Google updates the Search Quality Raters' Guidelines and some listener Q&A
Or get it on:
Show notes and links
In this week's episode, Jack Chambers-Ward is once again joined by his co-host, Mark Williams-Cook, to discuss all the latest SEO & PPC news. This week, Jack & Mark discuss:
- Google updates their Search Quality Raters Guidelines
- Lily Ray's analysis of the Search Quality Raters Guidelines
- SISTRIX's TrendWatch July 2022
- July 2022 Google Product Review Update
- Glenn Gabe's analysis of the Product Review Update impact
- Listener Q&A including how to prioritise SEO tasks and how to maintain rankings when changing CMS
Transcript
Jack: Welcome to episode 30 of season two of the Search with Candour podcast. My name is Jack Chambers-Ward, and this week I am once again joined by my co-host Mr. Mark Williams-Cook. And this week we'll be talking about Google updates, search quality raters guidelines, July, 2022, the Google product review update, and a bit of listener Q&A, which we haven't done in a very, very long time. Search with Candour is supported by SISTRIX, the SEOs toolbox. Go to sistrix.com/SWC if you want to check out some of their fantastic free tools, such as their SERP snippet generator, hreflang validator, checking your site's visibility index, and the Google update tracker. Go to sistrix.com/trends for trend watch, which we'll be talking about later on in the show.
Mark: So Google has updated their search quality rater guidelines at the end of last month, so July the 28th, and we are always interested when this happens because the search quality raters guidelines, well, firstly, they're a little bit misunderstood. So to give you a very quick outline, for those that don't know, search quality rater guidelines exist for people that are manually reviewing results in Google, as part of a feedback loop for their algorithms to test how well things are running. They don't directly impact how sites are ranking, but the reason we're so interested in them is that the search quality rater guidelines essentially describe what Google's algorithm is hoping to achieve. It's a very long document. It's a public document, obviously, so you can view it. But it gives you the actual instructions that quality raters are giving in terms of how they should think about websites, how they should assess them. So again, not necessarily how the algorithm works, but it is the outcome that they are trying to achieve.
What's particularly interesting about this update in the quality rater guidelines is Google has done a fairly significant rewrite of their YMYL content and YMYL is your money, your life content. So this is content, essentially, where if it's very wrong, could cause material harm to people's health or finances. Now, we will link in the show notes at search.withcandor.co.uk to a really good writeup by Lily Ray who's done some analysis of these changes. I'm going to read out a couple of the sections of the guidelines that have been updated, give some of Lily's analysis, some of our views as well, just to give you a shortcut around this. But essentially in the previous versions of the quality rater guidelines, we had topics that were broken down into categories, such as news and current events, civics, government and law, finance, shopping, health and safety, groups of people, and other, and all of those have now been removed because Google has reframed their definition around the extent to which content can cause harms to individual or society as a whole.
So I'm going to read out this section in the search quality guidelines, which is about YMYL topics. It's a little bit of a long read, but I think it's worth just picking through this and we can talk about what we think is significant. So this is section 2.3 and it says, "Pages on the worldwide web are about a vast variety of topics. Some topics have a high risk of harm because content about these topics could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or wellbeing of society. We call these topics, your money or your life, or YMYL. YMYL topics may significantly impact or harm one or more of the following, the person who is directly viewing or using the content, other people who are affected by the person who viewed the content, groups of people or society affected by the actions of people who viewed the content." So this isn't just talking as well about a set of instructions that may make you make a bad financial decisions, it's actually talking about larger impacts as well of you read this which might trigger you to go on and do something that has negative impacts on other people.
It goes on say YMYL topics can directly and significantly impact people's health, financial stability, or safety, or the welfare wellbeing of society because of the following reasons. And this is where the reframing comes in. So there's two reasons they give. One is the topic itself is harmful or dangerous. For example, there is clear and present harm directly associated with topics related to self-harm, criminal acts, or violent extremism. Secondly, the topic could cause harm if the content is not accurate and trustworthy. For example, mild inaccuracies or content from less reliable sources could significantly impact someone's health, financial stability, or safety, or impact society for topics like symptoms of a heart attack, how to invest money, what to do if there is an earthquake, who can vote, or needed qualifications for obtaining a driver's license. So I think out of those two reasons, 95% of the sites we are going to be working on are going to fall into reason two.
Jack: You would hope so, wouldn't you? Yeah.
Mark: You would hope so. There'll be some topics around self harm, which might be advice, websites, mental health websites, things like that.
Jack: Some legal websites might talk about criminal activity as well. Yeah.
