Today is Wednesday, January 12th, and I’ll be talking about Shopify, Server Logs, winners and losers from Google’s December 2021 Product Review update, Google Search Operators, thread on all the different templates/checklists/flowcharts, women in tech SEO newsletter, and shocking, someone’s site isn’t getting indexed and John Mueller kindly responds.
Was there an algorithm update on the 11th?
The guys over at Search Engine Roundtable may think so.
It looks like there is a good amount of volatility in the algorithm trackers. Though we may not get any answer from Google, the indicators do show something is happening. I’m not seeing any real major movements on my sites, but they’re not ecommerce or affiliate sites, and those have seemed to have more volatility lately especially those relying on reviews.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-update-january-11-32742.html
Yoast released an in depth article on SEO for Shopify.
They cover everything from optimizing core web vitals, lazy loading images, how to blog with shopify, and of course, how to use their new app with Shopify. If you haven’t worked with Shopify in the past, this may be a great primer to seeing what it can do. As they say, Shopify is somewhat the anti-Amazon, and if you are considering selling online, this may be a great starting point to see just what it would take and what it is capable of. I’ve worked on a number of Shopify sites and the platform is solid, but this article definitely would help trim the learning curve for a seasoned SEO who isn’t used to Shopify.
Yoast also announced version 17.9 of their plugin which integrates with Wincher, and allows you up to 5 keywords to track for free, while the paid version allows for 500-10,000 keywords.
Search Engine Land published an article on Monday about server logs, and I think it gives a great overview. I’ve been really spending a lot of time with server logs recently and thought I’d give a few things that I’ve been looking at:
- How often are specific types of pages being accessed – For example, if you have a product page, how often is Google crawling the page. How often is it crawling your blog posts? This is useful to understand how quickly to expect changes that you’ve made to show up in the SERPs
- Looking at just the crawler, I’m seeing what kind of 404s and 301s Google is hitting. Interestingly enough, I see sometimes 404 on sitemap files, and some of those haven’t been on the site for years. It’s good to make sure there isn’t an old search console account with old sitemap files. I’m also curious about how often Google is pulling my sitemaps.
- Comparing what Google is crawling versus what’s in my sitemap. If I’m finding that some sitemaps just don’t seem to be triggering the crawls, then I might want to use more sitemaps with less line items, or more sitemap index files with fewer links out to sitemaps.
- What is my crawl budget looking like, how often is Google visiting, and using this to track downturns or heavy increases. Either case, it’s good to know what’s going on so I can make sure that Google isn’t going down a path that doesn’t make sense, or that there is something that is causing Google to visit less often. That can be a quality thing, or even a speed thing.
Doing this on your own is a bit tough, I’d recommend looking at a service like Botify or DeepCrawl. Both are SAAS offerings that can crawl multi-million page sites. If you are looking at just thousands of pages, Screaming frog has a Log Analyser which can handle most of the tasks for smaller and medium sites.
https://searchengineland.com/why-server-logs-matter-for-seo-378199
Screaming frog Log File Analyzer had an update yesterday as well: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/log-file-analyser-4-0/#4.5
Lily Ray tweeted about the winners and losers from Google’s December 2021 Product Review update. She had another tweet about non product review sites moving around due to the large fluctuations as well as seeing many of the review sites pages get replaced with the product they were reviewing.
I think this is likely a good thing, so often we’re searching for something to solve a problem, but don’t get to the actual company site. I’m more interested in the official information, but then when I’m looking to see reviews and user generated content, I’ll do a specific reviews appended search. Maybe I just know that half the time it is an affiliate site and I just don’t trust them as much, but I think this was the right move by Google.
Looking to take some of your knowledge up a step – check out
SEO nerd Switzerland meetup with Brenda Malone who will discuss Advanced Google Search Operators For Smarter SEO.
Google Search Operators, why would we need to know that? Right from the online meetings description:
Use GSOs to find indexation problems, search for guest post opportunities, identify duplicate content issues, do deep competitor research and basically, help find detailed information about your domain or competitors’ domains to gain an SEO advantage. Brenda is an active member of the Women in Tech SEO community, and this online meetup would be a great opportunity to anyone in SEO.
Meetup Link: https://www.meetup.com/SEOnerdSwitzerland/events/282426514/
Aleyda Slis shared a 2021 thread on all the different templates/checklists/flowcharts she’s shared over the past year. It’s an incredible thread full of amazing content for any SEO. Take a look, I’m sure you’ll find something you could use!
Another newsletter to sign up for besides the #SEOFomo (https://sparklp.co/76026bef ) – is the women in tech SEO newsletter by Areej AbuAli. Help them get to 3K newsletter subscribers before their January edition, they’re about 167 subscribers away!
And what better way to end today’s podcast than another – my site isn’t getting indexed:
Veerendar Sunkara said his site isn’t getting indexed on Google, it’s been 2 months. It’s an Amazon affiliate blog. John Mueller chimed in that they might just be sending the traffic instead to the source site, if you aren’t providing anything of value.
Again, this comes back to your site quality, if it’s not a high value site, then Google is less likely to index pages, and the less of your site it will index them. I used this Podcasts site as a test, it’s on a brand new domain and registered and built the basics of the site on December 8th, so about 4 weeks ago. The site ranks for certain terms, and most posts get indexed within 24 hours. It’s not the best site, but it’s got all the technical aspects down, and has unique content.
He ends by saying about sites: “not all of them are really that useful & necessary to be fully indexed.”
Well said.
