Wix's Site Inspection tool, Google steps up Featured Snippets with MUM
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Show notes and links
On this week's episode, our brave host Jack Chambers-Ward is riding solo and gives you a rundown of the week's SEO news including:
- Wix’s new site inspection tool
- Google steps up featured snippets with MUM
- Google Search Console performance report bug with Discover on July 26th
- Google Search Console simplifies its reports with a new item classification
Transcript
Jack: Welcome to episode 31 of season two of the Search With Candour podcast. My name is Jack Chambers-Ward, and I'm on my own this week, no guests, no Mark. It is just me, I'm afraid. So, it's probably going to be a fairly short episode this week, and I'm just going to try and cover some highlights of the SEO and PPC news for the week. The highlights of the news include: Wix's new site inspection tool Google stepping up their featured snippets with the inclusion of MUM, something we've talked about previously on the show Google Search Console performance report bugs with Discover, that happened towards the end of July And Google Search Console simplifies its reports with a new item classification that will be rolling out in the coming weeks and months.
Sponsor: Search With Candour is supported by SISTRIX, the SEO's 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 out your site's visibility index and their Google update tracker. You can also go to sistrix.com/trends and sign up for TrendWatch, which is their fantastic trending newsletter. You'll get that delivered to your inbox every single month. And I will actually be talking about an upcoming huge data drop from SISTRIX regarding content and high-performance content formats later on in the show.
Wix’s site inspection tool
So, let's kick things off with some more Wix news. And I know I've covered them a couple of times since joining Search With Candour, but once again, Wix are basically cutting edge when it comes to SEO for a CMS and they have now integrated Google's URL Inspection Tool API into the Wix dashboard. As far as I know, and according to their tweets, they are the first SAS CMS, the first SAS platform to actually integrate this directly into the dashboard without you having to use an external crawler like Screaming Frog or something like that, or Sitebulb. You can use those kind of things still, but having this built into your Wix dashboard is kind of next level and makes things so much simpler for any of us, including myself, who have sites on Wix and are trying to keep an eye on the SEO side of things. So, here is the quote from Wix and of course, I will put a link to this post in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk. So, you can go and read the full statement and if you do have a site on Wix, you can understand how to access it and basically get all of the results from the URL Inspection Tool. Here's the quote from Wix: "Our site inspection tool enables you to monitor the status of your pages in Google's index from within your Wix dashboard. The data within the site inspection dashboard comes directly from Google via its URL Inspection Tool API. The site inspection tool is organized to show you..." And then here are some bullet points to basically give you an idea of the kind of data you'll get from this. If you are familiar with the API already, or if you are just familiar with the URL Inspection Tool on Google Search Console anyway, you'll understand what kind of data you're going to get here.
Just in case you're not familiar with it, I'll give you a rundown of what this is included in the site inspection dashboard on Wix.
- The proportion of your pages that Google has indexed and excluded
- The most common status details associated with your pages
- An overview of your site's usability on mobile devices
- The index status, status details, mobile usability, and rich results eligibility for each of your URLs.
So, I don't know about you, but I've seen plenty of sites have issues with indexing over the last sort of 18 months or so. And that's been true for some of my sites, that's been true for some of the clients I've worked on over the last couple of years, both at Candour and in previous roles as well. And the URL Inspection Tool API, which we talked about when it launched a little while ago, has been incredible and just so useful for me to get an idea of what's happening on the site and to get an idea of what Google is doing and what stage we're at in terms of the indexing process. Have you been crawled? Are you discovered, but not yet indexed? All this kind of stuff, you can get the different statuses there.
And it can give you a really quick idea and the fact that you can get it even quicker just by going to the site inspection dashboard on Wix and having a look. And like I said, one of my sites is on Wix, so I have actually tried this myself and it is incredibly easy to use. So, like I said, we are not sponsored by Wix, we know some people at Wix and they have been doing a fantastic job over the last few years from really turning Wix into just another CMS and that kind of, as I called them before, the black sheep of the CMS world, which I think is maybe a misnomer on my part, I spoke wrongly there, but I know a lot of people wonder, can you rank a Wix site kind of thing?