Mark: Exactly. There is an overlap, but I think most people will be affected by reason two. And the other interesting thing, which we'll go into in a minute, is this is the first time, I believe, that Google has acknowledged that YMYL content is treated on a spectrum. So that may be within a type of search, there are levels of which they're rating in terms of how much harm could be caused which then impacts how much trust expertise authority, if you like, is needed. And I say that, because I've jumped ahead, because Google does mention EAT quite a lot. So I'm sure I'm sure Lily Ray is putting on her smug emoji face which she's self described as because the amount of references we are seeing from Google around the topic of EAT now, especially with YMYL, is increasing and they do seem to be making it clear that it is more important.
So Google goes on to say, "To determine whether a topic is YMYL, assess the following types of harm that might occur. Health or safety topics that could harm mental, physical, or emotional health or any form of safety, such as physical safety or safety online. Financial security topics that could damage a person's ability to support themselves and their families. Society, topics that could negatively impact groups of people, issues of public interest, trust in public institutions, et cetera, and other topics that could hurt people or negatively impact welfare or wellbeing of society." So Google does go on to say that many or most topics are not YMYL and do not require a high level of accuracy or trust to prevent harm.
Because YMYL assessment is on a spectrum, which, as I said, is the first time I think they've actually said this, it may be helpful to think of topics as clear YMYL, definitely not YMYL, or something in between. Pages on clear YMYL topics require the most scrutiny for page quality rating. And there's a table here, and it's in the article that we'll link to in the show notes, which gives you a breakdown of examples by type of topic. So I'll give you just a couple of these. So we've got three ratings, which is essentially a clear YMYL topic, a maybe, this is that in between on a spectrum, maybe YMYL, and not or not likely to be a YMYL topic. So on the information side of things, a clear YMYL topic would be things like evacuation route for tsunami. So obviously inaccurate information is probably going to kill people.
Jack: Yeah, it's going to cost lives. Absolutely.
Mark: They've got a maybe, which is interestingly a weather forecast. So they're saying normally if it's inaccurate, it's not going to cause harm but as-
Jack: In certain situations, in the case of a tsunami. Yeah, that could be.
Mark: Michael Fish knew there was going to be a storm, or there wasn't going to be a storm and then there was. And then not likely is things like music award winners. This topic is unlikely to cause harm. Advice about an activity. So a clear topic is when to go to the emergency room, a maybe is how often to replace a toothbrush, and then not likely is how frequently to wash jeans. They've got a personal opinion here as an example. So a personal opinion, a clear YMYL topic for a personal opinion is about why a racial group is inferior.
Jack: Yeah, that makes sense.
Mark: So clear group so it says explanation pages on this topic have been used to justify or incite violence against groups of people. Fair enough. Maybe YMYL topic, personal opinion about why an exercise is inferior. That's quite interesting.
Jack: There's a lot of that stuff in the exercise community. One blog will say, "These are the five things you should do for the best abs." And the other one will say, "Do not do these things if you want great abs." Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation. That makes a lot of sense.
Mark: And then we've got unlikely to be personal opinion about why a rock band is inferior. I don't know, that might cause harm. Some people are pretty opinionated about that.
Jack: I've met a few very opinionated people about that.
Mark: Might lead to extremism.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah.
Mark: News about current events. A clear example of YMYL is news about ongoing violence. So obviously people need accurate information to stay safe. A possible is news about a car accident. So the accident itself may have been harmful, but there's very little risk of future harm from small inaccuracies in reporting about an incident. And not YMYL would be news about a local high school basketball game. So I think this is quite interesting for a few reasons. The main one this immediately brought my mind back to, and I dug up the tweet to find it, I found the receipts, was when Danny Sullivan, so the search liaison for Google, answered a question. This was way back now on September the 9th, 2019. It was up there though, I remembered it.
Jack: Well done, Mark, genuinely. That's impressive.
Mark: So he got asked a question. So the question from SEOByMichael was to Danny, "Now, I'm very curious and can't seem to find any official word on this so let's try Danny Sullivan. How does Google handle content accuracy and is that process factored into keyword rankings? I thought this would be done through comparative data analysis of popular consensus." And Danny replied, "Machines can't tell the 'accuracy' of content. Our systems rely instead on signals we find align with relevancy of topic and authority," and he's given a link there. Now, I don't know if you have an opinion on this. What that says to me essentially is, look, in a lot of case, we don't know the answer to, say, how often to replace a toothbrush. There's probably not an objective answer to that, but use that as an example. However, their algorithms are looking for all the things we've spoken about before, where we've talked about expertise of authority and trust and are just building a picture of this website kind of looks trustworthy, therefore, this is probably a correct answer.
Jack: Yeah. I think that's a key point. You've got to think about it's the future harm they mention a couple of times in those guidelines, I think is key. And there's a little example here from Lily Ray on her article here as well, talking about a hypothetical harmful situation about a non-harmful topic. So a lot of scientific topics, and I talked to Katherine Watier Ong about this a few months ago, talking about a lot of scientific journals and things like that come under the YMYL category because they cover a lot of health stuff, a lot of future advice stuff and technology stuff, which is often related to finances, all that kind of stuff. It kind of fell under that umbrella.
