SEO news: A guide to Google Search ranking systems / Does URL length and structure matter?
Or get it on:
Show notes
In this week’s episode of the Search With Candour podcast, Jack Chambers-Ward is reunited with Mark Williams-Cook to discuss:
- Google has made it easier to get products in the shopping tab
- Google has created a guide to their Search ranking systems
- Majestic’s SEO in 2023 summary
- A discussion about URL length & structure - does it affect your rankings?
Transcript:
Jack: Welcome to episode 46 of season two of the Search with Candour podcast. My name is Jack Chambers-Ward and it was about time we got the band back together. So I am once again finally joined by Mr. Mark Williams-Cook.
Mark: Hello.
Jack: How are you?
Mark: It's been a long while.
Jack: It has. We worked out just before we start recording. We haven't done like a sit-down, two of us in the same room, news episode since August and it is nearly December. We've had a lot of guests on. We've done a few Q and As and stuff like that and we'll talk about that at the end of the show, don't worry. Yes, Mark and I are back together to talk about the latest SEO and PPC news. The topics we'll be covering this week include, Google has made it easier to get products on the shopping tab. Google have also created an article detailing their new search ranking systems. I say new in inverted commas. Majestic has released their SEO in 2023 summary, including some very familiar names, and we'll get into a discussion about URL lengths as well since that's been a hot topic on social media over the last few weeks.
Sponsor - SISTRIX:
Search with Candour is supported by SISTRIX, the SEO's toolbox. You can 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 or if you want to check out your site's visibility index. You can also go to sistrix.com/trends and subscribe to the TrendWatch newsletter and we'll be diving into the October edition of TrendWatch later on in the show and boy, there's some interesting things for us to discuss in TrendWatch. I'm already looking forward to it.
It's now easier to get products on Google Shopping:
Mark: Our first topic to welcome me back is Google helping us help them, which is a story we saw on Search Engine Journal about Google is making it easier to get products in the shopping tab. We covered this probably two or three times, I think. In season one, I think I covered when Google started allowing free organic results in their shopping results. So previous to that, you had to have a Google Merchant Centre, you had to have a verified site, a product feed and you had to pay for inclusion in the PLAs, the product listing ads in the shopping tab. Then, Google made the decision to start to allow people in for freeze, gasp. Why would they do such a thing? Again, it was Google allowing us to help them very much I think because there was lots of press. Especially around at the time, about changing behaviour in E-commerce and people going direct and starting their shopping on Amazon rather than doing what Google would like them to do, which is a Google search, funnily enough. One of the reasons for this was Amazon just had a larger inventory, when you did a search for a product, rather than just getting people paid to be listed on Google Ads, you had everything on Amazon. The one way to provide a better experience for searchers was for Google to expand their inventory, and an easy way to do that was to let people on for free. Now, it seems that Google is not happy with the amount of people that have done this because there still are some administrative and technical challenges.
Jack: They want more, even more.
Mark: They want more. So as I said, to get to your organic listings on the PLAs, you would still need to have a Google Merchant Center account. You would still need to have a product feed your site verified to be eligible. That can be difficult for all kinds of reasons, such as our CMS doesn't automatically generate a product feed, might be one of them. Now, what Google has done is essentially streamlined this process so you can get started having your feed now from Google Search Console. If you don't have a Merchant Center Account, because you still need one, you'll be prompted to create one at the time, but the differences are now, you don't also have to go on and verify your site, and that's done because you're verified in GSC. Interestingly, you no longer need a product feed to get your listings. Google will rely on the structured data on your site, which a lot of E-comm platforms now will automatically generate for you.
Jack: Yeah, we've talked about the importance of structured data around products before and how key it can be for getting this kind of thing moving for your products. You really kind of ... if you know your competitors are doing this kind of thing and using structured data in a ... and like you said Mark, a lot of CMSs and a lot of E-commerce platforms have this built-in anyway. So if you are not doing it, you are going to get left behind and it is becoming more and more important to get extra little features like this out of the SERPs that are going to be key to selling your products through Google and across your E-commerce link.
Mark: I think this is worth knowing because it may mean, if you are currently enjoying some organic product visibility, that may change.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: Because it's very likely there are, I would imagine, in the tens of thousands conservatively of E-commerce sites that maybe small ones, that haven't got around yet to sorting out their product feed, that are now going to see this opportunity in search console and they may already have structured data labelling their products so they can just do a few clicks and get that set up. So again, there's always those head-scratching moments where sometimes maybe you've lost some visibility, you've lost some traffic and you're trying to work out, well, is it a ranking change, is it an intent change? Is it seasonality? Is it competitors? This may be one of the reasons why ... or one thing you want to investigate if you do lose some visibility. For those that don't have listings, good luck to you. This may be an easy way for you to get some more traffic.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: So you can check that out. That's coming to your Google earch Console.
A guide to Google Search ranking systems:
Jack: Sticking with Google, let's talk about their ... I don't want to call them new because they're not really new, but the update, the guide that Google has released about their search ranking systems. They have clarified 20 search ranking systems and five now kind of retired and outdated systems that I'm sure a lot of long-term SEOs listening may be familiar with as well. So it's kind of a bit of an update and a merge and a clarification I feel.
