In the latest episode of Canonical Chronicle Ross discusses:
GMB’s new bulk review management feature
No follow links & page rank value.
A new Google indexing issue
New Survey reveals that over 50% of searches end with a zero click event
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I’m Ross Tavendale, the managing director of Type A Media, a creative search agency based in London. I make videos about business leadership, web technology, SEO, PPC and how I turned being a Type A personality into a business.
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Ross: 00:00 We are the people that can find whatever you may need.
Ross: 00:03 If you've got the money, honey, we've got your disease.
Ross: 00:06 Welcome to Canonical Chronicle, Episode 75,902.
Ross: 00:11 Let's get into it.
Ross: 00:13 So as a retailer, keeping on top of reviews and feedback is totally essential.
Ross: 00:27 Otherwise, they're going to get out of control.
Ross: 00:30 For example, this one for men's hair removal cream on Amazon,
Ross: 00:33 the guy says, "Religion hadn't featured much in my life until that night,
Ross: 00:37 but I suddenly became willing to convert to any religion to stop the violent.
Ross: 00:41 burning around the turd tunnel that seemed ..."
Ross: 00:45 I can't finish that. You get the idea.
Ross: 00:47 Well, good news is that you can now bulk edit reviews.
Ross: 00:52 and flag your reviews inside of GMB, which is a nice little workflow hack.
Ross: 00:56 for anyone who's running a local business.
Ross: 00:59 So in a hangout recently, someone asked John Miller if nofollow links.
Ross: 01:03 are counted as backlinks, and as SEO's, we were all like:
Video: 01:08 Yes or no.
Ross: 01:10 So for those that are practicing link builders,
Ross: 01:13 and not just headline readers, we already know that the answer is no.
Ross: 01:18 A nofollow link doesn't pass page rank, but, and it's a big but ...
Video: 01:23 (singing)
Ross: 01:26 It's still a good thing for an SEO to get a nofollow link.
Ross: 01:29 Now you're, like, "Well why is that the case?"
Ross: 01:32 Well, just because there's no page rank being passed doesn't mean.
Ross: 01:36 that there's no trust being passed.
Ross: 01:39 For example, if you're on Wikipedia, which is a nofollow link,
Ross: 01:42 are you going to say, "Well that link's rubbish"?
Ross: 01:44 What about major news sites? Exactly, it all still passes value.
Ross: 01:49 Now, for the love of Matt Cutts, please don't exclusively build nofollow links.
Ross: 01:54 But don't discount them either because, in the words of Matt himself,
Ross: 01:58 "The object is not to make your links appear natural. The objective is that your links are natural."
Ross: 02:06 So you spent hours on an amazing piece of content.
Ross: 02:10 Is it in the state map? Check. Is it internally linked on the site?
Ross: 02:14 Yep, check. Is it indexed in Google?
Video: 02:18 Nope.
Ross: 02:20 Well that's because Google is having some indexing issues, once again.
Ross: 02:25 So Danny Sullivan came out in Twitter to confirm that, yes,
Ross: 02:27 they are having some problems indexing new content and they are working on it.
Ross: 02:32 This week Rand Fishkin published a study on Google collect stream data.
Ross: 02:36 that revealed that 50% of all searches are now a non-click event.
Ross: 02:43 When we heard this, most SEOs were like:
Video: 02:46 Why God? Why?
Ross: 02:48 And despite Google sending less and less traffic to competitor websites,
Ross: 02:52 the study shows that they're sending more traffic to Alphabet properties than ever before.
Ross: 02:59 Now, a lot of people are seeing that,
Ross: 03:00 "No, it's totally fine. No, in advertising it's all about brand exposure and impressions."
Ross: 03:06 And to be honest, to that, I say:
Video: 03:10 Are you high?
Ross: 03:11 Right. What are you guys smoking? Here's an idea.
Ross: 03:14 Seeing you're doing keyword research, use SEMrush to work out if.
Ross: 03:18 there's a knowledge panel or an answer box in the SERP.
Ross: 03:21 And if there is, downweight that as a non-transactional click.
Ross: 03:24 because if you're trying to work out forecasting for your clients.
Ross: 03:28 and protect click-through rates based on search volumes,
Ross: 03:31 you know you're not going to get that anymore.
Ross: 03:33 So just make sure you're building that into your keyword research.
Ross: 03:36 This is a big one for audio files and podcast junkies all over the world.
Ross: 03:42 Google is now listening and can understand all of your podcasts and surface them in the SERPs.
Ross: 03:48 Well, it can do that unless you have my accent.
Ross: 03:52 This new feature's available right now, and all we need is a podcast landing page.
Ross: 03:57 with the right schema markup on it.
Ross: 03:58 So this is great news if you want to drive more traffic to your podcast.
Ross: 04:03 I just hope that people don't randomly start shouting out keywords in their podcasts.
Ross: 04:09 in order to be indexed for "money terms.".
Ross: 04:12 First it was Google ad people contacting our clients without permission.
Ross: 04:17 Now Search Console is sending random reports we didn't ask for to our clients,
Ross: 04:22 and if you're an agency site SEO, you're like:
Video/Child: 04:26 No thanks.
Video/Adult: 04:26 What?
Video/Child: 04:26 It's freaky.
Ross: 04:32 Now Search Console are going to be sending out these monthly reports to people showing,
Ross: 04:36 kind of, talk level numbers; no context, just the numbers.
Ross: 04:40 Although I sound a little bit pessimistic on this one, it may actually end up as a good thing.
Ross: 04:45 The reports keep SEO front of mind for the clients,
Ross: 04:48 and that kind of helps engage in conversations around search performance.
Ross: 04:52 And inside of the organization, it will help them probably to pay a bit more attention to search.
Ross: 04:59 That's everything for this week's Canonical Chronicle.
Ross: 05:01 We hope you liked it. If you do, please do subscribe and follow us on social.
Ross: 05:05 Until next time, we will see you later.