Unexpected Content Digest about SEO: Vol.1

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Unexpected Content Digest about SEO: Vol.1

Every specialist will confirm that SEO is changing. SERP is improving, algorithms are updating and this is the endless circle of development. Quite a trite first sentences but they're true. This is not another digest with tons of useless information to gain more traffic, and maybe not a perfect one, but the useful one. At least, I hope. And at the end of the post, you can vote to show your opinion ;)

Search Engines News (August-September 2018)

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So let's start with Google and check out August and September changes.

  • Google has launched a new type of search engine designed specifically around helping people find data. Dataset Search provides easier access to millions of datasets across thousands of data repositories on the web.

  • Google has introduced a new type of featured snippet with expandable subtopics. Learn more for which types of queries it works on Google blog.

  • And now to the most thrilling changes. Google's Danny Sullivan confirmed late September algorithm update. By the way, Google's John Mueller suggests site owners working to recover from August's core algorithm update to make content more relevant.

  • A lot of specialists noticed email alerts from Google Search Console that sites they are monitoring have been migrated to the Google's Mobile First Index. It means that the index is growing. By the way, Google's John Mueller cautions site owners that using a lot of JavaScript may prevent a site from being moved to mobile-first indexing.

  • Now you can add IPTC Metadata to Google images. The new feature will show images containing author and copyright metadata.

  • Also, Google has celebrated its 20th anniversary and shared how search can change in the next 20 years. In a nutshell:
    • from answers to journeys
    • more interactions without queries
    • from text to more visual results
  • And the last Google-related news is a Chrome update. You should have noticed that. As for me I really appreciated smart answers:
    New blog: read and unread posts

Here we go. Time to Bing.

  • Bing has announced that Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) will now work directly from its mobile search results.

  • Also, it is expanding its Visual Search capabilities with text transcription, a math problem solver, and an overall faster search experience.

  • Bing is shuttering its public URL submission tool, which allowed people to anonymously submit URLs to Bing's index. Now you can do that through Bing Webmaster Tools.

And Yandex ends this list of changes with a new site quality index (SQI) which replaced TIC.

Digging into SEO

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Searching for some information related to SEO, I often stumble upon great pieces of content. This chapter is dedicated to sharing them with you ;)

  • Great guide on how to improve your site structure and boost SEO performance by Cyrus Shepard. Here you'll find advice on URL structure, content silos, cross-linking, pagination, breadcrumbs and much more. So check out 15 tips to bring your site to its full potential.

  • Optimizing multilingual websites and implementing hreflang attributes sometimes can be challenging. Aleyda Solis has described common ways to fail at international SEO. Here are some of them:
    • not using different URLs for each of your international web versions
    • using a single ccTLD to target many countries
    • canonicalizing all of your international web versions to one to avoid content duplication issues
    • implementing hreflang annotations without following a process that includes validation

  • And now about voice search. For me, it was terra incognita until I've found a guide by Brian Dean. With eye-pleasing illustrations, you'll sort voice search out from basics till advanced tips.

  • JavaScript SEO. I've heard it many many times and I'm sure you too. So if you want to dig into this topic without mindblowing, you can read a guide by Tomasz Rudzki. Memes are little bonuses in this post ;)

  • And the bitter truth about SEO is ending this list. 30-40% of the recommendations from the classic tech audit have no effect. Sometimes you spend a lot of time improving various aspects of the site, but you don't get tangible changes. Meanwhile, you can optimize the headers by adding new keywords and make them more attractive, and positions are falling. Everything that worked for one project may not work for another. So experiments are everything for SEO specialists. Read about surprising SEO A/B test results by Moz Whiteboard Friday.

About Netpeak Software Products

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And the last chapter of our digest is about Netpeak Software products and some interesting cases that were published on the external resources.

  • Data extraction procedure, also known as scraping, is widely used by marketers for collecting prices from competitors' websites. Check out ways to use scraping for comprehensive competitor analysis using Netpeak Spider and try to:
    • analyze the most popular competitors' content
    • scrape Google SERP (now it's available in Netpeak Checker in a more convenient way)
    • scrape customer reviews

  • After precise creation of the website with WordPress CMS, you can think that everything is OK. But the risk that you've forgotten about basic website SEO is too high. Find out 15 most common WordPress SEO mistakes and how to avoid them with specialized plugins and Netpeak Spider.

  • And the last one. Our friends from AcademyOcean took a comprehensive look at how SaaS companies handle demo requests. So they found out how common demo request pipeline looks like. Netpeak Spider helped them to streamline the process of collecting data.

That's the end and time to pass sentence has come.


If you think that I’ve missed some necessary info, leave it in the comments below. I’ll add it to the digest to make it more valuable :)