The example Lily gives here is the science behind rainbows of science implies that it is going to be an important thing and that will tie into society and all that kind of stuff, but rainbows are far from harmful. So that's a thing that would actually not be considered YMYL because it's a hypothetical situation where it doesn't categorise that. I think it's great that they're making that distinction. I think that's very important because things could so easily fall into the wrong bucket, into the wrong silo of one thing or another. And hopefully this is moving in the right direction when we get clearer definitions and more correct analysis of this. So yeah, I think this seems very positive to me, from my perspective.
Mark: It really starts to get interesting, for me, in this section around low quality content. And I think this highlights the value of reading through these quality rater guidelines every now and again, because it really at least gives you the thinking behind what Google's doing or at least what they want you to... How they want you to approach content. And again, aligning yourself with Google long term is always going to be a good SEO strategy because if you get in the way of them and the wallet, you're not going to last long. So low quality content section, this is really interesting. It says, "The required level of EAT," and even just that for me is weird because obviously Google have said there isn't a single EAT metric.
Jack: You don't get an EAT score on Google Search Console or something.
Mark: Exactly.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: There's no EAT score. It is this amalgamation of stuff. But it's interesting that they just opened now with this concept so central to everything. They said, "The required level of EAT, the quality of the main content, the amount of helpful main content, and the amount of information about the website and creators of the main content depend on the topic and purpose of the page." Now, again, I've had this discussion before with clients when we've done content strategies and the goal objective when you start with them is always, "Hey, we want to rank for this commercial term or this term with high search volume." But there's basically they don't have any other supporting content on that topic on the site and I give them the thought of experiment of, "Okay, well, if you've got two pages on two different domains, which are roughly of equal quality but one of them has 50 pages on the same topic and they all interlink and they have related questions, which would you blind guess is going to be the better source?" It's normally, "Well, that one."
And it's interesting. Just thinking about the things that they list here around helpful content, the amount of information around that topic. But again, they framed it, like we said, that depends on not just the topic, but the purpose of the page, like the example you gave there with the rainbow. So they say, "For many topics, personal experience, everyday expertise, and some time or effort to assemble the main content may be all that the page needs to be satisfying. For some topics or webpages, no information is needed about the content creators aside from what is in the main content itself, e.g. forum discussions that pose no risk to users. However, for pages on YMYL, there is a higher standard for main content, EAT, and information about the website or content creator."
And again, this is interesting because there was I think it was the search pilot test where they added author bios into a website and essentially tracked no change in rankings. And again, there was a really interesting discussion about that because I don't think even if you could say author bios help, it's not going to be a single lever working on its own in a vacuum. It's going to be part of, firstly, a bigger picture of EAT. And again, in the context to the type of content you're showing. So author bios on a site that isn't clearly YMYL, may have no impact, but on a site where YMYL is very important, it may give you the ability to build on other things to show. It's just that it specifically says here on YMYL topics, there is a higher standard and information about the website or content creator. So to me, it would be a very almost foolhardy thing not to bother including that when it's been specifically mentioned here.
Jack: Yeah, I know. The example Katherine and I talked about in a health space is Healthline and what they do, and that they log every update to every article and you get a full change log of who has updated this article and when, and they have verified little ticks next to their authors. Some of them will say, "Verified by a medical doctor," and stuff like that. So when a page gets updated by it's written by somebody or written by a doctor, you see their credentials there, you get a full change log of who has updated this article and when. And that's about as clear as you can possibly get. It's about the most in depth who wrote this thing and who are they just on the page without going through to an author bio that I think I've ever seen. And Healthline, from my experience of checking SERPs for health related products and services and informational guides and things like that, they are pretty dominant to say the least. And I know Healthline have a huge in-house SEO team, so it's unsurprising. But yeah, they're the leading example. So listeners, if you haven't checked out Healthline and some of their articles, and an example of the extreme end of this, in a positive way, go and check out Healthline because they do something that is beyond anything I've seen on other websites. And it could be a good example, at least something to aim for in the future to have verifiable authors of particular expertise for your articles, especially if you're working in health industries or other YMYL topics.
Mark: So there's two last points I want to close on, because we could talk about this for a long time.
Jack: The entire episode.
Mark: There's two other points in this low quality content section I found were interesting. So they've said low quality characteristics do not depend on the purpose or topic of the page. Shocking or exaggerated titles or a mildly negative reputation for the website or the content creator is a reason to assign a low rating for any page. There's a lot to unpick there in two sentences. So they're saying, firstly, shocking or exaggerated titles, so basically clickbait titles.
Jack: Clickbait nonsense. Yeah. As you said, ways to lose 10 kilos overnight or something like that. Those kind of...
Mark: Doctors hate him.
Jack: Yeah. She looks 25 and she's 65. Doctors hate her.