Mark: It's an update on what they're calling updates really, isn't it?
Jack: Yes.
Mark: It's a terminology update as well.
Jack: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I know Lily Ray shared this across her social media, shout out to Lily Ray, she's always fantastic for picking up on stuff like this when it comes to updated Google documentation and Google updates, which we're not allowed to call them anymore. She followed up with a very funny tweet of, "I'm not going to go back through all my old articles over the last 15 years and change the word update to systems, but I'm sure someone will want to do that at some point."
Mark: I think there's going to be a whole club still calling it Google AdWords, Webmaster Tools and Google updates, Google algorithm updates. We're not joining the Google Ads search console and Google systems update.
Jack: Exactly, exactly and I think it's interesting this list because again, I think it's kind of information, if you're paying attention to what's been going on at Google recently over the last five, 10 years or so and ... or you're listening to podcasts like ours that keep you up to date with this sort of stuff, and we talked about various things like BERT and MUM and page experience updates, product review updates, all this kind of stuff, there's a lot of stuff here that I would kind of expect and there's some stuff I'm like, "Okay, I guess you are, again, like you said, changing that terminology and rewording and rejigging things ever so slightly to make sure that now, it's all kind of under one umbrella in this certain thing." So let's go through the list, shall we, Mark and we can stop and chat about a couple of things, but there are ... starting off at the top we have the old B-E-R-T. Can you remember what BERT stands for, Mr. Mark Williams-Cook?
Mark: That's mean.
Jack: I know.
Mark: Bidirectional Encoder trans something, Transformers. Hold on.
Jack: Representation Transformers or something like that.
Mark: There you go.
Jack: Yeah, Representation from Transformers-
Mark: I only did a presentation on it a few months ago. It's one of those things like doing SEO digital marketing for 20 years and I still use percentage calculators online and like ROI calculators, even though I've done the sums hundreds of times.
Jack: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I know, yeah, we've talked about BERT quite a few times. It's essentially how Google is understanding the combinations of words can express different meanings and different intent and it's a way of understanding language better in search. It's an AI system that Google has been using for a while now and-
Mark: What was the R again?
Jack: Representation.
Mark: Okay, I wasn't joking. I had already forgotten, maybe doing on a podcast can make you remember. The thing that I think is interesting about BERT is that it's not like a ranking factor per se.
Jack: Yes.
Mark: It's a ranking system in that I believe the biggest impact it has on understanding language and nuance is actually on the query level itself. So rather than understanding your content, the biggest gap I think it closed is understanding precisely what the user is typing in. So Google does not have to rely on other metrics such as page rank, link equity to decide which result it should be giving you or which one is the highest probability of being correct.
Jack: Yeah, definitely. Next one is crisis information systems, which is something we've touched on a couple of times and that's divided into two sections, which is ‘Personal crisis and SOS alerts’, and I know we've touched on a couple of times about the SOS alert stuff when it comes to things like natural disasters and pandemics, I hate to use the P word, but pandemics and stuff like that. Unsurprising, there again, kind of a thing, you probably already get notifications and alerts from Google and all that kind of stuff for these kind of things. Next one, which I thought was quite interesting is a weird way of wording it is de-duplication systems. As we know, Google doesn't like duplicate content, you'll see that in any audit and across any site, across the world pretty much. It's basically them trying to understand the most relevant results and avoiding duplication of information across the SERPs from what I understand. This also plays into featured snippets as well. So again, trying not to share the same information multiple times across one single SERP.
Mark: One thing I haven't quite gotten my head around in this list is when Google has spoken about ranking systems before. They've been quite specific sometimes in what they refer to as their core ranking algorithm, which I'm guess is these 20 odd things.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: And then, things they do post rankings, so featured snippets is a good example of that. So they calculate where everything should rank, but then they kind of do the rich snippet or a rich result generation at the end. In my mind, de-duplication was nearer the end of that process, but I guess it makes sense that it is part of this.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: I'm not sure whether this is all quote-unquote, core ranking stuff. I guess it is from how they've worded it.
Jack: Yeah. From the most simple side of it, I guess it's making sure that the same page doesn't rank multiple times in a single search. So if you're searching for a particular product type, one website and it's single product page for that thing will not rank first and fifth and ninth or whatever it is, so trying to get rid of duplication there.
Mark: I was thinking it was in terms of if the same content exists on five different websites, their way of choosing which one-
Jack: I guess it's also that. They specifically mentioned ... so the exact wording from Google here, the one I'm referring to is, "If a webpage listing is elevated to become a featured snippet, we don't repeat the listing later on in the first page of results." So that's related to the featured snippet side of things. In such cases our systems show only the most relevant results and avoid unhelpful duplication. You can learn more about how de-duplication works, again, links in the show notes as always.
Mark: It sounds like all of it.
Jack: Yeah, kind of a bit of all of it, and pretty much weird. They're trying to streamline and clean up and tidy up and they use the word declutter, which I think is pretty accurate. One that is hotly debated and has been for many years is exact match domains and how much does your domain matter in your search rankings and all that kind of stuff. How do you feel about it, Mark?
Mark: Well, I'd certainly never buy a domain like christmastrees.co.uk and hope that it's going to be enough to make me rank for Christmas trees. Who would do that?
