IndexNow, Domains, 2022 Local SEO success, and Disney in the Metaverse

Today is January 6th, 2022 and today I’ll be talking about IndexNow from Microsoft, a couple domain related questions answered by John Mueller during his “ask googlebot” video from yesterday, a thought provoking local SEO article by Mirriam Ellis at Moz, and finally Disney is getting into the metaverse

Microsoft Webmaster Tools released their IndexNow WordPress plugin over the holiday weekend. I can’t believe I didn’t see this, but Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land put together a nice writeup on this. If you are running WordPress I would highly recommend this. For those that don’t know, IndexNow is an initiative headed by Microsoft to make indexing new and updated content more efficient. Typically a crawler has to check a page and see if it’s changed since the last time it visited. This is different, it send the search engine a notification that the page is new or has been changed and the crawler can then visit the page. This should be a more efficient way of doing things. Right now, Google is “looking into it” but I’m not expecting an answer anytime soon.

I did a test with this plugin and I have to say, it’s a very simple setup. Once installed and activated, the API key and all site settings are taken care of for you. I made an update to a page, checked my server logs and saw BingBot crawl the page within 2 minutes.

Overall, this is something I would suggest anyone with a WordPress site should install. Right now, it’s had just over 400 installs, so it’s not getting a ton of usage. This definitely puts you in the advantage.

https://searchengineland.com/indexnow-plugin-for-wordpress-378228

Ask GoogleBot – Domains Lightning Round From January 5th 2022.

Does Google care about tld?For example a real estate agent might want jimsmith.realtor instead of jimsmithrealtor.com.
Google says they don’t care, it’s treated the same.

Perception may be different for your end users as well as in some cases you may have issues with things like email. If you don’t end in a common top level domain like com or net, you may find that some email verification javascript fails and you end up having to use a gmail or something. One other opinion I have on this, if you are choosing a “vanity” tld instead of a .com, and the .com is a competitor, you may wish to reconsider. People will often type in the .com afterwards, or search instead. You may be losing out on branded traffic.

Can I rank globally for a domain with a ccTLD. The example was using .fr and you are a French site, but you want to target Brazil as well. In Search console, you can only setup one Country to target. Once you remove that, you are no longer targeting a single country.

Also, having a ccTLD send a signal to Google and tells it which country you are targeting.

Miriam Ellis puts together another great article over at Moz – this is giving me whiteboard Friday feels. The article talks about 2022 Local SEO success. There were a few really great takeaways as I read the article and I encourage you to take 5 or 6 minutes and read it all the way through.

But what I liked most was the talk about supply chain gaps and how you couldn’t buy name brand anti-bacterial, but then your local brewer started making them. How you couldn’t buy masks but there were teams of Etsy sewists. Did you Google making your own bread or where to buy flour locally? The savvy business owners came up with new solutions.

I know of an event sign company that pivoted to creating anti-bacterial stations and their business has grown over the last few years now.

All of these are examples of ways we, as marketers, can work with our suppliers, product team, and latest trends to come up with solutions that impact those around us. Tom & Dr. Pete @ Moz both put some 2022 predictions together at the end. Just go read the article, it’s worth it.

https://moz.com/blog/2022-local-seo-success

And a few days ago we talked about Reddit’s homepage getting taken down a notch from a DMCA request. To follow up with that, a Reddit thread by user dustyd22 discussed a site that is copying their site word for word and just adding a “the” in front of the domain name.

A quick response links to Google’s content removal form.

I’ll go ahead and have that link here in the show notes for you, but it’s a really good idea to make sure you’ve got this bookmarked and use it when someone is blatantly stealing your work. Note – ensure that you have canonical links setup on your site, half the time these pages end up keeping those in the source code and you end up getting some actual value out of it. Your mileage may vary, but I’d err on the side of caution with this and act quickly with anyone you see doing this.

https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en

Disney has entered the metaverse.

Remember yesterday’s news where I talked about Nike the perfect Corp entering the metaverse. Well, Disney has just entered and they’re looking to make it big. IGN has an article on this, outlining the several patents that Disney just filed on An Augmented Virtual World Simulator That Doesn’t Need a Headset Or Glasses.

If you weren’t sure if the metaverse was going to be a thing, I think between Disney and Nike both putting a lot of money towards it is an indicator that there is going to be a whole new opportunity as marketers to be one of the first to market especially if you are in an industry that relies heavily on interaction with a product.https://www.ign.com/articles/disney-patent-augmented-reality-theme-park-rides