SEO UPdate #16 | 22/03/2022

Welcome to the sixteenth SEO Update, as usual written by and for an SEO specialist. Hopefully there are things among them that you can use for your own clients. Happy reading. 🙂

Fast news from SEO land

You are in luck, we have extra fast news from SEO land today.

• Google’s movie reviews are now full width in the SERP. From now on, when you type a movie + review into Google, you will see it displayed full width.
• An unconfirmed update was noted (“the spring update”). Google’s Danny Sullivan also says he knows nothing about this.
• A survey was conducted among SEO specialists regarding website migrations. 80% of specialists say it is common to experience a loss of traffic after a migration. For me, it’s very much a question of what kind of migration is actually involved, that can be very different in the final outcome of this. See screenshot below.

A website with quality issues switches domains, sees a temporary rise in the SERP and then drops again.

Google’s John Mueller asked a few technical SEO diagnostic questions and then suggested it might be a quality issue with the site. That the old domain had that quality problem, and when you migrated to a new domain, Google took a few days to understand that the site had moved. Once Google realized the site had moved, Google applied the same quality signals to that new domain – resulting in the rankings going down again.

So a migration to a new domain is not the solution when you have quality issues. This could be, a poor backlink profile or technical issues that remain the same if you don’t change the rest of the website (outside of your domain name in this case).

Hotel listing expansion by Google

Google announced the expansion of hotel listings in the SERP. It is now also used for Google Maps, where before it was only shown in Google Search.A number of changes have taken place.

Google hotel center has added some features such as that you can see how many organic clicks you got and how much revenue you generated with it. See the image below for explanation.

So what does it look like now in the SERP? See the screenshot below.

Google indicates that hotels can indicate, from their Google My Business account, what their opening hours and rates are. These are shown that in Search.

Closing

A lot has happened again in SEO land. Hopefully you learned something from this and can use this knowledge for even better results on your clients or your own projects. Good luck!