Jack: Only a known maniac would do that.
Mark: Yeah, so I mean, EMD is always going to be an issue because I don't think Google can reliably tell the difference between a navigational query and an informational query. So yes, if you have the domain Christmas trees, if you've built up, if you manage to build up enough kind of equity, are they searching for the website, Christmas trees or are they looking for Christmas trees in general? Certainly, we still see exact matched domains punching well above their weight. I do think it's a really interesting topic because that's been ... that's an old thing. I remember Matt Cutts saying they're kind of turning down their dials on EMD stuff and then SEO is still laughing that it works, but what I have noticed is four more competitive things and that's why I brought up Christmas trees.
It certainly doesn't work as well as when you choose something more specific, where there isn't a kind of thoroughfare of regular informational commercial searches going through.
Jack: The exact wording from Google is, "Our exact match domain system works to ensure we don't give too much credit," that's the exact word. They don't give too much credit for content hosted under domains designed to exactly match particular queries. For example, someone might create a domain name containing the words best places to eat lunch with a hyphen in between each word, and hopes all those words in the domain name would propel content higher in the rankings. Our system adjusts for this. So whatever complete idiot started christmastrees.co.uk, hoping they've ranked for Christmas trees, I guess they shot themselves on the foot really.
Mark: By the way, if you do want a fresh real Christmas tree delivered, you can get it from christmastrees.co.uk. I hear they're fantastic. I don't have any voucher codes-
Jack: I was going to say if they've paid for sponsorships.
Mark: If anyone knows a voucher code, please DM me.
Jack: Next up from Google is freshness. What do you think about freshness now? What do you think of freshness is and how Google determines freshness?
Mark: Well, I think the acronym in brackets afterwards is important, which is QDF, which is query deserves freshness.
Jack: Yup.
Mark: So I would say it's contextually applied. Some things, it matters if they are fresh. Other things, it does not matter so much, which is one thing I've always told people about that not necessarily just kind of updating content means it's going to rank, but certainly, we've got a client that does round up reviews of a certain set of products every year and yes, it's important that that's updated because the information changes.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: So I think there's also information there about query shifts. So I think Halloween is a great example. The search results tend to lean towards E-comm sites in the couple of weeks, run up the Halloween and then go back to informational. So I think all of those things are related, yeah.
Jack: Yeah, definitely and I know we've talked about it when it comes to also ask, right and how quickly the PAA data will change when ... I know the example you used previously was like Kim Kardashian went to a particular gala or whatever it was and it was the Met Gala, that was it, yeah and she wore a particular ninja suit and suddenly all the PAAs about Kim Kardashian changed and about the Met Gala changed minute by minute as things were changing and you know can use that in your content strategies to make sure you're creating fresh content. I was talking to a client about Google Discover content the other day and discussing how you can plan to make sure around the release of a particular product or range or whatever, you can do a pre-release at the time of release and a post-release kind of targeting thing. It's all about being topical and fresh. That's key, key information for this kind of thing.
Mark: Did you set me up there to talk about AlsoAsked and I missed it.
Jack: I very much did. Yeah.
Mark: So the last example I actually used was Rishi Sunak during the prime ministerial change and the really cool thing there was the PAAs were updating almost by the hour, adding in new questions about him and talking about also us.
Jack: What a segue, Mark.
Mark: Yeah, I know, you just had to nudge me, wink and then just spoonfeed it to me. We are coming up to Black Friday. We're running a sale this week. So will it be still going on Monday? We'll do it on Monday, on the day of this podcast is going to be the last day you can get it. You can use the code Black Friday 22 and get 100% off your first month.
Jack: One free month. Look at that.
Mark: I know, right?
Jack: Fantastic.
Mark: Please don't abuse it.
Jack: What's that URL again, Mark? alsoasked.com. Next up, something we've talked about a lot recently, of course, helpful content. Do we need to talk about helpful content anymore? I feel like we've kind of ... the SEO world has beaten this horse to death at this point.
Mark: We've explored the hills of vaguery with helpful content enough.
Jack: Next up then let's move on quickly to link analysis and page rank and-
Mark: You missed page experience.
Jack: Yeah. I did.
Mark: We don't really need to talk about that. Page experience, you know what it is. Let's talk about link analysis/PageRank. What do you think about that?
Jack: Links are still important. I know we've had this conversation a lot and I've seen you have it on Twitter and LinkedIn quite a few times, Mark, where people are saying good content can just rank. Yeah, but links are still very, very important and the fact that we've talked so much about it, and again, the community has talked about it so much over the past two decades, links are still important and I know people like John Mueller have talked about maybe in the future, links will be less important the more sophisticated Google gets and the more ... kind of like the better understanding Google can get content, the less it will need to rely on these kinds of signals coming from links. However, they're not there yet, and as far as I know in 2022 and going into, as we will soon be in 2023, linking and getting backlinks and internal linking and all that kind of stuff is still very, very important.
Mark: Yeah, Google said they still use a version of PageRank, that's good enough for me.
Jack: There you go, and they literally link to the original page rank research paper in this article. So you can go and read the original patent and the research paper, which I did a few years ago and I found really interesting. I like going back and looking at all those original documents from back in the day. It's very, very interesting.