That was a kind of, if you had your site on Wix, is it as good as having it on WordPress or Shopify or whatever it is? I think the testament of the Wix SEO team and the developers there, it is now one of the best. And as I said, this is the first CMS that is doing this, so I think they are really cutting edge in terms of what the team there is doing and what they're pushing for their developers that do. So, huge credit to Mordy, Nati, Crystal, George, the whole SEO team over at Wix, they are doing incredible work. And yeah, like I said, link for that in the show notes, if you do want to read the full post and if you have a site on Wix, this is essential SEO information you're essentially getting built into your dashboard directly with Wix. So, highly recommend you go and check that out, and as I said, links in the show notes as always, at search.withcandour.co.uk.
Google steps up featured snippets with MUM
Next up, let's talk about some featured snippets and Google announcing they are stepping up, in their own words, their featured snippets. So, this is a really interesting thing because they're including MUM. I don't know if you guys remember, we talked about this a little while ago on the show, talking about MUM and how integral it is going to be for the future of Google, essentially. They first introduced it way back in May of last year and have talked about how important it's going to be, including at their big conference Search On '21, which happened late 2021. They're talking about how the AI behind MUM, which is short for the Multitask Unified Model, how that technology is basically going to shape search for the future. And I know we've talked about it in context of BERT as well, and basically how state-of-the-art MUM is going to be and how integral it's going to be so much for Google's technology going forward, essentially.
So, let's dive into some of this featured snippet stuff. This was highlighted for me on Search Engine Land, of course, by the inimitable Barry Schwartz over there. Of course, give Mr. RustyBrick a follow, he is fantastic, basically breaking a lot of SEO news on Twitter and Search Engine Land as well. Highly recommend you go and follow Barry there and I'll put a link for the full article on Search Engine Land in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk. As we dive in here, I'm going to read a little bit of the statement here from Google themselves, and a little bit of the statement and write up from Barry here as well on Search Engine Land. And essentially, they're trying to improve the trustworthiness and accuracy of featured snippets and actually provide multiple sources for this kind of thing, and basically try and clarify if a consensus has been reached for an answer for a particular question.
So, let's read this section here. "Featured snippets in Google Search will now use MUM to understand if there is a general consensus for the information Google shows as callouts in their featured snippets." Google said, and I quote, "Our systems can now understand the notion of consensus by using a multitask unified model known as MUM. MUM has not been used to-date in too many applications within Google Search, limited to COVID vaccine names, Google Lens features, and a few other things, but it is now being included and used to improve featured snippets. With the help of MUM, Google can understand if there is a consensus across the web to help highlight the callout portions of the featured snippets. Consensus-based techniques, according to Pandu Nayak, the Vice President of Search and Fellow at Google, have meaningfully improved the quality of featured snippet callouts. It's important to note, this does not come to mean that featured snippets will show facts necessarily. It does not necessarily do that, but it does help improve the overall quality of the featured snippet callout." Barry then used an example here of, how long does it take for light from the sun to reach Earth? And there is a featured snippet here that says, "The sun is 93 million miles away, so sunlight takes eight and one third minutes to get to us, not much changes about the sun in so short of a time, but it still means that when you look at the sun, you see it as it was eight minutes ago." And that is a featured snippet from pbs.org. And they actually callout with the featured snippet callout, which is the bold, top information at the top there, where it just says, "Eight and a third minutes." At the top. You get that full little description at the bottom there, but you get a big callout that says, "Eight and a third minutes." As a very quick, at a glance answer for that question.
If you want to know, how long does it take for light from the sun to reach earth? Eight and a third minutes is the correct answer there. And they have that highlighted and in bold above that result. That's what we mean by the callout. What we're talking about when it comes to all this verification and things like that and consensus, Pandu Nayak explained, "These featured snippets are generally taken from the top ranked results." So, he is hopeful that those top ranked results in Google Search aren't spammy, essentially, to try and avoid consensus spam. So, say somebody makes up a false answer to a question for whatever reason and tries to spam it with other sites that then "verify" their fake answer, it shouldn't be able to be spammed there. And Google will be able to understand, this is being spammed, is trying to be controlled by untrustworthy sites, and that would not then be considered consensus for these featured snippets.
