SEO UPdate #9 | 22/02/2022

A very nice date for an SEO update, I thought. A lot has happened in the land of SEO specialists, so let’s get right to it.

Google tightens DMCA (penalty algorithm)

Google sent a document to the U.S. Copyright Office explaining that DMCA (better known as the pirate update) is being tightened. A website now sees, which is more than before, an average drop in organic traffic of 89% (huge, that is).

The expansion here is largely about catching redirect schemes deployed for the sake of organic findability.

Microsoft is testing colored ads

Microsoft is deploying colored ads (probably to increase its CTR). See the image below for info. In general, you sometimes see colored search ads and sometimes search ads with a white background, hence the conclusion that in all likelihood they are testing this.

Quick news from SEO land!

As an SEO specialist, you want to keep going. I’ll help you do just that, with quick news from SEO land.

• It does not currently seem to be possible to deploy exclusion words in Google Shopping (ppc). Whether this is a bug or permanent, I’m not sure.
• The “referring page” section in the inspection tool is not very important, according to Google’s John Mueller. It purely shows the URL by which Google first discovered the URL in question. Multiple URLs are often displayed here.
• John Mueller of Google indicated that how your Web Stories do in search has no impact on the performance of the rest of your Web site.
• Paginated pages: Google indicates here that it can help to prioritize new content on your first pages. If the same content is always left here, Google will crawl it less and less often.
• John Mueller points out, there is no E-A-T score, but Google has included it in its guidelines and the team working on the algorithm is absolutely working on this as well (I often point this out to my clients as well).
• Google’s indexing API is used to display jobs as well as livestreams. Do you use it for other purposes? Then it’s not going to help, but it can’t hurt either, according to John Mueller (everything comes from our friend John today).

A nice ending

A bug was submitted of ads displayed on the left in the SERP and organic results displayed on the right in the SERP.

That’s it again. Until the next one!