Google’s Crazy Year of Updates

November 17, 2021 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

You never know what’s going to happen when it comes to SEO, but 2021 stands out. Compared to 2020, we had more than 6 confirmed Google Updates and even more unconfirmed updates. Google also made some refinements to rankings and to how the SERPs (search engine result pages) work.

This post was updated December 30, 2021 because even more Google Updates occurred after it was first published!

“Summer of Updates”

Not only did we have the two back to back Core Updates in June and July, we got several Spam Updates, the Product Review Update, and the Page Experience rollout for Mobile for a busy 2021 “Summer of Updates”.

Per SEMrush, desktop results for January 2021 through October 2021 had 68% more high volatility days than in 2020. Mobile was even tumultuous with 84% more volatile days.

Google Search keeps evolving

2021 also saw Passages Ranking, the final phase of Mobile Indexing, and a change in how Google generates web titles.

The latter caused consternation among SEOs and a flurry of tweets showing examples of crappy web titles in the Google SERPs snippets. Below is an example where Google got it wrong even for its own web site.

Example of Google's web title generation having confusing results
Google Ads page a victim of the web title change in August

Fortunately Google adjusted the system in September and it has been performing better.

Google 2021 Updates

So much happened in 2021, I found myself losing track. Accordingly, I created this post as a reference for myself and others.

(Literally as I am pushing the Publish button on this post on November 17th, there is another Core Update rolling out …)

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Time To Consider A Google Keyword Planner Alternative

November 11, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

If you haven’t already noticed, Google Keyword Planner has severely limited access to its keyword data to marketers. Unless you have a consistent active Adwords campaign, when logging into Keyword Planner today, you’ll see wide ranges for average monthly search volume instead of an actual number.

google keyword planner search volume ranges

A range like 100-1K is useless for most keyword research. If you are like most SEOs or marketers your exploration of your keyword space starts with Google Keyword Planner. So what is the alternative?

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Should I Create a Google+ Business Page?

July 6, 2013 / Social Media / by Kathy Alice

Google+If you have a business, the short answer is yes. However a less clear decision is how much you should invest into a Google+ Business page. Businesses struggling with the demands of Twitter and Facebook, may not relish the idea of engaging with yet another social network. However Google+ has some clear SEO benefits that you shouldn’t ignore.

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5 Ways to Work Around Not Provided Keywords

May 14, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

UPDATE: January 13, 2014. On December 31, 2013 Google updated GWMT search query data to be “less rounded”. If you visit GWMT you’ll see a line marking where the change took place.

UPDATE: September 30, 2013. Last week we found out that Google is extending SSL protection to users that are not signed in. This means that for ALL organic search traffic that Google sends to your site, the keywords will be removed and replaced with “not provided”. At this point in time, Bing is continuing to provide webmaster keywords in the referrer string.

Starting in October 2011, keywords used in secure searches are now hidden from webmasters by Google. This means that in Google Analytics (or in any other analytics tool), keywords from these searches show up as not provided. A secure search could mean the user is logged into a Google account, is using Firefox 14 or is just explicitly using secure search. A lot has been written about this controversial move, which was done ostensibly to protect privacy but did not extend to Adwords.

not provided in Google Analytics
More than 60% of the keywords used to find my site are hidden from me

Although Google initially stated that the change would affect 10% of queries, there are many sites where the percentage is much higher. In WebEnso’s case, keywords for 62% of searches fall under not provided, and the percentage is still climbing. 62% is a huge percentage. This means that more than two out of three keywords used to find my site is hidden from me. So what to do?

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Will Google Search Still be Relevant in 5 Years?

April 1, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

GoogleAs a SEO consultant you develop certain filters, some might even say blinders. You look at websites differently than other people. Some aspects of a website you ignore, but others, like the user experience and the content you pay close attention to. A good example of this is site search, the search functionality you find on many sites.

WordPress SEO search page on webenso.comA routine technical SEO recommendation is to noindex any search pages that are crawlable on a site.

If you are not sure what I mean by search pages: go to the search box on this site, webenso.com and type in “wordpress seo” you’ll get a page that looks like the below and has a URL that has a
?s=wordpress+seo query string in it.

Either you don’t want Google to find those URLs or the pages should have the meta robots tag on it set to noindex.

But I’m not here to dive into the details of noindex and technical SEO. My point is that as a SEO you disregard the search pages once addressed and forget about them. This is what I mean by blinders. We SEOs are so focused on Google search, with an occasional journey into Bing search, that we don’t always see the potential that the other search engines have to disrupt the search industry.

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How We Increased Website Traffic by 150% by Fixing Duplicate Content

January 26, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Most people outside the industry think that Technical SEO is all about on page optimization, in other words; updating a page’s meta data and content to have the right keywords in it. However there is another aspect of Technical SEO that has nothing with keywords and can be very powerful for larger dynamic websites. This discipline makes sure the site is search engine crawler friendly by making sure the search bots can find all the pages and also that there are not multiple URLs for a single page, also known as duplicate content. Duplicate content within a site is more common that you might think and I have repeatedly seen significant traffic increases by eliminating it. This is a case study of how we addressed over-indexation of duplicate content by Google and increased traffic by more than 150% overall.

The site in question is a B2B eCommerce site which does a brisk business on weekdays but has much lower traffic during the weekends and holidays. The chart below tracks its weekly non branded organic search traffic for the last 9 months. Here “non branded” means that we exclude organic traffic that arrives via company and domain name keywords, however note we do include product keywords which is a significant part of their traffic.

non branded organic traffic
Non Branded Organic Traffic – Weekly

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