Mark: So GPT3 even can generate clickbait titles now, if you tell it to.
Jack: I assume that's the first thing people did with GPT3. That's the default setting almost.
Mark: Combined with we have seen Google replacing titles now to be more descriptive. So they've started using like H1s, internal links and stuff.
Jack: The bad example we used when the Titlepocalypse happened, and I've brought this up on the show many times before, was the somebody had something stuck in their throat and Google took the wrong piece of information from that article and put it in the featured snippet. And it took, "Do not stick your fingers down their throat," and it ended up with, "stick your fingers down their throat," which is life and death. That's about as YMYL as you can possibly get. And Google got it wrong when they did the whole title update thing. So yeah, that's very interesting. They're clearly taking this a lot more seriously and hopefully that means we won't see a mistake like that slip through the net in future. Fingers crossed.
Mark: It's kind of ironic when that's their second of two reasons.
Jack: Literally.
Mark: For something that could cause harm, which is like symptoms of a heart attack. So I remember that it was telling you, "Just bend down there, stick them fingers down their throat. Everything will be fine."
Jack: I love the idea of somebody Googling that as somebody is choking in front of them.
Mark: I've got this. I've got this.
Jack: What do I do when somebody's choking? Oh, fingers down your throat. Oh, yeah. Thanks, Google.
Mark: Yeah, so shocking or exaggerated title is interesting and how Google might work that out. Because again, this isn't describing what they're doing in the algorithm. This is telling raters what they should be looking for.
Jack: Yes.
Mark: Mildly negative reputation for the website or content creator. So again, all the way back to talking about page rank and bad neighborhoods, toxic links, there's been lots of ways to describe what a negative reputation for a website or a webpage looks like. I haven't heard many people talking, until fairly recently, about information about content creators. Again, Lily Ray was one. We spoke about what might happen in the future and we were talking about Google fingerprinting even people's voices for podcasts too and we were talking about trying to work out who individuals were around the web by writing style, which was apparently frighteningly accurate as well. There's that project where they identified book authors under ghost names by writing style.
Jack: Yeah, I talked about that with Katherine as well.
Mark: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Mark: So I think that, again, this is maybe a crystal ball of what's to come and strategically how you should be looking at content. So there's that. And the last point is that low quality pages can occur on any type of website, including academic sites, nonprofit websites, government websites, generally any otherwise helpful type of website. Low quality pages may be about any topic. Pages on YMYL topics need to be treated with more scrutiny for signs of low quality related to the main content and the website content creator because of the obviously impact that we've discussed. But there's one more rating which is around if pages are hacked and such.
Jack: Sure. Sure.
Mark: So much to take in and think a few steps ahead, which is why I like looking at these quality rater guidelines, because we are working with some YMYL clients now and this was one thing that we picked up with them about things like who wrote this. Who are they? What do they know? Why should we trust them? Even outside of a search point of view, without going into what that website was about, I would want to know, as a user, who wrote that information.
Jack: Yeah, absolutely.
Mark: So yeah, Lily has done a nice breakdown. So we will link to that search.withcandour.co.uk and worth reviewing those updates for yourself.
Jack: So I mentioned some trends and some trend watch at the top of the show, let's dive into some trend watch July 2022, shall we? Because I've got some interesting topics this week. And I picked out a couple that were not necessarily my favorites, but something I thought you and I could talk about, Mark, for a little bit. Something I've seen quite a lot of around the internet, especially on Reddit, for some reason, there's a lot of phobia based Reddits, subreddits, trypophobia, or trypophobia, trypophobia. I'm never sure how to actually pronounce that. It's the fear of a cluster of small holes altogether, like a honeycomb, that kind of thing. I know a lot of people feel very uncomfortable. They get that skin crawly feeling when that happens. Do you have anything like that? Do you have a fear of the little clustered holes, things?
Mark: Nothing quite that abstract that I'm aware of. I guess there might be some material combination things, but I'm pretty lucky like that. I don't, as far as I'm aware, have actually any particular phobias of anything.
Jack: Lucky you.
Mark: Lucky me, yeah. That I've discovered yet. Life's hopefully long and there's time to come.
Jack: Yeah, fingers crossed. But yes, we have seen an increase, or SISTRIX have, specifically, looking into trend watch, we have seen a particular increase in the searches for trypophobia basically over the last year or so. And again, I wonder if it's because of these little communities on places like Reddit where you see these things spiral out of control and suddenly everybody's talking about the same thing. And yeah, I wonder if it's kind of a lot of people all talk about it once and then been like, "Maybe I do have that thing. Let me go and search it." Or you've experienced the thing, and I think this is a really common thing, people trying to diagnose themselves and being like, "That made me feel uncomfortable. What does that mean?" And searching it there and looking out for definitions and stuff like that.
Mark: I definitely think it's people sometimes discovering what their phobia is called.
