollow webmasters should begin to rethink how noindex is used on certain pages. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Ads Not Complying With Coalition For Better Ads To Be Blocked in Chrome
Google recently confirmed that as of February 15, 2018 they will start blocking ads in their Chrome Browser if they do not comply with the Coalition For Better Ads standards. This will coincide with the Coalition’s “Better Ads Experience Program.” Site owners can determine if their site violates the standards via Google’s Ad Experience Report and if their site has a “failing” status for more than 30 days, all ads will be removed from their site. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Third-Party Reviews in Local Results
Google works directly with third-party review sources to integrate content into the Knowledge Graph for hotels. Third-party sites have the option to keep their content out of Google’s vertical search while still appearing in the organic search results. In the past Google has been accusing of “scraping” content from third-party reviews but has since provided policies that give publishers the option of having their content displayed. It isn’t clear whether Google will work with publishers to expand third-party reviews to other categories such as restaurant or local services yet. Source: Search Engine Land
Analysis
PPC Account Boosting Tips
PPC Hero William Larcom shares several bottom line tips for boosting paid search account performance. His first tip is to eliminate click fraud through reaching out to third party services to get rid of invalid clicks. Another tip is to leverage demographic bid modifiers, which Larcom notes is very easily accessible in the new AdWords interface. Beyond that, you can also implement income-level modifiers which are found under the same demographics report. Larcom also suggests testing automated bidding, which he was initially against adopting. But, after testing them he found that they beat out some of his previous manual bid management efforts. In another cases where the outcome yielded neutral results, the fact that he was able to achieve the same results through automation compared to manually entering bids saved him a lot of time. Source: William Larcom, PPC Hero
Anchor Text Best Practices for 2018
Sergey Grybniak of Search Engine Watch shares anchor text optimization tips for 2018. With Google’s algorithm getting smarter as the years pass, it’s important to keep anchor texts as natural and versatile as possible. Avoid multiple repetitive keyword based anchors, these looks spammy to Google and indicates manipulation with backlinks. Grybniak suggests that creating anchors that are relevant to content not only provides a better user experience but allows webmasters to engage in relevant guest blogging successfully. Source: Search Engine Watch