Mark: Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
Jack: Exactly. Next up, something again, we've talked about quite a few times, local news because local search is still a thing. Again, covering things like top stories and the local news features you see on SERPs and things like that. I feel that's fairly self-explanatory, right?
Mark: Indeed.
Jack: You're searching in an area for a bit of news, then you'll get that locally sourced piece of information.
Mark: Number nine is MUM, what does MUM stand for?
Jack: Multitask-
Mark: You've got it right in front of you.
Jack: I've got it right in front of me. I'm cheating.
Mark: You cheat.
Jack: That is the one I know to be fair, but I am cheating. It is the multitask unified model of course, and kind of building upon what we talked about with BERT, it's another AI system of understanding and generating language and like you were saying Mark, I think it directly ties into a lot of query understanding and stuff like that as well, right?
Mark: Yeah, I was having an interesting conversation about content creation and MUM and if Google can work out the answer or something with mum, would they prefer to rank their generated answer versus if someone actually created the answer to that query as MUM would?
Jack: Interesting.
Mark: We are going along the lines of once Google has made this transition, got this understanding, it can say, "Okay, well the question you're asking me is this, and actually I think based on what you're going to ask next, I'm going to pull together information I've learnt of these four websites and generate the text for this page, but I've always gone along the lines of thinking Google is hedging its bets on the probability of giving the best result, and if it can find the content that it thinks is close to what it believes is the correct answer, why would it risk generation? Because as we know, as we've seen many highly amusing examples, sometimes the machine learning kind of stuff can go completely off the rails and give you bonkers stuff. I like to think the latter that that's what's going to happen because at least it still gives you some hope that there's some value in humans creating content rather than just being a training set for Google.
Jack: Yeah, are the robots just going to answer all of their own questions and make us redundant in a couple years? It's quite possible. We'll no longer need to write anything ever and it will all be automated. Speaking of AIs, next on is neural matching and that's again Google trying to understand more about basically the representations of concepts and queries is the exact wording, representations of concepts in queries and pages and match them to one another. So trying to understand bigger concepts and how queries relate to other things on the page and around that kind of topic, from my understanding,
Mark: The kind of entity type stuff.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: Which nodes and entities doing concepts and edges.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah. Next up, original content is important. Again, something I think we probably all know if you're listening to this, make original content, don't just copy and paste stuff. This includes obviously, literally, don't just copy a competitor's work and change a couple of words and all that kind of stuff, but also, things like canonicals and things like that, making sure your pages are the pages you want to be picked out for indexing and to be shown on this app should be the original version and the prime essentially version of that page. Next up, we have removal-based demotion systems and there's a couple of different types here. We have legal removals and personal information removals, and I can't remember who it was, somebody tried to contact Google to get their information removed from the SERP or something like that. It was a famous example of a celebrity fundamentally misunderstanding how Google works and they were just like, could you please take down these photos of me, or something like that and it didn't work, to say the least. Yeah. Yeah, this is again, something we've touched on where you get ... you can create copyright removal requests and things like that. We touched on that a little while ago. There are ways to flag this kind of thing to Google if somebody is using your content that you own your copyright to or you own the intellectual property rights to and things like that. You can flag this to Google and they will send these kinds of demotions, these signals to that site and inform them, "Hey, I've been flagged. Similarly, for personal information, this is stuff like doxing basically for those who are familiar with doxing, where you have non-consensual publishing of very personal details, personal images, explicit images, all that kind of stuff. You can have those requested to be removed, especially if other sites are publishing that information and that content. You can request that to be removed and that site will receive a demotion there as well. Next up, passage ranking, more AI stuff. Who knows how much we're talking about AI in this list? There's a lot of powerful AI stuff going on and this is the ... Again, to quote Google, the AI system, Google uses to identify individual sections or passages, if you will, of a webpage to better understand how relevant a page is to SERP.
Mark: I find that really interesting as a kind of system because I understand what they're doing there, I believe at least, which is previously they had looked at more of a page level-
Jack: An entire page at once, kind of thing.
Mark: Yes, to understand what it was about, and this is actually saying, well, maybe there ... well, there obviously is a lot of instances where the correct specific answer is just kind of buried in that page, which as a whole, machine read wise may not be topical, and I just find it interesting that that is a problem that they have encountered with, "Oh we're missing out on decent answers in search because when we are looking at the page as a whole, we're sometimes not getting the correct kind of signal back."
Jack: There might be some diamonds in the rough there somewhere basically, yeah. Yeah. Next up, product reviews. Something we've had two, two and a half updates in the last 12 months about. They are keen on product reviews recently with Google, and again, to quote Google here from the documentation, product review system aims to better reward high quality product reviews content that provides insightful analysis and original research is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well. Again, I feel like this is something that has been covered pretty extensively over the last 12 months or so, with two of the big product review updates we've had in that period. If you're going to get reviews, make sure they're done by experts. All the usual stuff you come to expect from product reviews, don't just churn out rubbish and make stuff up. Basically, make sure you have firsthand experience experts on hand and they know the topic and the product and all that kind of stuff.
Mark: Again, that's the other end of, definitely expected this problem of affiliates just doing a quote-unquote, review of the best thing. The best one is the one I get the most affiliate commission for. Yeah, I could see that one coming.