Another advancement in these featured snippets is around what Google calls false premise queries and these queries that may be inaccurate or factually incorrect, but are nevertheless used by some searches in Google Search. And so, this is essentially, if you ask a question that Google knows is incorrect, it will essentially try and ignore the incorrect part and show you the consensus around the web with what is the actual answer. And the example here again, used by Barry on Search Engine Land is, "When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln?" I would hope all the listeners out there, you know that Snoopy did not assassinate Abraham Lincoln. So, essentially, it removes the Snoopy factor and takes the, when part of that search, the assassinate Abraham Lincoln, ignores Snoopy, and you get the answer of 14th of April 1865, because that is the date that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, because we didn't ask who or where, we asked when, it just gives you the date and actually ignores that Snoopy bit. We know that Snoopy didn't and Google knows that Snoopy didn't assassinate Abraham Lincoln. So, it knows to get rid of that, essentially.
We also have it on the other end of things, when it comes to the content advisory side of things, to discuss low confidence results. And this is essentially when you search for something and there is not a clear consensus on this and you don't get that many results to a search. I'm sure we've all done it before, if you are working in SEO and PPC, I'm sure you search around a lot and occasionally you will come up with something that does not gain hundreds of thousands, millions of results, whatever it is.
Google said, "It's now expanding its content advisories to searches where its systems don't have high confidence in the overall quality of the results available for the search." And Google say, "It does not mean that no helpful information is available or the particular result is low quality. It just means there is no clear guidance and no clear context or confidence from the results that appear to that query." So essentially, Google is using a lot of the technology behind MUM to really understand context and consensus for so much of this stuff and really trying to improve the featured snippets and especially the callouts for the featured snippets, for this whole kind of thing. Because I know we've had a lot of issues with featured snippets being incorrect or spammed, or whatever it was, over the last few years.
I always bring up this example pretty much every couple of episodes at this point, when the Titlepocalypse happened, when Google did their big update and was rewriting everyone's titles and stuff, that also changed a lot of the featured snippets. And we got a featured snippet that was how to deal with somebody when they're choking, ended up taking a featured snippet and the callout for that was, "Stick your fingers down their throat." Instead of taking the full sentence, which was, "Do not stick your fingers down their throat." It pulled out the wrong information there. And this technology is trying to avoid exactly that and make sure there is a clear consensus, especially for these, your money, your life kind of searches, with things to do with finances, health, all that kind of stuff. So, hopefully this kind of technology is the thing that would help us avoid that in the future. Like I said, Barry goes into a bit more detail on Search Engine Land, so I recommend you go and read the article and I will have a link for that in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk.
Sponsor: SISTRIX high performance content format data coming soon
So, as I mentioned at the top of the show, we have a little tease from SISTRIX about an upcoming data drop described as, "Huge" from Steve, the one and only, Steve Paine, at SISTRIX. And I actually jumped on a call recently with Steve to get an idea of what we could expect from this coming up. And we might actually get Steve on as a guest to run through this data in the next few weeks as well, once it is publicly available for you to read in all its details.
Basically what this is, is a update on the high-performance content examples and the high-performance content format specifically. So, that's things such as information hubs, content hubs, resource hubs, all that kind of stuff. SISTRIX have gone through and basically gone through all of their data, and as Steve put it to me in our chat the other day, "It is machine generated," so that's all of their data gathered across their vast library of data, "but hand curated." So, it's actually taken out by the SISTRIX team, that's including the data journalists we talk about regularly when we're talking about IndexWatch, TrendWatch, all that kind of stuff, and some of the amazing team over at SISTRIX, Steve and his fantastic team there as well.