Jack: Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah.
Mark: So yeah, I think Reddit's a really interesting place for where those topics get seeded where you'll just see a, "Today I learned such and such phobia is the fear of..." And then you are like, "Oh." And I think many people think... So the trypophobia, the fear of things with lots of holes in, people that have that, and we actually had someone that used to work here with that, that's how I knew what that was, but they probably think, before Reddit, that, "Oh, I'm probably on my own with this phobia."
Jack: Yes.
Mark: And then suddenly you're like, "No loads of people have it."
Jack: There's a whole community of people sharing terrifying images. You can all be scared together. I myself have trypanophobia, I hate needles. It's the reason I don't have any tattoos yet. I'm planning to get a tattoo just to see if it does freak me out. But injections, vaccination. I am fully vaccinated, for the record, because I'm not an idiot. But it was a pretty-
Mark: He's got a high EAT score, people.
Jack: Thank you. But yeah, it was quite an effort for me to actually sit down and be like, "Okay." I haven't had a vaccine since I was a kid because I don't travel much for needing malaria shots or anything like that. So the COVID vaccinations recently were my first injections in a very long time. And it was genuine anxiety before sitting down and actually putting the needle in my arm.
Mark: What about like blood donations then? Is that something you wouldn't-
Jack: I've never done it.
Mark: Because of that mainly?
Jack: Yeah. Yeah. I think so, yeah. It's going to get weird and graphic, but it's the feeling of the needle piercing the skin and actually inside the skin. I have this weird thing where I feel like it's going to move around and jostle some muscle-
Mark: Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do.
Jack: ... and scrape some bone or something. Yeah, I've heard some horror stories. Doesn't help that my wife is a nurse as well and has told me some absolute horror stories of stabbing around with needles trying to find people's veins and stuff.
Mark: Yeah, yeah.
Jack: That's all.
Mark: My wife trained as a phlebotomist and would practice on my arm. Yeah, it's very good though. Anyway.
Jack: My wife has thalassophobia, which is the fear of open water as well. And the thalassophobia, Reddit is fascinating. It's those massive like sun fishes and stuff and those massive whales, but it'll be a whale and then nothing for a mile in every direction. And she finds that absolute... Deep, empty water terrifies my wife.
Mark: So having done so much scuba diving-
Jack: I was going to say.
Mark: ... I regularly enjoy posting my pictures to thalassophobia. So if you look at my history, I've got a few there of diving ropes that just disappear down into the blue that were going down to a few of sharks in the distance coming out of the blue.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, so you've actively participated in both mine and my wife's phobias basically.
Mark: Well, they go there to look at it. So that and I think it's depths below is the other.
Jack: Yes. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, not trypanophobia, that's my one. Trypophobia is becoming more and more common I think, or at least people are finding and discovering it and self-diagnosing. The actual condition probably isn't getting more and more common. But I know it's been highlighted under a lot of stuff like American Horror Story and horror films and stuff like that over the last few years, which introduces a whole new audience to it. So you suddenly realize like, "Oh," as you said, Mark, "I didn't know that made me feel that way. Oh, no. I feel very uncomfortable. I feel weird now." And yeah, you get even innocent things such as honeycombs or those little poppy heads, Lotus heads and stuff like flowers can trigger it, or it can be body horror, terrifying effects and stuff.
Mark: We can put some pictures in the show notes.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, we'll stick 15 examples of trypophobia in the show notes. But to cheer ourselves up a little bit after a lot of phobia and stuff, should we talk about some retro gaming?
Mark: Yes.
Jack: Finally. This is the moment I've been waiting for on this podcast, that Mark and I can talk about video games. Because, weirdly enough, Tetris is trending. And credit to Nicole Scott, the data journalist from SISTRIX who put trend watch together for July, it's a really weird trend graph and to actually pull out this data and work out what is trending and what is not, is always a fascinating thing to me. And I've actually come up with a couple of ideas of what could be triggering these recent spikes in interest for Tetris. Because for those of you who don't know, Tetris is a game that's been around for 30 plus years. It's one of the very early video games and if you've ever used SISTRIX, funnily enough, it's their loading screen. It's the little blocks that come down and make a line and then it clears. We'll get a copyright strike. But yes, it's Russian, funnily enough, it has a very famous theme song and I got addicted to it on my Game Boy, back in the day, where I would dream about Tetris blocks. Yeah.
Mark: Was that a Game Boy or a Game Boy Color?
Jack: Proper Game Boy. Proper old giant gray box of a Game Boy that lost the battery cover at the back so I was literally holding the batteries in. So having to do this weird claw thing of using my middle finger to hold the batteries in while pressing the buttons with my thumbs. It was a whole thing. But I absolutely adore Tetris and it's gone through, as you can imagine, a million different revisions over the last 30 years, there's so many different versions. But some things I wanted to highlight, and obviously it's timeless. It's one of the definitive, if not the definitive, puzzle games in the history of video games. But things like Tetris 99, Tetris Effect, and the sequel Tetris Effect: Connected all came out in 2019, 2018, and 2020, and Tetris Effect: Connected actually came out last year in October of 2021 on Switch. And they're very popular.
