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Google On How It Manages Disclosure Of Search Incidents – Search Engine Journal

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Join us as we share insights from the top SEOs at the world’s largest traffic-driving websites. Instead of guesswork, you’ll discover how to leverage real data to align your team and fast-track growth with five proven and actionable tactics you can implement immediately.
Discover the latest trends, tips, and strategies in SEO and PPC marketing. Our curated articles offer in-depth analysis, practical advice, and actionable insights to elevate your digital marketing efforts.
The 7th edition of PPC Trends explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the onslaught of AI tools, and provides actionable tips for thriving.
Discover the latest trends, tips, and strategies in SEO and PPC marketing. Our curated articles offer in-depth analysis, practical advice, and actionable insights to elevate your digital marketing efforts.
Join three of Reddit’s top executives in this exclusive AMA (Ask Me Anything) to discover how you can tap into Reddit’s unique platform to drive brand growth.
Join this leadership discussion for proven techniques to build long-term relationships and keep your clients coming back.
Google discusses how it decides to publicly disclose search incidents that affect search, crawling and indexing
Google’s latest Search Off The Record podcast discussed examples of disruptive incidents that can affect crawling and indexing and discuss the criteria for deciding whether or not to disclose the details of what happened.
Complicating the issue of making a statement is that there are times when SEOs and publishers report that Search is broken when from Google’s point of view they’re working the way they’re supposed to.
The interesting part of the podcast began with the observation that Google Search (the home page with the search box) itself has an “extremely” high uptime and rarely ever goes down and become unreachable. Most of the reported issues were due to network routing issues from the Internet itself than a failure from within Google’s infrastructure.
Gary Illyes commented:
“Yeah. The service that hosts the homepage is the same thing that hosts the status dashboard, the Google Search Status Dashboard, and it has like an insane uptime number. …the number is like 99.999 whatever.”
John Mueller jokingly responded with the word “nein” (pronounced like the number nine), which means “no” in German:
“Nein. It’s never down. Nein.”
The Googlers admit that the rest of Google Search on the backend does experience outages and they explain how that’s dealt with.
Google’s ability to crawl and index web pages is critical for SEO and earnings. Disruption can lead to catastrophic consequences particularly for time-sensitive content like announcements, news and sales events (to name a few).
Gary Illyes explained that there’s a team within Google called Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) that’s responsible for making sure that the public-facing systems are running smoothly. There’s an entire Google subdomain devoted to the site reliability where they explain that they approach the task of keeping systems operational similar to how software issues are. They watch over services like Google Search, Ads, Gmail, and YouTube.
The SRE page explains the complexity of their mission as being very granular (fixing individual things) to fixing larger scale problems that affect “continental-level service capacity” for users that measure in the billions.
Gary Ilyes explains (at the 3:18 minute mark):
“Site Reliability Engineering org publishes their playbook on how they manage incidents. And a lot of the incidents are caught by incidents being issues with whatever systems. They catch them with automated processes, meaning that there are probers, for example, or there are certain rules that are set on monitoring software that looks at numbers.
And then, if the number exceeds whatever value, then it triggers an alert that is then captured by a software like an incident management software.”
Gary next explains how the February 2024 indexing problem is an example of how Google monitors and responds to incidents that could impact users in search. Part of the response is figuring out if it’s an actual problem or a false positive.
He explains:
“That’s what happened on February 1st as well. Basically some number went haywire, and then that opened an incident automatically internally. Then we have to decide whether that’s a false positive or it’s something that we need to actually look into, as in like we, the SRE folk.
