Don’t settle for the one thousand row limit in GSC. In this tutorial, I explain how to get all of your Merchant Listings data from GSC, while covering some other ideas for working with the data via Analytics Edge. Merchant Listings can be incredibly powerful for ecommerce retailers. They are free product listings that show up often in a ‘product grid’ in the SERPs. Clicking each merchant listing triggers a product card and enables you to view photos, reviews, and other information related to a product. And of course, you can click through to view and purchase the product from a website. You c ..read more

While helping a company that was heavily impacted by several algorithm updates in the fall of 2023, I started by scanning GSC reports to get a feel for the situation. And when digging into the inbound links report, I started noticing something funny across a number of links. There were some relatively powerful referring domains in the list, but when checking the urls receiving those links, the target url was different. In other words, the url receiving the link was actually via a separate url… That can happen, but what I discovered was a little different. The target urls were from anothe ..read more

From “Generally reliable” to “Blacklisted”, you can find scores and discussions for many sites whose reliability is frequently discussed by Wikipedia editors. And as a bonus, I’ll explain how to find when a site is used as a source across Wikipedia. Based on helping many companies over the years that have been impacted by major algorithm updates, I know it’s sometimes hard for site owners to objectively review their own site. This is why I have recommended running user studies through the lens of broad core updates. Like I said in my post about the topic, objective feedback from real users ca ..read more

I’m going to flip the script for this post, which I rarely do. I’ll start with where I think the helpful content system can go from here and then provide the why after (for those that want to better understand some background about Google’s punitive algorithm updates). Here we go. I think Google’s helpful content system can go in a few different directions from here: Google could simply lessen the severity of the HCU classifier. It would still be site-wide, but sites would not be dragged down as much. It would get your attention for sure, and maybe just bad enough where you still want to imp ..read more

Google released Notes as an experiment on November 15, 2023, which is essentially a global commenting system that can appear in the search results, in Discover, and now while browsing a webpage via “SGE while browsing”. It enables anyone that’s part of the experiment to post a note for a specific url and read Notes from other users. Notes can contain text, a background image, you can tailor the design a bit, etc. And after posting a Note, you can view impressions and likes via your profile. I activated Notes in Search Labs the day it launched, and I have posted several Notes along the way. A ..read more

For whatever reason, I’ve seen an uptick in site owners reaching out to me recently about search snippets appearing that they aren’t happy about. For example, Google is selecting text for a search snippet that they simply don’t want to be displayed in the search results. The site owners reaching out didn’t know if they could influence that somehow, or if they were just stuck. In those situations, I always explain that providing a solid meta description can increase the chances of Google using your own description in the snippet. That said, and as Google just reiterated this week, it can cho ..read more

As I’ve been helping companies that were heavily impacted by the “2023 Fall of Insane Algorithm Updates”, I have once again heard from several site owners that had their highest levels of traffic right before getting hammered. I’ll cover more about that soon, but it’s something I have seen for a long time. And now that we’ve read Google’s testimony about Navboost and user interaction signals from the latest antitrust trial, several ideas have been running around my head. While helping companies impacted by major algorithm updates (like broad core updates), it’s super-important to run what I ..read more

Google rolled out the November 2023 reviews update on November 8, 2023 and announced it is moving to more of a continuous rollout (so the November update will probably be the last reviews update announced). That’s unless significant changes to the system are implemented (like expanding to additional languages or other major changes implemented). As a quick refresh, the update launched in April of 2021 and just evaluated product reviews at that point. That’s why it was originally named the Product Reviews Update (PRU). Then with the April 2023 reviews update, it moved to evaluating any conten ..read more

Including tips and recommendations for helping site owners navigate the AI UGC triple (detection, volume, and pace of lower-quality AI user-generated content.) The term “low-quality AI user-generated content” is a mouthful, but it’s an important topic for site owners that allow UGC to be published on their sites. And I have come across several tough situations recently based on heavily analyzing the September helpful content update (HCU). I don’t think anyone has covered the topic of UGC’s impact with the helpful content update yet, so I wanted to quickly cover it in this post. Since the la ..read more

The past two months in Google Land has been one of the most volatile times I can remember in the search industry. Google released the August broad core update, then a powerful helpful content update in September, then the October broad core update, and also sandwiched in a spam update which overlapped the October core update. Needless to say, it’s been a crazy and wild time for SEOs and site owners. Like I’ve said many times before, Welcome To Google Land. As the updates have been rolling out, I have spoken with countless site owners that have been impacted. And during those conversations ..read more