SEO Newsletter Issue 64 – 2022.09.01–2022.09.15

[News] A New Core Algorithm Update + the HCU Ends

At the end of August, Google launched a new Helpful Content Update. It began rolling out on August 25 and officially finished on September 9. According to reports from the community, most people did not see much traffic volatility, although a small number of sites—sites with obviously AI-generated or low-quality content—were hit hard. Danny, Google's official spokesperson, said on Twitter that the HCU was not a one-time update. Its signal could be incorporated into other algorithms to keep fighting unhelpful content.

Just as the HCU wrapped up, Google announced that a new core algorithm update, called the “September 2022 core update,” began rolling out on September 12. The previous core update was in May, when many sites saw dramatic volatility. Because of Danny's comments in the tweet above, some people thought this core update might be when the HCU would really make itself felt.

Neither the HCU nor the core update came with specific optimization advice; only the broader official guidance was available for reference.

[Official] Google Shares Good and Bad Meta Description Examples

In early September, Google updated its Meta Descriptions documentation. The underlying guidance stayed the same, but Google added four examples that made the document easier to understand. In addition to readability, a description should consolidate and summarize the page's most important information when appropriate. You can refer to this article.

This was not new information for SEO professionals, but specific good and bad examples are very useful when communicating with writers or clients.

Link: How Google rewrites webpage titles

[Template] A GA4 Dashboard Template for GDS

Someone overseas created a Google Data Studio dashboard template for GA4. Its seven packed pages of reports should meet most marketing needs. Page seven, “UA VS GA4 Comparison Summary,” is an especially interesting comparison of the differences between UA and GA4 data.

GA4 templates are still relatively rare, so this can serve as a foundation for developing a data dashboard suited to your own website.

I also recently found a free GA4 course by Dana DiTomaso on LinkedIn. Dana is very active in the web analytics field, and I recommend adding this course to your watchlist.

Links: Other GA4 courses on LinkedIn / Google's official GA4 course and certification

[Interesting] 10 Experts Share Their Favorite SEO Interview Questions

This article collected the favorite interview questions of 10 well-known veterans in the SEO field. They came from impressive companies including Shopify, Chewy, HubSpot, and SurveyMonkey. (Two of them have interviewed me before, and I did not get either job XD.)

In addition to listing the interview questions, the article asks the experts to explain why they ask them and which qualities or skills matter to them. The questions themselves probably are not too different from what you would expect, but hearing them directly from the interviewers still feels different. I recommend reading all 10, thinking about how you would answer them, and then checking the original article to see what each interviewer hoped to uncover.

1. Have you done this before? How did you overcome the biggest challenges?
2. Imagine we wanted to rank #1 for {a keyword}. What should we do?
3. You’re a vending machine repair specialist. You walk into a room and see a dark vending machine. What’s the first thing you do?
4. How do you go about making sure your recommendations get implemented?
5. How would you set up an SEO test?
6. Organic traffic is down – walk me through how you would diagnose its cause.
7. Describe a complex SEO challenge you've encountered, and walk me through step by step how you approached trying to solve it, and why you chose the route you did.
8. Tell me about a project that you're particularly proud of, why you're proud of it and what you learned from the project.
9. What's the most important SEO initiative?
10. What was your most difficult technical SEO project and what was the business impact?

Links: Original article / My experience interviewing for an SEO role at Amazon

[Research] The Pros and Cons of Infinite Scrolling by NN/g

Infinite scrolling automatically loads the next page of content when a user nears the bottom of the current page, creating a more seamless experience. I am sure everyone is familiar with the design; even Google's mobile SERPs began using it last year. The approach may look good, but is it right for every kind of content, and does it have other limitations or drawbacks?

NN/g is a well-known UX research organization, and it published this article analyzing infinite scrolling. Although it may seem like a good user experience, infinite scrolling can actually create quite a few problems. For example, users may find it harder to return to a particular product because they will not remember which page it was on. When users go back to the previous page, they are also often returned to the top of the category page.

I definitely recommend reading this article. Infinite scrolling has SEO considerations, but understanding its UX advantages and drawbacks can also help you discuss it more concretely with designers or clients.

Links: Original article / Other NN/g research: Information architecture / How people read webpages

[Recommended Reading] Will Getting Pages Indexed Be SEO's Next Challenge?

The article opens with the observation that more and more SEO professionals are noticing their sites are not fully indexed, then begins exploring the reasons behind the phenomenon.

I really like the author's angle on this issue. From the perspective of Google's business model, crawling the entire web and placing all that content into an index is an enormous undertaking, and the web's growth will only cause its content to expand exponentially. From a business standpoint, however, indexing everything on the internet may be unnecessary because most of it is duplicate content or outright garbage.