And, in this case, they decided that, yeah, this is a valid thing. And then they raised the priority of the incident to one step higher from whatever it was.
I think it was a minor incident initially and then they raised it to medium. And then, when it becomes medium, then it ends up in our inbox. So we have a threshold for medium or higher. Yeah.”
Gary Ilyes next explained that they don’t communicate every little incident that happens because most of the times it won’t even be noticed by users. The most important consideration is whether the incident affects users, which will automatically receive an upgraded priority level.
An interesting fact about how Google decides what’s important is that problems that affect users are automatically boosted to a higher priority  level. Gary said he didn’t work in SRE so he was unable to comment on the exact number of users that need to be affected before Google decides to make a public announcement.
Gary explained:
“SRE would investigate everything. If they get a prober alert, for example, or an alert based on whatever numbers, they will look into it and will try to explain that to themselves.
And, if it’s something that is affecting users, then it almost automatically means that they need to raise the priority because users are actually affected.”
Gary shared another example of an incident, this time it was about images that weren’t showing up for users. It was decided that although the user experience was affected it was not affected to the point that it was keeping users from finding what they were searching for, the user experience was degraded but not to the point where Google became unusable. Thus, it’s not just whether users are affected by an incident that will cause an escalation in priority but also how badly the user experience is affected.
The case of the images not displaying was a situation in which they decided to not make a public statement because users could still be able to find the information they needed. Although Gary didn’t mention it, it does sound like an issue that recipe bloggers have encountered in the past where images stopped showing.
He explained:
“Like, for example, recently there was an incident where some images were missing. If I remember correctly, then I stepped in and I said like, “This is stupid, and we should not externalize it because the user impact is actually not bad,” right? Users will literally just not get the images. It’s not like something is broken. They will just not see certain images on the search result pages.
And, to me, that’s just, well, back to 1990 or back to 2008 or something. It’s like it’s still usable and still everything is dandy except some images.”
Google’s John Mueller asked Gary if the threshold for making a public announcement was if the user’s experience was degraded or if it was the case that the experience of publishers and SEOs were also considered.
Gary answered (at about the 8 minute mark):
“So it’s Search Relations, not Site Owners Relations, from Search perspective.
But by extension, like the site owners, they would also care about their users. So, if we care about their users, it’s the same group of people, right? Or is that too positive?”
Gary apparently sees his role as primarily as Search Relations in a general sense of their users. That may come as a surprise to many in the SEO community because Google’s own documentation for their Search Off The Record podcast explains the role of the Search Relations team differently:
“As the Search Relations team at Google, we’re here to help site owners be successful with their websites in Google Search.”
Listening to the entire podcast, it’s clear that Googlers John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman are strongly focused on engaging with the search community. So maybe there’s a language issue that’s causing his remark to be interpretable differently than he intended?
Google explained that they have a process for deciding what to disclose about disruptions in search and it is a 100% sensible approach. But something to consider is that the definition of “relations” is that it’s about a connection between two or more people.
Search is a relation(ship). It is an ecosystem where two partners, the creators (SEOs and site owners) create content and Google makes it available to their users.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Khosro
I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO, evolving along with the search engines by keeping up with the latest …
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Join Our Newsletter.
Get your daily dose of search know-how.
In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers.
Copyright © 2024 Search Engine Journal. All rights reserved. Published by Alpha Brand Media.