And essentially, it brings you some really, really interesting examples of what is possible from some of the top performing content directories in UK search results. So, what do I mean by that? That is essentially, content hubs on existing domains that have incredibly good visibility index. So, obviously, the rating from SISTRIX looking at their visibility over long periods of time, and we're looking at how many URLs in that directory rank in the top 10, top 100, all that kind of stuff, for chosen keywords.
And we actually have a little sneak preview from the June 2022 data. So, you can have a look at the top 15 high-performance content format examples, as denoted by SISTRIX. And we will go through and have a look at those, like I said, in more detail in a few weeks, but they're things such as the nutrition hub on Healthline. Particularly interesting is the ideas and advice section on B&Q's website, which is diy.com. For those of you here in the UK, you probably know B&Q already. What is particularly interesting about the ideas on the advice hub on the B&Q website is that it is informational intent or the know intent, that is the K-N-O-W intent rather than the do or transactional intent. So, that directory and all of the content on there is performing incredibly well for informational search queries rather than the rest of the site, which is a huge eCommerce site for homeware and stuff like that, here in the UK, which is serving transactional intent across the rest of the site. So, they are doing a fantastic job of increasing their visibility for a vast number of keywords that they would usually not have access to if they had just stuck to their transactional side of things on their eCommerce website. They are actually building out that hub and accessing a lot of the informational search intent queries. So, as I said, I will drop a link in the show notes for this little snippet, this little preview. And we'll be talking about this in much more detail over the coming weeks, as this article gets updated with the brand new data drop from SISTRIX. So, as I said, stay tuned, click the link in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk, to check out the little preview and get an idea of what is going to come up in the next few weeks or few months from this very interesting analysis of high-performance content formats.
Pretty much, if you're looking into building a content hub or a resource hub for one of your sites, this is the kind of data for you. And I know we've been talking about it a lot at Candor, I even talked about topic clusters and building hubs and stuff way back with Andy Chadwick from Keyword Insights. I'll put a link for that episode in the show notes as well, so you can get an idea of how to cluster keywords and really build out these little hub pages and things like that. And these examples are fantastic examples of that. So, like I said, this is just a teaser, this is the tip of the iceberg for the data from SISTRIX, and stay tuned for a big update that will hopefully help us get an idea of what content hubs and high-performance content formats we are seeing really make big waves in UK search results.
Google Search Console performance report bug with Discover on July 26th
So, a quick bit of info here about Google Search Console performance report for Discover, specifically noting a reporting issue late July. And Google posted this on the 26th of July 2022, and their statement was, "Due to a logging error, site owners might see a drop in their Discover clicks and impressions during this period." So, around that sort of 48 to 72 hours around the 26th of July. If you are aware of your data, when it comes to Discover on Google Search Console, you may see some very strange things occurring and essentially, that is on Google's end, not on your end of things. So, it's not something to worry about. They have actually put a little note and a little annotation on the chart for Discover. So, you can see the exact time when it kicked off and if you see a particular change in your clicks and impressions there, you can get a clear head of it. Again, the annotation says, "An event has occurred in Google Search that might affect your site's data." And then you can click here for more details, as you expect when this kind of error happens in Google. But if you have noticed something and you're trying to work out what's going on, or particularly weird reporting when it came to the end of July for one of your clients or something like that, specifically on the Google Discover side of things on Search Console, there was a notable error there. So, please do be aware of that. Make a note of that in your reports, just in case you're wondering if something has happened. So, yes, it is on Google's end, not on your end, and you don't need to worry about it.