Tetris Effect, for those of you who don't know, is the one that was originally in VR and you would move the blocks around you and all that kind of stuff. And it's very visually interesting and has lots of different quirks to it and lots of different modes and stuff like that. The sequel to that is very similar and then they took it out of the VR so you could just play it on your console or whatever it was. And they imported it to the Nintendo Switch late last year and it is incredibly popular on the Nintendo Switch. For those of you who don't know, that's a little portable console. So Tetris back being on handheld consoles makes sense. And yeah, it's one of those timeless games that I think people will just play forever and ever and ever.
Mark: There was quite a stir created as well this year with the Tetris copyright and trademark.
Jack: Oh, yeah.
Mark: In that an indie game developer had their game removed, I believe from Steam, because the copyright description for Tetris is really broad. It was something about-
Jack: Because it was one of the first ones, yeah.
Mark: Grids and connecting blocks of certain shapes. So essentially they had a sort of Tetris like game you could say. And yeah, they managed to roll over it and it generated quite a lot of discussion just because the, I'm not sure what it's called, a patent or the trademark on the actual what they've protected in the game is super broad because the game is of course quite basic so it can't be that specific.
Jack: It was Blockles, that's the name of the 'Tetris clone'.
Mark: It was never going to go far with a name like that.
Jack: Right? Yeah. So here's a couple of questions for you, Mark. You probably know this already. What is a Tetris in Tetris? Do you know the answer to this?
Mark: Is it something to do with the complete line?
Jack: It is. It is.
Mark: Yeah. Over multiple rows.
Jack: Oh.
Mark: So many of them.
Jack: Yes. How many?
Mark: A number, a specific number.
Jack: It's a specific number.
Mark: Tet, it's probably some root for a number.
Jack: It is.
Mark: But I'm going to... 10 probably. I'm just going to go with 10.
Jack: Four.
Mark: Four, I meant four.
Jack: Tetra is four.
Mark: Tetra.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: Of course. Tetra Pak.
Jack: Tetra Pak, yeah. A tetrahedron-
Mark: Should've known that.
Jack: ... is a four sided thing. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. Tetris is if you're able to clear four lines of blocks at the same time.
Mark: 10, what was I thinking?
Jack: That's mad.
Mark: That's never happened.
Jack: No, you physically can't do that with the blocks.
Mark: You can't do that.
Jack: I don't know where you were going with that.
Mark: Can you edit that back?
Jack: Absolutely not. No, I do enough editing on the show already. And do you know what the blocks are called? They're an official trademarked copyrighted name for the blocks.
Mark: Is it something I could guess? Because I don't know.
Jack: I'll give you a clue. It starts with Tetra or T-E-T-R.
Mark: Tetricles.
Jack: It's not a million miles away but that's a bit more not-safe-for-work than I think they planned. They're called tetrominoes or tetrominoes. So dominoes but tetras.
Mark: I never would've got that.
Jack: There you go.
Mark: And I love that trivia.
Jack: Yeah, and I didn't look that up. That's generally off the top of my head because I'm a nerd. So you're welcome, listeners. You have two bits of trend watch. So go to sistrix.com/trends. Like I said, you can subscribe to the newsletter, you'll get a trend watch delivered to you every single month from the fantastic team at SISTRIX. And if we talk more about video games, you'll get weird trivia from me because that's the kind of person I am.
Jack: So I've been talking about Google updates for their search quality raters. There also was a product review update, another one, very recently as well and it's a lot smaller than the last one, to say the least. We've not seen a huge amount of impact from the chatter that's been going around the SEO community. I've been, as I always do, trying to keep an ear to the ground on SEO Twitter and some of the forums, some of the usual places, as you can imagine. And yeah, most of the things are saying it's not a huge, huge issue. However, our boy, Glenn Gabe, shout out to Glenn Gabe who comes up on the show very regularly because he does fantastic work, has noticed some fluctuation in some of the sites he's been paying attention to and has actually picked up on some drops towards the end of July specifically.
So it's an interesting kind of thing where the tools are saying, "Yeah, no, nothing, really. No huge volatility." But Glenn is reporting pretty much unanimous drops towards the end of July for a few of the websites he's obviously paying attention to. So it's a bit of a mixed bag. I've seen some people say, "Yeah, we saw a huge traffic drop off," or, "oh, we saw a huge increase in traffic on some of the forums." Of course, this has all been highlighted and categorised and stuff by Barry from Search Engine Roundtable, shout to Barry as well. But yeah, it doesn't seem to be as clear cut as many of the other product review updates we've seen. I think we last had the one in March I believe.
