This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Google Releases Help Series Videos
New Google video series address frequently asked questions or raised issues found in the webmaster forums. Google’s John Mueller gives insight on questions regarding subdomains and subfolders and states that both are fine for SEO. A question recently asked is if multiple H1 tags are okay to use, the answer is that multiple H1s are fine. Another big topic covered in the videos is that fixed manual actions may affect visibly in search overtime due to the amount of time it takes for Google to recover the actioned domain. Source: Search Engine Land
Images in Search Text Ads Spotted on Google Mobile SERP
A new test recently spotted on Google’s mobile search results contained a text ad with an accompanying image. Allegedly, the accompanying image is taken straight from the landing page. When asked about this test, a Google spokesperson stated “we’re always testing new ways to improve our experience for our advertisers and users, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now.” Source: Search Engine Land
Google Introduces Rich Results and Testing Tool
The decision to change the name of rich snippets, rich cards or enriched results is to simplify the terminology for documentation purposes. Along with the new name comes a new rich results testing tool to make diagnosing page structure data much easier. The testing tool allows for users to test all data sources on pages such as JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa. This will give users an accurate reflection of the rich result appearance in search. Source: Google Webmasters Blog
AdWords Removing Bid Limit on Grant Program
Google has recently made big changes to their grant program, namely the removal of the $2.00 bid cap when using maximize conversions bidding. An additional requirement which was rather hidden in paragraphs of policy text notes that a minimum of a 5% Click-Through-Rate must be maintained to be eligible to break the bid limit. In addition, Google will no longer be allowing keywords with a quality score of 2 or lower in Google grants accounts, effectively banning these keywords. Source: Clix Marketing
Possible Search Ranking Updates
Many sites may have notices changes recently, some for the better and some for the worse. Search Engine Land is analyzing date and patterns to confirm whether or not Google released a new search rank update. Certain sites are seeing changes occurring suggesting that the update may be larger than what Google is stating. Sites that have seen changes include, doorway page like site targeting many keyword permutations, low quality content sites with lots of ads and affiliate links and e-commerce sites. Source: SERoundtable
Analysis
Jumpstart Your PPC Account in 2018
Diane Chelius of PPC Hero wants to help you jumpstart your PPC account with the start of the new year. One of her main suggestions here is to review your general settings, particularly looking to see if you can switch your rotation to optimize in any campaigns or reviewing search partner performance. Chelius also recommends looking through your ad extensions, stating that this area isn’t typically a place you revisit very often. Make sure you have coverage for all extension types, including newer ones like promotion extensions. The author’s final note is to keep your ad groups granular. In an effort to improve your quality score, make sure keyword themes are split out so that you can write the most relevant ad copy possible for them. Source: Diane Chelius, PPC Hero
Tips from Google to Prepare for Mobile-First Indexing
Google’s Gary Illyes updates webmasters and publishers on mobile-first indexing progress. The Google expert reminds us that sites that make use of responsive web design and implement dynamic serving is the first step webmasters should be implementing to be mobile ready. It’s important to ensure the mobile version of the site has quality content, structured data and metadata. There’s a potential for an increased crawl rate so be sure the servers hosting the site have enough capacity to handle this. Although there is no timeline for when changes take place, Google will be evaluating sites based on their readiness for mobile-first indexing slowly and cautiously. Source: Google Webmaster Blog