Jack: Yeah, definitely. Next up, we have RankBrain. I love it about RankBrain, another AI system because we haven't got enough AI systems on this list, that helps Google understand how words are related to concepts. It means you can better return relevant content even if it doesn't contain all the exact words used in a search. I don't know, I'm sure you do, but remember, the good old days where you had to search for an incredibly specific thing to get an incredibly specific answer and if your wording was ever so slightly off, then you would not get an answer to that specific question. RankBrain basically helps to understand how content is related to other words and concepts around that topic. So if you are searching for something and you've missed particular elements of punctuation or sentence structure or whatever, it can understand the gist of what you are going for and hopefully serve you an appropriate and relevant answer.
Mark: I remember when RankBrain came out, they said it was primarily used on new searches that they hadn't seen before. So I'm guessing this is again, essentially, the application of what you're saying, which is that, "Okay, we haven't seen this such before, but we generally understand how they're related to a concept, therefore we can give a better result than again if we try and do the kind of exact matching of keywords," and I think that's helpful as well when terms change and again, it's leveraging information that people are putting into Google. I searched queries versus how ranking is getting sorted.
Jack: Yeah. Last few, I think this is probably the Vegas one for me, is the reliable information systems, and I will read this one because I'm-
Mark: I'll be very honest, just seeing that as a headline, I understand what those words mean, but I wouldn't be able to define what Google means by that.
Jack: I think this is ... for me, this is the least intuitive on this list. So I will read the wording on the documentation from Google here. "Multiple systems work in various ways to show the most reliable information possible." Great, that's a great start.
Mark: As far-
Jack: Reliable information is reliable. Brilliant, thanks, Mark.
Mark: That as far as I would've got, I think based on the title.
Jack: The examples they give us such as to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low quality content, again, doesn't really explain much and to elevate quality journalism. Interesting, we're talking about journalism here. In cases where reliable information may be lacking, our systems automatically display content advisories about rapidly changing topics. So this is from the ... I guess five years or so of fake news we've had and all the unreliable COVID information we were getting over the last couple of years.
Mark: Okay.
Jack: Do you remember the notifications we were getting in the SERPs of, "This is not a verified source, please take this with a grain of salt," or however they were on this kind of thing. So ensuring information is reliable from reliable sources. So trust the CDC when they're talking about diseases and stuff. Don't trust Donald Trump or your mate down the road who claims that vaccines give you certain diseases or whatever. They go and say these provide tips on how to search in ways that might lead to more helpful results and then, give a link to more information about how quality information is. I think that reliable information is an interesting way of wording it. I can't think of a better way to word it, but like I said, for me just looking at the titles, I think you're right Mark that it was like, I know what you mean. And then, specifically like, "Oh it's to do with essentially facts, actual reliable sources of information through a journalist-"
Mark: Especially, really like YMYL stuff.
Jack: Yes, exactly.
Mark: The COVID thing was an interesting example because the one thing I did noticed about all those searches, because they would strip out a lot of the rich results, so you wouldn't get PAAs, you wouldn't get featured snippets because those things, I think, because they are generated after all of this stuff miss out on some of these trust and reliability signals because again, PAAs I see commonly flags on Twitter for having pretty nasty things in them.
Jack: Yes.
Mark: Like racist stuff.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: Because it's just coming directly from people's searches and I guess it skips, it goes around a lot of these systems or comes in afterwards. So I find that quite interesting when they've got sensitive search, is they obviously know that that additional layer isn't appropriate.
Jack: Yeah, definitely. Last two here, sites diversity, which I think is very interesting and something I've seen not work personally. This is essentially ensuring that Google won't show too many web pages from the same site on a single SERP. So a particular site will not completely monopolise a SERP for a topic. So say for example, you're in quite a competitive niche or a competitive industry and you have one global industry-defining leading competitor, they're not going to completely dominate the SERPs just because they are particularly well-known in a household name and all that kind of stuff. Basically, trying to bring site diversity to the SERPs and ensure that relevant information and a diverse range of information is available from a specific query. They also specifically mentioned that you can't get around this with subdomains, you sneaky SEOs. Subdomains and the primary domain are all considered the same thing for this purpose. So in theory, you should not be able to monopolise a SERP using a bunch of different subdomains off your primary domain. However, I have seen this a couple of times, maybe not too many, but two or three pretty high rankings from the same site for a particular query.
Mark: So posted blogs on wordpress.com
Jack: That's a good question.
Mark: Even rank.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: At the same time-
Jack: Markwilliamscook.wordpress.com and jackchambersward.wordpress.com would not be-
Mark: It seems to be at odds with what they tell us about subdomains and ranking that it's done on a case by case and they try and work out if it's the same.
Jack: They have very carefully worded it here, so I'll read it, "Site diversity generally treats subdomains as part of a root domain, i.e. listings from a subdomain and the route will be considered from the same single site. However, sometimes subdomains are treated as separate sites for diversity purposes when deemed relevant to do so."
Mark: I could see that Google are writing this and then, just being at the end like, "Am I the drama?"
Jack: Yeah, I imagined Lizzi and the team there, just tapping away and being like-
Mark: Why do people keep talking about subdomains?
Jack: And last but certainly not the least of the current ranking systems, spam detection.
