SEO UPdate #13 | 15/03/2022

Already the thirteenth SEO Update, written by an enthusiastic SEO specialist. Let’s start right away.

How does Google understand videos? Google explains it!

Danielle Marshak, a product manager at Google, explains how Google understands video in a new series of videos. Here I am talking about the content of these videos. Below are the ways in brief how Google does this:

• Audio from the video file is used to understand the spoken words.
• The headers of the video can be read by Google to understand what is going on in the video itself.
• Google even understands objects, animals and movements in the video. This is harder for Google to understand than the above points, though.
• Structured data in the videos is also used to gain a better understanding of this.

About structured data, Danielle emphasizes that this is really still important. Google is still, compared to understanding written content, in the early stages of understanding video content.

The parameter tool is too “scary” for SEO specialists

According to John Mueller, the parameter tool is a scary tool for many SEO specialists. In the first place, he advises against using them if you are not an SEO specialist, which is quite understandable.

The parameter tool allows you to specify from within the GSC what Google should do with certain parameters. This is no longer possible from a GSC account with domain authentication. So this is an obsolete tool in the GSC.

See screenshot for the parameter tool.

Personally, I also just prefer to work with noindex tags or the Robots.txt to tell Google what I want with my parameters. So this is what I would also advise my clients to do.

Short news

Do you have a minute? Then we discuss the fast news. Quick, but no less important because of that.

• Google Favicon now uses Googlebot for crawling. Google recently updated its documentation for this purpose.
• Google: hreflang does not give you a ranking boost. I personally think that indirectly it definitely factors into Google’s better understanding of your website.
• Google is increasingly testing things in the SERP. This was noticed by the community of SEO experts on SERoundtable.
• Most SEO specialists use canonicals to set up faceted navigation correctly for SEO. See this link for more.

That’s it again. Hopefully you learned a lot and can apply this for your own accounts. Good luck!