We can’t believe we’re already over a month into the new year, but despite how quickly time flew we’ve got plenty of news and updates to show for it.
Most of the industry news this month was related to various GSC changes and updates, new Google documentation and tweaks in SERP appearance. We also saw the addition of a Core Web Vitals lane in Chrome 88 performance recordings, and the Bing Webmaster Tools Performance Report added crawl and index data.
We’ve also seen a few cool new experiments from SearchPilot, a Google Ads Benchmark Report for 2020, and Gary Ilyes and John Mueller continue to confuse concerning link equity distribution. And here at Tight Ship we’ve also been discussing the best way to measure Core Web Vitals for websites with a lot of long tail.
Here’s our monthly news and insights roundup for January:
Industry News and Updates
General News
- Google announces new visual redesign of mobile search
- Our take: We’re liking these “no ad” examples, very clean looking — but it would be nice to see how these designs pair with an ecommerce query that would actually pull in ads.
- Google adds price drop enhancement documentation
- Chrome 88 Performance Recordings Adds Core Web Vitals Lane
- Google Continues Injecting Links Into Featured Snippets
- Google Expandable Knowledge Panels More Visible
GSC and BWT Updates
- The “Request Indexing” tool returns to Google Search Console
- Ourtake: Just poking around with this and it looks like they removed the ability to request indexing for an already indexed page which means we can’t use it as a way to quickly have a page update crawled.
- Google sends notifications of HTTP/2 Googlebot Crawling
- No obvious change in trend over time, initial MoM pre-post stats looking at only money page types for large ecomm client:
- Crawl volume: -8%
- Unique URLs crawled: -10%
- New unique URLs crawled: -41%
- Static crawl volume: +21%
- Static unique URLs crawled: +25%
- No obvious change in trend over time, initial MoM pre-post stats looking at only money page types for large ecomm client:
- Issue validation temporarily disabled and then fixed
- GSC now includes more than one referring page in “Inspect URL” report
- Google Index Coverage Report updated with more specific categories
- Google Crawl Stats Report Can Handle Additional Types Of Crawls
- Bing Webmaster Tools Performance Report Adds Crawl & Index Data
Insights and Hot Takes
- A few recent SearchPilot experiments we found interesting:
- Adding email interstitials led to a 4% drop in organic traffic
- Placing brand name first in title tags leads to 15% uplift in organic traffic
- Adding internal links to nearby cities on a listings site raised organic traffic to the linked-to pages by 7%
- We argued about whether there was enough proof that this gain was from improved “equity distribution”.
- Google Ads Benchmark Report Q4 2020
- Does a noindexed page pass link equity? Gary Ilyes and John Mueller disagree…
- Impact of anonymized queries in GSC
- This is not new but we revisited this, as it can negatively impact the accuracy of GSC data – and we use a lot for clients.
- When analyzing query data from GSC, there is a type of query known as an “anonymized” query which can lead to discrepancies between the query table data and chart totals.
- Anonymized queries are very rare queries which are not shown in the results in order to protect the searcher’s privacy.
- For websites with a lot of long tail traffic, these queries can add up. You can analyze your query data to check what sort of impact anonymized queries may be having on the overall picture of your keyword data.
- Core Web Vitals metrics for clients with long tail (Tight Ship)
- We recommend leveraging a real user monitoring system to gather data Web Vitals metrics for clients with long tail, since Google tends not to show data for those.
- Here is some documentation on gathering these metrics:
In Memoriam: Hamlet Batista
On January 27, 2021 we learned of the unexpected passing of a beloved member of the technical SEO community, Hamlet Batista. Hamlet was the CEO of RankSense and a technical SEO expert whose work with Python for SEO made a foundational contribution to the development of the technical SEO discipline. He was very generous in sharing his knowledge and encouraging those around him to continue to develop their skills and strive for excellence. We didn’t know Hamlet well, but his outsized impact on our industry both from a professional and personal perspective is very apparent, as many tributes and personal stories have been shared over the past few days in light of the tragic news. His close friend Lily Ray has set up a GoFundMe in his honor to help his family during this difficult time.