Mark: All right, depending on who you are.
Jack: Exactly. We know about spam filters. Again, we've talked about this a few times already. You don't know what spam is on the internet by now, where have you been? So yeah, those are the officially confirmed and listed ranking systems from Google and we have five retired systems here as well. Essentially, what I mean by retired systems is that they are essentially rolled into the 19 we just discussed or have been superseded by ones that are now in the official listing. So you have things like hummingbird, mobile friendly rankings, page speed, which is obviously, superseded by page experience, panda, penguin and the necessary for secure sites as well.
Mark: It makes sense because I guess if we've got mobile first indexing, that assumes mobile friendly because if your site is not mobile friendly, it's not going to be able to access the kind of content and-
Jack: Exactly. Yeah, that's also tied into page experience as well.
Mark: Yeah.
Jack: Mobile friendliness and all that kind of stuff as well. So yeah, there we go. A big long list. I will leave a link to the full article in the show notes of course, at search.withcandour.co.uk if you want to read that at your own speed and in your own leisure time. Now, let's talk about some TrendWatch shall we, Mark. We haven't talked about TrendWatch in a very long time.
Mark: I feel like we need a little-
Jack: Refresher.
Mark: No, like a cooler intro jingle for TrendWatch. Maybe SISTRIX can sort us out with something.
Jack: If you know any musicians out there who'd like to record us a little jingle, please do let us know. I have been talking about making jingles and stuff for podcast recently. I bought a new little mixer thing. It will allow me to add jingles and stuff as we go, so start playing like-
Mark: What does 2023 hold for us?
Jack: Lots of air horns and memes and stuff and jingles. Anyway, diving into October's TrendWatch written by Nicole Scott over at the data journalism team over at SISTRIX. I'm going to pick out a couple of different things. We won't cover the whole thing. You will need to subscribe to the newsletter to get the full list of topics from TrendWatch, but I picked out a couple of things basically that made me feel old and/or nostalgic. Essentially, my theme for this week from this TrendWatch is stuff that has come back into trending after a long time away. Starting off with low rise genes. As a man who grew up in the 2000s and the 90s, it's weird seeing all the 90s and early 2000s trends coming back around again in the 2020s and making me feel very old. Our office is quite close to one of the universities here in Norridge, and seeing all the students dressing like my friends did 20 years ago is really weird for me.
Mark: Yeah, it's quite jarring isn't it? I said it to you before we recorded. I saw some, I guess kids hanging out and they literally looked like late 80s, early 90s and my brain was kind of like, "Oh, they must be acting," or that kind of thing, and I was like, "No."
Jack: It's a period piece. God, I'm so old.
Mark: Yeah. I was like, nope, that's just that now.
Jack: That's cool. Again, remember when we were in the 80s, revival thing with all Stranger Things and everybody wearing big neon things, all that kind of stuff. We're past the shell suits and we're onto basically like the 2020s grunge phase. I've seen a lot of black flannel shirts and baggy jeans and hoodies that are way too big for the person wearing them and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, low-rise jeans are very much on the rise.
Mark: They really are.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: Even to this day, there is not even like a bit.
Jack: It's pretty soon. So Nicole has picked out the data all the way from 2018 where it was essentially nothing to an absolute skyrocket and a few peaks along the way through 2021, but they absolutely skyrocket over the last few months and yeah, the low-rise jeans are well and truly in at the moment apparently. So keep your eye out for more of Y2K fashion style around. It's definitely a thing here in Norridge. I assume it is around a lot of the English-speaking world as well.
Mark: Can you see this big peak here where it went up? Can you see roughly what date that is?
Jack: What's that like, between Halloween and April of 2020?
Mark: Is that March 2020?
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: Did lockdown drive people mad?
Jack: Maybe.
Mark: I need some low-rise jeans immediately.
Jack: Maybe. Next up going even further back in time, going back to the 18th century, talk about some snus, shall we, Mark?
Mark: So I haven't looked yet and I still don't know what snus is.
Jack: Would you like to have a guess? It said it's from the 18th Century that gives you the Vegas of clues possible, I guess. I can even read some bits here and skip the word snus and see if you can work out what it is.
Mark: Okay.
Jack: Have an idea.
Mark: The only things that came to me were Snu Snu from Futurama.
Jack: Okay, from Futurama. Yeah.
Femputer: I, Femputer have decided the fate of the men. Femputer sentences them to death by Snu Snu.
Jack: And Snuff Snuff the clothing. You're much closer with Snuff Snuff, weirdly enough. What also makes this trend interesting is that while it is illegal in the UK to sell snus, it's perfectly legal to use snus in the UK. This has led several Swedish online retailers focusing their sales efforts on the UKK.
Mark: It's illegal to sell it.
Jack: It's illegal for UK based retailers to sell it. It is illegal to use it in the UK. This really sounded like that Pulp Fiction conversation. If it's legal to buy it. It's legal to sell it, and if you get stopped by a cop at Amsterdam, it's illegal for him to search you.
Jack: Okay, got it. Before Brexit, this supply chain worked well and was an easy and convenient way for people in the UK to buy snus. However, after updates and regulation on the 1st of July, 2021, safety and security declarations and imports from the EU to the UK, Hello Brexit, were introduced as well as the payments of import duties. Why might it be suffering import duties, Mark?
