SEO e-Newsletter Issue 7 – 2020.04.16~2020.04.30

Google Shopping becomes a free platform

Google has opened its shopping platform free of charge to all e-commerce merchants to publish their own products. Before this, Google Shopping could only publish products for a fee. This update is equivalent to an additional exposure platform for sellers for free, and an additional battlefield for SEO. Launching it at this time is quite in line with today's needs.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the top is still the advertising slot, but the bottom is the result of natural sorting. This update was launched in the United States at the end of April, and Google also expects to launch it worldwide before the end of the year.

link:official announcement / registration process / related reports (Chinese)

Google: We couldn't find any matching results for our search

Starting from 4/23, when Google cannot find highly matching search results, it will display a new message to confess to users - "It looks like there aren't any great matches for your search」。

The search results represent the quality of the search engine to a considerable extent. Google is dealing with all kinds of search terms every second. When it cannot find the appropriate results, instead of giving a hard answer, it is better to proactively admit that the search results are not perfect.

link:Google Announcement

GSC update - reduced page coverage & added URL copy function

Google Search Console has two updates. The first point is that starting from 4/12, the pages covered by reports in GSC will be reduced, which will help improve the performance of GSC.

The second point is to add a small icon next to the URL that can copy the URL. This must be the optimization that many SEOs dream of.

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link:official document

SEO experiment, exiting featured snippets causes 12% traffic loss

E-Newsletter Issue 1introduced - "web pages that appear in Featured Snippets will no longer appear in the general search results below.". Many people are worried that content appearing directly in search results will lead to a loss of traffic. Therefore, foreign SEO agency Moz conducted an experiment. They selectively removed some web pages that originally occupied featured snippets from this position. They made the following three findings: The

• nosnippettag can quickly remove web pages from the featured snippet position
• Loss of featured snippet position results in approximately 12% traffic loss
• will After thenosnippettag is removed, the web page does not quickly return to the featured snippet position.

link:Moz original text

"How-to" tag search appearance changes

Some foreign SEOs discovered that the "How-to" structured data has changed in the appearance of search results. This is structured data that was only supported in August 2019. It is mainly used for content webpages with clear steps.previous articleshas been introduced.

Below are several possible appearances of several "How-to" tagged pages in search results.

Link: Picture source ( 1 / 2 ) / related reports

Left navigation bar of Google search results

Some netizens found that for some search terms, the left navigation bar appeared in Google's search results (SERP). This situation mainly occurs when the search term is a clear subject, such as: book title, person's name, movie...etc.

Link: Picture source ( 1 / 2 / 3 )

Google removed 2.7 billion ads for policy violations in 2019

Google mentioned in a recent article that they have considerable requirements for the quality of ads. In 2019, they removed 2.7 billion ads that did not meet the standards (an average of 5,000 ads were removed every minute) and 1 million ad accounts. In the past few months, tens of millions of coronavirus-related ads have been removed for policy violations.

link:official announcement

Tool Sharing - Compare Two Lighthouse Results

The Chrome team has developed a very practical tool that allows users to compare the report results run by two Lighthouses. This tool can be used to compare the performance of "before optimization vs. after optimization" or "your own website vs. other websites."

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link:Lighthouse comparison tool / source code

Good Article Sharing (Part 2) - UX Indicator: CLS Score

Most people should have this experience. When they go to a web page, the pictures start to load halfway through browsing, the page starts to jump around, and then they have to scroll down to find where they see it. Pixnet, which is loved by many people in Taiwan, has such a problem.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is one of the UX indicators used to measure whether there is a section shift on a web page. This article by Paul clearly explains this concept, the calculation method of CLS Score, and how front-end engineers can avoid this problem. Recommended reading!

link:Paul Li article / digital engine introduction / CLS calculation tool

Tips - Add annotations to Google Data Studio reports

Google Data Studio does not have a native function that allows you to annotate charts. This article explains in detail a small step to achieve such an effect - "Use Google Sheets and Data Blending!", which is quite practical for GDS enthusiasts!

link:Original text

Google webmaster Q&A – Apr 3 & Apr 9 & Apr 14

Google Webmaster Hangout is an official Q&A event held from time to time. DeepCrawl helps organize the content each time and is also a regular source of information for the author. Here are a few interesting highlights:

• The AMP version of the URL must be on the same domain
• <lastmod> helps Google understand which pages to crawl first
• For very large sites, reducing the number of pages can help
• User Reviews and Critic Reviews should use structured markup

link:4/3 Notes / 4/9 notes / 4/14 notes

NNgroup Research: How people browse the web

This is a study released by Nielsen Norman Group, which uses eye tracking technology to sort out how ordinary people scan web pages to absorb information, and the different behaviors when different web pages are typeset. Quite an interesting report, recommended reading.

link:NNGroup report

Official Video: How Google handles 301 Redirect

In this episode of the video, John Mueller was asked - "I have moved 301 from web page A to web page B, why does web page A still appear in the search results?" This is a very common question. For Google, 301 is only one of the factors in choosing a canonical URL. There are several other factors that affect canonical URLs. Let's take a look at John's answer!

Bonus: John told an interesting trivia in the video, that is, there will be people from other groups within Google asking this kind of SEO questions, but as Search Analysts, they are actually not allowed to answer their own questions, even if the answers are public.

Official Video: Can Links be Handled with JavaScript?

WMConf Lightning Talks is a new series, the content is mainly a short version of the content of webmaster seminars held by Googler in various places. This is the first episode of this series. Martin Splitt explains how Googlebot views "links". It seems to be a simple concept, but it is complicated by JavaScript and the SPAs that have flourished in recent years.