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SEO in the Age of Generative AI: Mastering Topical Authority and Content Strategy with Bernard Huang – The Content Standard by Skyword

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Content Disrupted Podcast
By Skyword Staff on July 1, 2024
A Content Disrupted podcast with Bernard Huang, founder at Clearscope.
Access this and more Content Disrupted episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
How is generative AI disrupting Google search and what does that mean for brands and content creators? In this episode of Content Disrupted, Clearscope Founder Bernard Huang sits down with Skyword EVP Dan Baptiste to discuss the current and future state of SEO and AI-powered search. They delve into the cannibalization of search traffic, the new way to approach topical authority, and how to use content to build trust and credibility in a landscape flooded with commoditized information.
Bernard is the co-founder of Clearscope, the leading SEO optimization software for high-quality content teams. Before Clearscope, Bernard started an SEO consulting agency, was a growth advisor in residence at 500 Startups, and led growth at a YC startup called 42Floors.
[01:16] Google’s Algorithm Updates and the Changing SEO Landscape – Bernard shares his journey from being a growth hacker at the Y Combinator startup 42 Floors, where he experimented with various SEO strategies, including black hat tactics. He highlights the importance of major Google updates such as Penguin, which devalued spammy links, and Panda, which penalized thin, duplicate content. Hummingbird shifted the focus to comprehensive and quality content, leading to the rise of in-depth guides. RankBrain introduced dynamic user engagement signals, making search results more responsive to user interactions. The Helpful Content Update emphasized creating content for humans, highlighting expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Bernard’s insights underline exactly how Google’s evolving algorithm updates have pushed SEO strategies from a game of manipulation to a focus on creating valuable content that genuinely serves users.
[11:41] The Challenges and Opportunities of Content Creation in the Age of AI – Bernard explains how Google’s increasing integration of AI-generated answers and featured snippets is leading to a significant reduction in traditional search traffic for many informational queries. Huang highlights that this trend isn’t new; technological improvements have always redirected specific queries away from Google. However, AI’s capability to generate content directly, such as job templates or recipes, represents an unprecedented level of “cannibalization.” He advises content creators not to fear this shift but to adapt by focusing on areas where AI falls short, such as providing unique perspectives, firsthand experiences, and trustworthy recommendations. Huang points out that while AI excels at consensus-based answers and structured “stuff” like itineraries; it lacks the perspective, depth, and credibility users seek in certain types of trust-based searches, such as product reviews or specialized guides. As a result, the challenge for content creators lies in differentiating their work by emphasizing human elements and expertise that AI cannot replicate, thereby maintaining relevance in the ever-changing digital landscape.
[18:44] From Black Hat Tactics to Trustworthy Content – Bernard discusses how Google’s algorithms have evolved now valuing content that offers genuine opinions and perspectives. This evolution suggests that search is becoming better, as it encourages content creators to produce valuable, authentic information rather than just filling pages with SEO keywords. However, Google still faces the challenge of the vast amount of AI-generated content skewing the information landscape and the need to differentiate between authentic information and commoditized content. Bernard points out that while AI can generate content rapidly, Google’s focus on user engagement signals still creates a complex environment where brands with higher domain authority tend to dominate. This dynamic now needs content creators to leverage their subject matter expertise, authenticity, and unique insights to stand out in a crowded digital space. Bernard explains how brands can capitalize on the way search associates topics and things with an “information gain” approach that focuses on additive content within networks of topics where subject matter expertise or firsthand expertise is assumed or required.
[29:35] Topical Authority As the New SEO Playbook – Bernard highlights that the traditional method of targeting high search volume keywords and creating basic content or content clusters around them is no longer sufficient. Instead, smaller publishers should focus on specialization within their niche, delving deeply into various aspects of a topic to establish authority. He explains that Google now emphasizes a site’s focus score, which assesses the depth and relevance of a website’s content on specific topics. This shift means that creating comprehensive, unique content that explores the nuances and intricacies of a subject can help smaller sites rank higher in search results. For example, rather than just covering general information about marathons, a site should include detailed content such as personal training experiences, common mistakes, and unique insights into marathon preparation. This approach not only differentiates smaller publishers from larger competitors but also aligns with Google’s efforts to combat the flood of commoditized content produced by AI. Although the search volumes for these specialized topics might be smaller, the aggregate effect of a well-developed library of granular, authoritative content can drive significant traffic over time.
[36:07] Brands Need to Focus on Owning a Niche – Bernard emphasizes the importance of defining specific topics or “ownable lanes” that are aligned with your brand’s identity and target audience. He further advises that brands should adopt a multichannel content creation approach, producing engaging content tailored to different platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. He points out that search now functions less as a discovery channel and more as a mid- to bottom-of-funnel channel, so brands need to plan to create content for search that captures interest generated from other platforms. This strategy requires moving away from generic, high-volume keyword content and focusing on adding unique value to niche topics. Smaller brands should narrow their focus to specific aspects where they can provide unique insights, rather than trying to dominate broad topics. Overall, a niche-oriented strategy demands effort and thoughtful planning, offering significant rewards for producing high-quality, detailed content. Instead of spreading efforts thinly across broad topics, brands should identify high-level topics that are both relevant and manageable.
Follow and subscribe to Content Disrupted on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. Every other week, we host candid conversations with pioneering CMOs and researchers on the topics most relevant to enterprise marketers, from the psychology behind today’s digital buying behaviors and how to craft more relevant creative to maximizing internal trust in the marketing team.
 