Mark: I think I know what it is now and I think, I know why you said it was close to ... so snuff used to be tobacco you'd put in your mouth, which is the only reason I can think health and safety, it's got to be something-
Jack: It's a type of snuff. You've nailed it.
Mark: Nice.
Jack: Yeah. Since Brexit, a large number of online snus retailers have stopped selling snus to the UK with the risks around tobacco and health warnings also make it increasingly difficult to buy snus as well.
Mark: Snuff was the one you'd sniff actually, wasn't it?
Jack: Yes.
Mark: So it's not chew, it's not chewing tobacco. Yeah, you'd sniff it.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: I remember my grandparents had a little tin box of snuff. I don't think there's anything in it.
Jack: Thankfully, this trend is far less pronounced than low rise jeans because snus sounds gross. We do not endorse use of tobacco products on all the usual corporate stuff we need to say on a podcast. Yeah, it seems to be back with somewhat of a vengeance for the first time in 200 years, which is weird.
Mark: So yeah, it's just-
Jack: It's the type of snuff tobacco. Yeah. Literally. Smoking is not cool anymore, better get into some snus.
Mark: Yeah, it's like, it's vape. Is it going to take over from vaping?
Jack: Maybe. Maybe it's the alternative vaping. Who knows? And last, a little bonus one that Nicole included in here, because of course, Nicole herself is Canadian, she wanted to give a shout out to Canadian national treasure, Leonard Cohen for his song, Hallelujah. Specifically search Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah. He is quite the trend, quite the spike over the last few months, and I hadn't realised this, it's because there was a documentary released called Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. I was just looking at this graph and I was like, "That's a fairly consistently popular song, right? Why would it suddenly spike in September of 2022?"
Mark: Yeah.
Jack: A documentary came out and I love movies. I'm indifferent to Leonard Cohen, sorry Nicole. I think he's fine. I've only listened to a handful of his songs, but yeah, he's seen a resurgence in the last few months because of a documentary about that song, so there you go. Three highlights from TrendWatch there for you. If you want to get all the trends and all the updates from SISTRIX, you can go to sistrix.com/trends, subscribe to the newsletter and you can the full list delivered straight to your inbox, every single month.
Majestic's SEO 2023:
Jack: Onto our next list of things. So this'll be much quicker than the Google one. I won't go into so much detail, but Majestic have released essentially their list of SEO in 2023, is how they describe it. It's going to be a book, a podcast, a video series and they've actually got an article here, the lists, to quote, David Bain who created this list for Majestic, "Some of the very best in SEO." And first of all, it's a fantastic list of fantastic people, including quite a few people we've had on the show before and one, Mr. Mark Williams-Cook is on the list as well. Congratulations, Mark.
Mark: That's why he said some people, and then, me.
Jack: Yeah, there's some really cool people also, Mark. No, seriously, it's a very, very great interesting list of people. It basically breaks it down by topic, which I found really interesting. So you're going to understand who's experts in what kind of topics from auditing and content structure to targeting, which is where I guess you come in with AlsoAsked and all that kind of stuff. Content planning, content production, SERPs, user-centricity, links, local SEO, thinking outside the box, analytics, loads of different topics. Basically, divided by certain experts and a big list of people and links to all their social media and all that kind of stuff. As I said, they're working on a podcast book and video series for all this kind of stuff as well. So yeah, fantastic list of people, including people like the aforementioned, Lily Ray, Optimisey, Lidia Infante, Sarah McDowell, Olga Zarzeczna, Cindy Krum, Myriam Jessier, Sophie Brannon, Kristina Azarenko, Billie Geena Hyde, Claire Carlile, Dixon Jones, Crystal Carter, Natalie Slater, Aleyda Solis, a lot of people we've had on the show before.
Mark: Yeah, I spoke to David for probably about 45 minutes or so. So with all the people on that list, if everyone did a similar level of content, there's going to be a lot of information.
Jack: Excellent. Look forward to that. We will keep you up to date when that does get published. I know they're planning to publish that and they're working on production as we speak. So once it's officially published with all the podcast and video stuff, we'll let you know. Last for the topic for this week, Mark.
URL length and structure:
Mark: Yeah, I thought this would be an interesting thing to wrap up with. It was an off-the-cuff kind of comment that I made around URL length from a discussion with someone else, and it spawned a few interesting discussions. I learned some things as well and I just wanted to kind of share this. So there was a thread and I've seen a couple of them actually talking about, quote-unquote, site structure and what we're actually talking about as URL structure. So specifically, the examples they were giving were for products on an E-commerce site, saying ... I think the example is sofas, if you've got your shop and then, you have your category URL, maybe a subcategory and I don't know, then a product URL versus just having a much flatter URL structure of products slash then the name of the sofa or whatever it's called. They were saying that's much better and the, quote-unquote, deep URLs are not good for SEO.
Jack: Yeah. So describing a deep URL as the number of sub folders before you get to the final destination essentially, right?
Mark: Exactly. Yeah. Now, I understand what this person is saying and they are correct in what they're trying to say, but it's a really important distinction that I've seen kind of confuse people before, which is that the depth of a page is not determined by the number of directories in a URL. It is determined-
Jack: Or the length of ... the number of characters in-
Mark: Yeah.