Duplicate content should not be limited to obvious duplication such as plagiarism. Content that merely satisfies the same user need should also be considered duplicate content in a broader sense. That may be why concepts and initiatives such as the Quality Rater Guidelines, E-A-T, and even the Helpful Content Update released that August had appeared over the preceding years: they could have been laying the groundwork for Google to determine that “your content is not worth indexing.”

A solution for crawling is also available. IndexNow, a new protocol launched by Bing and Yandex, can greatly reduce unnecessary web crawling, making it more sustainable, and Google is also testing its feasibility.

The summary above probably includes quite a bit of my own interpretation, so I recommend reading the original article. Overall, I think the future direction of search engines is something people in the industry should seriously consider. How likely is it that the strategies you are executing now will still work five years from today?

Link: Original article

[Resource] SEO Content Audit Template

This content audit template is built in Google Sheets. Columns from I onward contain basic information about each webpage, while columns B through E cover four checks: clicks, impressions, last crawl time, and indexing status. Together, they help identify underperforming articles that need special attention, while columns F and G provide space to record the actions to take.

The tool mainly uses Screaming Frog, together with GSC and URL Inspection, to retrieve each page's indexing status and GSC data. If you have the paid version of Screaming Frog, you can follow the steps in the article to complete the template. If you do not have the tool, you can collect the necessary data—pages, GSC data, and indexing status—in other ways, then organize it in the format the template requires and apply it.

Once a site reaches a certain volume of articles, it needs a scalable way to evaluate performance. I would not claim this template is the best, but it at least offers a useful way to think about the problem. Consider how you could combine it with other conditions relevant to your own site, such as GA data, article categories, authors, and publication dates, to form a clearer picture of article performance.

Links: Original article / Tools related to the URL Inspection API

[Video] Six Ways to Improve an Ecommerce Site's Search Appearance with Merchant Center

This video focuses on the relationship between Google Merchant Center (GMC) and Google Search. For Google, GMC is the more trustworthy data source because crawling webpages and extracting information from them is more cumbersome. Google also recommends that site owners continue using structured data on their webpages to provide product information, even if they have already submitted it through GMC.

1. Make sure all products can be indexed. In addition to finding them by crawling the website or through an XML sitemap, Googlebot can discover product pages through a GMC feed.
2. Make sure product prices are correct. Avoid having Google show the wrong price in search results—for example, displaying the original price when a product is on sale.
3. Use GMC's “automatic item update” feature so product changes, including price and availability, can be reflected more quickly.
4. Make sure the site is eligible for rich results.
5. If you have physical stores, submit a local inventory feed so products can appear in “near me” contexts. A small number of countries—not including Taiwan—could also use Google Pointy to integrate the availability of products in physical stores with online data.
6. Make sure “Surfaces Across Google” is enabled in GMC so products also appear in Google Shopping.

Links: Earlier videos about ecommerce optimization tips (Issue 62 / Issue 58) / About automatic item updates / About local inventory / About Pointy

[Video] Can One Webpage Use Multiple Languages?

The question in this video is, “Can one webpage use multiple languages?” John answers that, from a search perspective, it is important for Google's systems to identify a webpage's “primary language” clearly. If only a small portion of the page uses another language, that is fine because the system can still determine the primary language.

Google determines a webpage's language on its own. It does not use any meta tag, such as lang, or clues in the URL, such as /zh, to decide a page's primary language. This is also covered in Google's multilingual documentation.

[Summary] Should I Worry About Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget is a concept surrounded by a common myth in SEO circles. Many people believe Google assigns each website a “crawl budget,” and that when too many pages or overly large webpages exhaust that budget, new pages or content cannot be crawled or indexed promptly.

Gary says that Google originally told people it did not have a concept called crawl budget. Because so many articles and people in the SEO community discussed the subject, however, Google eventually published an article to clear up the misconception, defining crawl budget as the number of URLs Google is willing—or instructed—to crawl. Crawl budget is still something 90% of websites do not need to worry about specifically.

Lizzi asks an interesting question: Whose budget is crawl budget? Is it the crawl budget Google gives your website, or a pool you can decide how to spend across pages? Gary says it is the former. Based on signals such as content quality and update frequency, Googlebot decides how much budget a site deserves. Site owners cannot directly influence those signals, but they can make their sites easier to crawl through methods such as robots.txt, server capacity, and HTTP/2.

Crawl budget is not limited to HTML resources; it also includes JS, CSS, and other types of resources. Martin says that in GSC's crawl stats report, you can check whether Googlebot is spending too many resources crawling JavaScript files. In particular, if the JavaScript is unrelated to rendering the webpage's content, the share spent crawling JS should be relatively small.

I strongly recommend listening to this podcast episode. I often see people exaggerate the importance of crawl budget. SEO professionals should not listen only to rumors circulating within the industry; what Googlers say deserves consideration too.

Links: Transcript / Google's crawl budget documentation