Google Search Console simplifies its reports with a new item classification
Sticking with and finishing off with Google Search Console once again, way back in June, they announced they were simplifying the Search Console reports with an updated item classification. And a couple of days ago, the Google Search Central Twitter account tweeted out that they are now rolling this out over the coming weeks and months. The tweet from Google Search Central said, "We're simplifying the way we classify pages, items and issues in Search Console reports. We hope this will help you focus on critical issues that affect your visibility in Search and will help you better prioritize your work." And they link through to the announcement that happened back in June, and now they're saying essentially, this is rolling out. They even give a screenshot example of how the old report looks and how the new report is going to look. And essentially, you can see what it breaks down, why certain things are invalid and simplifies everything so you don't have the error status, the valid with warning status, and the valid status. You now just have invalid or valid, and invalid is then broken down into various different things. Here is the full statement from Google on their blog, and like I said, if you want to read this in full, see their examples, you can go to the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk. "We will roll out this change to all properties gradually over the next few months, so you might not see any changes for now."
Bear in mind, this was in June, so they are now rolling this out, so you may see changes coming up soon. "Users have told us that they are confused by the warning status when it's applied to a URL or item. Does a warning mean that the page or item can or can't appear in Google? In response, we're grouping the top level item, a rich result for the rich results reports, a page or URL for the other reports into two groups. Pages or items with critical issues are labeled something like invalid, and pages or items without critical issues are labeled something like valid. We think this new grouping will make it easier to see quickly which issues affect your site's appearance on Google, in order to help you prioritize your fixes. Read more about how this will change effects." And they put a link there to the help center, which gives bit more information there as well. "The changes discussed in this post will also be reflected in the URL Inspection Tool," Funnily enough, we were just talking about that with the Wix update there as well, "when inspecting a particular URL inside Search Console. However, they will only be updated in the URL Inspection API when we complete the rollout in a few months. This means that if your property shows the updated item classification in Search Console, you might see differences when comparing results from the product interface and if you're using the API." They will update this blog when the API has been updated and as I said, when they're saying rollout in the few months, that was back in June, I'm recording this in August, so it has been a few months already. So, the rollout is happening now, essentially. So, keep an eye on this and as I said, I'll put a link to this blog in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk, so you can get an idea when it's fully rolled out and when we'll get the new item classifications rolled out to not only the URL Inspection Tool, but the URL Inspection API as well.
Outro
So, as I said, a nice, quick one this week, since it's just me, I don't want to ramble on too long, although I am warranted to do that as you probably already know if you've heard this podcast before or any of my other podcasts. But I will be back soon, not only with Mark, he will be coming back to us very soon, as we said a couple of episodes ago, we want to be doing more QnA episodes. We're hopefully planning to do some live LinkedIn QnAs, which Mark and I will be hosting and basically taking questions directly from you guys and we'll be on camera as well. I know, dread the thought. But, I have also got some fantastic guests lined up for the next few months as well.
I tweeted this out and got an incredible response on Twitter from some of my favorite SEOs and people I wasn't expecting to respond. I want to give a particular shout out to Areej Abuali and the Women in Tech SEO community. Areej was very, very kind and shared my basically request for new guests and new voices in the SEO community. I particularly wanted to highlight people of color, people in the LGBTQ community, people of different genders and sexualities and things like that. I particularly wanted to have a variety and diverse cast of guests in the upcoming months on this show.
And as I said, Areej very kindly shared that in the Women in Tech SEO community for me and I have got some fantastic guests, some of them you've probably heard of, some of them have been in SEO for a very long time and worked in Brighton, done talks at BrightonSEO and all kinds of stuff. And some you might not heard of, who are newer to the community and are looking for their first appearances on podcasts, and I am very, very excited to give them the opportunity to really share their voice with the wider SEO community for the first time.
So, as I said, hopefully me just talking to myself for 25 minutes won't be the regular thing. I will have Mark back on and I have got a plethora of guests coming up in the next few months to talk about some really, really interesting topics and a very, very diverse cast of guests as well. So, lots to look forward to in the coming months from Search With Candor, I promise. Follow along with everything we are doing by going to search.withcandour.co.uk. You can of course follow us on Twitter, we are @candouragency on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter, I am @JLWChambers. I do sometimes tweet about SEO. I tweet about a lot of other stuff as well. If you don't mind music and DnD and pro wrestling and my other podcasts, you're very welcome to come and follow me on Twitter as well. But in the meantime, thank you for listening, and have a lovely week.