Jack: You can have one directory that is 100 characters long that also doesn't affect it, right?
Mark: Exactly, so it's not about the length of the URL. It's not about how many directories are in that URL. It's where it's linked to and from. So it doesn't matter if you have your product in a URL with 10 directories before it, if it's linked to, from your homepage or from your main menu, that is a kind of shallow page in terms of the hierarchy.
Jack: The click depth of one essentially. Yeah, yeah.
Mark: Exactly, and I think this is really important because you certainly wouldn't want to go and update the URLs on your site for SEO reasons and start redirecting, ranking URLs to shorter URLs because it'll have probably actually a negative impact. Because moving stuff always has a risk. So I made that point and just said, "Look, what you're saying about site hierarchy is true, and the important pages should be linked to prominently," which means they should be either linked to regularly from lots of other pages or they should be linked closely to other important pages and obviously, search engines don't have a concept out of the box of what a homepage is, but naturally your homepage picks up the most external links generally. So things normally link to ... directly from the homepage tend to be considered important pages.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: It's the basis of how page rank works, essentially.
Jack: Yeah, I was talking to an E-commerce client about this the other day and talking about the importance of ... they currently didn't have directly, any product pages listed on their homepage. We had a few category things, there's a link for the blog, there's a link for seasonal stuff and all that kind of thing but you could not get to any individual product pages from the homepage. I was like, pick some of your key products, some of the things that are not affected by the seasonal stuff that will be here year-round, that we know we can sell year round and focus on and let's stick them in a nice little grid of, "Here are our best selling products on the homepage."
Like you said, Mark, that completely restructures how they're seen in terms of internal linking, and I think you're totally right, there was a lot of confusion around length and directory length, the number of directories when actually really we're talking about internal linking structure and like you said, site structure, internal linking structure, URL structure. It all kind of got a bit messy and a bit confused there, but yeah.
Mark: The other thing ... so, the thing I learned from this discussion was ... that I wasn't aware, had been confirmed was that as part of Google's calculations for which page is the canonical, there is a slight preference on shorter URLs.
Jack: Interesting, I didn't know that.
Mark: Apparently, that's been confirmed by Google. I haven't seen it, but the person that said it, I trust. Now, the example, because the example I gave was generally on a lot of Shopify sites by default, if you put a product in a couple of categories, Shopify will generate a collection page URL for that property. So there'll be like a forward slash collections, whatever the name is, forward slash product, product name. Shopify will also generate a just slash product name URL and it will define that as the canonical version. However, because of the way the template works and i.e. collections, what Shopify goes in categories are normally linked to from the main menu, it means that as the kind of link equity page rank goes about the site, most of the links are pointing towards the longer collection pages.
It's very common to see Google decide, well, this must be the canonical page because it's the one you are internally linking to.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: I don't care that you have a canonical tag off to a shorter version of this URL because I can't find that URL on your site. Therefore, how could it be a canonical URL? So Google has told us, obviously, canonical tags are hint and even if they are using the Euro length as a factor, I would say it's a small factor and it's totally crushed by the prominence of internal linking. That's to me, been the number one thing I've seen Google use to determine which URL is canonical, it is which one is prominently linked to internally, and it makes sense because that should be the canonical URL.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah.
Mark: So I just wanted to leave that thereon because I thought it was an interesting kind of nuance but it's important and it has other ramifications on the side.
Jack: Well, that about wraps up for this week. Thank you for joining me, Mark. It's been nice to have you back on, and if you're listening to this on Monday, first of all go to alsoasked.com, use what's that code again, Mark?
Mark: BlackFriday22.
Jack: There you go. Get 100% off your first month. You go to alsoasked.com
Mark: And I just say there isn't any obligation to stay for further months. You can take your one month for free and then leave.
Jack: There you go. No better deal in SEO SaaS, and if you're listening to this on Monday or even Tuesday or even the morning of Wednesday, we're doing a live LinkedIn Q and A once again, this Wednesday, the 30th of November at 2:00 PM UK time. I don't know what that is in the other time zones and stuff, but you can work it out. There'll be a link for it in the show notes. You'll click that and it'll give it to you in your time zone and all that kind of stuff. It'll be a full video on Mark's LinkedIn of both of us sat here in the Canada studio answering your questions live essentially, as they come in and if you want to presubmit your questions, we will post it on socials and all that kind of stuff. We will take some pre-submitted questions as well so we can get the ball rolling. Yes, we will be back on Wednesday, live and that will also be next week's episode of the podcast. So next week's episode will be a Q and A. If you can't join us live, that will be normally in your podcast feed as usual on Monday morning next week, as well. So thank you for joining me, Mark. It's been nice to catch up and chat for nearly an hour about Googly stuff.
Mark: I commented before we started looking at the agenda, is this going to be long enough?
Jack: I said, "Yes, Mark. It definitely is." A lot of episodes I've done recently have been nearly an hour and here we are at 55 minutes.
Mark: It's because I missed you so much.
Jack: I know. I missed you too. It's nice to have you back. Well, thank you very much for joining us, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening. We will be back next week like I said with a Q&A episode and until then, have a lovely week.