Mark: Yeah. I think it's fairly common when we get updates that we have a little sporadic run of them every few months, because it seems to be there's a main change and then some tweaking and rolling back sometimes.
Jack: To go with the video game analogy, it's like patching it.
Mark: Right.
Jack: This is product review update 1.2.
Mark: So did Glenn come to any conclusions about the drop that he did see or is it just a, "Yeah, we think this has happened,"? Because looking at the sites there, it looks like he's dealing with sites with fairly significant six figure search traffic and they're not small drops I was seeing there on the site.
Jack: Yeah. So I think we're still early days for this. As we mentioned, this is right towards the end of July, similar to the search quality raters update there as well. So I think we are keeping our ear to the ground still at the moment. What Glenn says here is he's seen visibility tools catching up with what he's seen on some of his sites. And as you said, Mark, these are pretty sizable numbers for what Glenn has been dealing with. So some large drops have been coming through. And then maybe the tools, as we know, third party data and all that, they're going to be pulling through on a bit of a delay.
And there's a pretty significant drop in one of the sites Glenn was digging around and having a look and seeing, as I said, some increase to the visibility index, specifically on SISTRIX, but then looking on things like search console, he's seen a pretty significant drop off going from tens of thousands of clicks a day to basically nothing overnight. But I'm very intrigued to see where this is going to go. This was when it was all happening at the end of July, this is Glenn's report from then. So yeah, we'll keep paying attention and keep an eye on it basically. But I think you're right, Mark, this is the second wave, the shock wave, the aftermath of that initial big update so this is probably going to be a smaller little tremor rather than a big, huge change that we saw in March.
Mark: Great. So as Jack said at the start of the show, we are going to do a little bit of listener Q&A. So i-
Jack: Which is something we thought about doing, you and I have talked about this quite a lot, haven't we? About bringing it onto the show in a more regular format. Talking about doing LinkedIn live streams like I know you've done previously on the previous season and stuff like that. So, listeners, if you'd like to have some more Q&As, please do let us know. We will basically do what you tell us to.
Mark: I think we should sort that for later this month. We'll do a live recording one.
Jack: Yeah, I think that'd be-
Mark: We'll do some live Q&A.
Jack: I think that'd be really cool.
Mark: It's always fun.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: It's always fun. So we did solicit some questions from you. Thank you for all of the questions, especially the fun questions from some of you.
Jack: By fun, you mean sarcastic.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah, I enjoyed them though. I've got just a couple of questions here, because we are running quite deep into the show now, but a couple of good questions from you. So first one from so Saurav Agarwal which is how to identify important and lesser important tasks in SEO. I like that because it frames everything as important in SEO.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah.
Mark: It's not not important. It's just slightly less important.
Jack: Exactly. We need to tell clients and developers that. Things are either important or slightly less important.
Mark: It's a good question actually, because I think it's something that a lot of people, even some more experienced SEOs, maybe get wrong. So the headline thing here for me when we are prioritising SEO tasks is to look at the impact versus the cost. And by cost I don't just necessarily mean money, I mean time also. So you want to know what's the impact going to be, and you can look at that both in short and long term. So short term might be it will absolutely increase rankings or the impact might be long term, like we spoke about with maybe the YMYL stuff, this is going to improve quality because we're saying who the authors are. We don't expect an immediate uplift, but that's in line with our long term strategy.
Jack: Yeah, not to give away too much behind the scenes here at Candour, but I know this is something I talk to the team with fairly regularly. Whenever we onboard a new client and where we're doing audits and stuff like that, especially technical audits, as we're talking about here, we have a little matrix that we go through and we compare impact and cost. And whether that is the time for the offsite development team or that's the time for us to fix things, whatever it is. Or if it's the cost of paying those developers or paying for a new update or whatever it is. You've got to factor both in and I think there is a balance there, like having it on a scale. So not necessarily having a binary system, but having a one to five or a one to 10 and trying to scale back like, "This'll have the most impact with the least cost." There's your quick win category basically. And then counter on the other side of it, have things like cleaning up all your CSS and sorting out lots of JavaScript and stuff like that can be low impact, but very, very time consuming, you then balance it out and you have the other end of the scale. And everything, from my experience, mostly fits somewhere in the middle there. And I think that naturally builds out. Once you build that out into a table and literally lay it out number by number, task by task, that builds your priority list there. And I think that, from my experience, again, working here at Candour, working at previous agencies, that's the way I like to do it so I can actually have the data and the numbers in front of me. And it works as a way to present it to clients, in my opinion, as well.
Mark: When you're doing this as well, it's worth noting that the importance of a particular thing to fix is contextual to your site, it's not objective. So for instance, internal linking is important, but the impact is going to have, on a million page website, which has loads of read more links, it's going to be very different to a 10 page website that has pretty good internal linking already. So you can't just blindly say, "Okay, this is the importance of these things." And that's important as well. When you can use really good tools, like Sitebulb gives you, for instance, the importance of tasks, but that's not done always in context to your site and importance isn't the same as priority, which Jack went into. Other tips there for prioritisation is you can focus on things that are definitely confirmed ranking factors. So things like title tags, links. Google has told us these things are ranking factors so they're always good places to start. I like to also start on things that directly impact users so things like web performance is a good one. So core web vitals isn't a particularly massive ranking factor on its own, however, if you make your website faster, it's a win-win because your users are going to be happier.
Jack: Yeah. And the example we always give with cumulative layout shift is the checkout button or the cancel button shifting. And I can totally imagine, or I've done this myself in the past, going to buy something and then the button moves and you cancel it and you just get frustrated and think, "Right, I'm not doing this."
Mark: I'm out of here.
Jack: I'm out of here. I've had enough. And you lose customers that way. So it is the impact for the customers, for the users of the site is a huge, huge factor. You're totally right.
Mark: And lastly, you can do some kind of gap analysis between maybe what you haven't done and what your competitors have done as a reason for them ranking. And again, compare that to what your resource is, because there's no point prioritising things that you can't do because you don't have the budget, the time, or the people. So that's a rough guide to how we prioritise SEO tasks so I hope that helps you, Saurav. The second question we're going to field is from Fateh Mehdi who asks any quick tips to keep previous rankings after changing web technology or framework. Interesting question.
Jack: Big question. We talk about migrations fairly-
Mark: Yeah, we do. Right?
Jack: ... regularly on this show, don't we? Because it can be such a pitfall and the fact that Fatir here is talking about this tells me that they've either experienced it themselves or have experienced it with a client. So yeah, I'm not surprised. I know we've dealt with quite a few migrations here at Candour. One of the first things I did when I started working here was a reparation job from a migration gone badly for many international sites and they were trying to merge a lot of their international sites into their main US hub and things like paying attention to images. And I know this is something you were talking about in the office the other day, Mark, paying attention to do you get image traffic, pay attention to where your traffic is coming from. Where are you getting those clicks? Where are you getting those impressions? Where are you getting your converting customers from? Where are you getting your users from? So if you don't particularly have anything coming through on image or discovery or whatever it is, don't prioritise that, de-prioritise that. However, the client in question we were working with, did. They actually got a significant amount of traffic from their image side of things and they didn't redirect them correctly and lost a massive amount of clicks and impressions from it. So my initial thinking is pay attention to where those clicks and impressions and where the rankings are coming from in terms of what parts of your site. And really, again, we're going back to the priority side of things, prioritise. Because again, we could be talking about a million URL website and you don't particularly want to build a million redirect map. But yeah, prioritising key URLs that are the highest converting is such a key part of migrations, for me. I think that applies to rankings as well. Making sure the search intent for that new page, if you're wanting to maintain the ranking for that same keyword, should pretty much match the previous search intent for the page as it was before.
Mark: I think it's almost a trick question in a way.
Jack: Oh, sure. Sure.
Mark: Because if you're changing your web technology or framework, this is essentially backend stuff pretty much. Google only cares about the front end it can see and it can crawl. So if you change what technology you're using, if you end up spitting out the same HTML and the same webpage at the same speed-
Jack: Absolutely nothing changes on the front end.
Mark: ... nothing changes on the front end.
Jack: Sure.
Mark: So Google doesn't care. So the-
Jack: And we've talked about this. Google does not prefer any particular CMS or anything like that.
Mark: Exactly.
Jack: There is no preferential treatment there.
Mark: Exactly. So the question actually, what should we do to keep rankings after changing web technology and framework, is-
Jack: Change as little as possible.
Mark: Yeah. Well, you don't need to do anything if the front end hasn't changed. So then I'd break it down to two things, which is if the URLs have changed or the location of the resources, then just follow normal site migration advice. Update internal links, all that kind of stuff. If the URLs have stayed the same and you have experienced a ranking change that you don't think is related to one of the many Google updates, then something has changed. So then I would start looking at what were your core web vitals before and after. Like you said, Jack, check the response versus render. So what does it look like with, without JavaScript compared to the old version? Because something has changed.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: And yeah, my advice would be then, all of these things have pretty objective measures. So either don't change it or if it has to change, make the end result of the front end better so it's faster or it loads quicker. But otherwise you don't have to actually do anything because Google doesn't care.
Jack: There you go, don't do anything because Google doesn't care. The official response from Search With Candour. Well, that's all we have time for this week. Thank you much for listening. Thank you for submitting your questions to the Q&A. Like I said, I think that's something we're going to be bringing back more regularly on the show when Mark and I are co-hosting. And we'll plan to do some live shows coming up soon. So stay tuned for some announcements for that. But until then, thank you much for listening. Have a lovely week and goodbye.