Featured image by ugguggu at Adobe Stock.

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Google Confirms Ranking Boost For Country Code Domains – Search Engine Journal

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Join us as we share insights from the top SEOs at the world’s largest traffic-driving websites. Instead of guesswork, you’ll discover how to leverage real data to align your team and fast-track growth with five proven and actionable tactics you can implement immediately.
Discover the latest trends, tips, and strategies in SEO and PPC marketing. Our curated articles offer in-depth analysis, practical advice, and actionable insights to elevate your digital marketing efforts.
The 7th edition of PPC Trends explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the onslaught of AI tools, and provides actionable tips for thriving.
Discover the latest trends, tips, and strategies in SEO and PPC marketing. Our curated articles offer in-depth analysis, practical advice, and actionable insights to elevate your digital marketing efforts.
Join three of Reddit’s top executives in this exclusive AMA (Ask Me Anything) to discover how you can tap into Reddit’s unique platform to drive brand growth.
Join this leadership discussion for proven techniques to build long-term relationships and keep your clients coming back.
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that country code domain names perform better in search results because Google gives an edge to local sites
Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about a ranking preference given to sites that use country level domain names and explained how that compares to non-country domain names. The question occurred in the SEO Office Hours podcast.
Domain names that are specific to countries are called ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domains). These are domain names that target specific countries. Examples of these ccTLDs are .de (Germany), .in (India) and .kr (Korea). These kinds of domain names don’t target specific languages, they only target Internet users in a specific country.
Some ccTLDs are treated by Google for ranking purposes as if they are regular Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), which are domains that are not specific to a country. A popular example is .io, which technically is a ccTLD (pertaining to the British Indian Ocean Territory) but because of how it’s used, Google treats it like a regular gTLD (generic top level domain).
The question that Gary Illyes answered was about the ranking boost given to ccTLDs.
This is the question:
“When a Korean person searches Google in Korean, does a com.kr domain or a .com domain do better?”
Gary Illyes answered:
“Good question. Generally speaking the local domain names, in your case .kr, tend to do better because Google Search promotes content local to the user.”
A lot of people want to rank better in a specific country and one of the best practices for doing that is to register a domain name that is specific to the country. Google will give it a ranking boost over other sites that are not explicitly targeting a specific country.
Gary continued his answer by explaining the ranking boost of a ccTLD over a generic top level domain (gTLD), like .com, .net and so on.
This is Gary’s explanation:
“That’s not to say that a .com domain can’t do well, it can, but generally .kr has a little more benefit, albeit not too much. “
Related:
Lastly, Gary mentioned that targeting a user’s language has more impact than the domain name.
He continued his answer:
“If the language of a site matches the user’s query language, that probably has more impact than the domain name itself.”
A benefit of targeting a language is that a site is able regardless of the country that a user is searching from whereas the country code top level domain name targets a country.
Something that Gary didn’t mention is that using a ccTLD can inspire user trust from searchers whose country matches the country that the domain name is targeting and because of that searchers on Google may be more inclined to click on a search result that uses the geotargeted ccTLD.
If a user is in Korea they may feel that a .kr domain is meant specifically for them. If a searcher is in Australia they may feel more inclined to click on a .au domain name.
Listen to the podcast answer from the 3:35 minute mark:

See also: 
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Dean Drobot
I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO, evolving along with the search engines by keeping up with the latest …
Conquer your day with daily search marketing news.
Join Our Newsletter.
Get your daily dose of search know-how.
In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers.
Copyright © 2024 Search Engine Journal. All rights reserved. Published by Alpha Brand Media.

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Google Says How To Get More Product Rich Results – Search Engine Journal

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Join us as we share insights from the top SEOs at the world’s largest traffic-driving websites. Instead of guesswork, you’ll discover how to leverage real data to align your team and fast-track growth with five proven and actionable tactics you can implement immediately.
Discover the latest trends, tips, and strategies in SEO and PPC marketing. Our curated articles offer in-depth analysis, practical advice, and actionable insights to elevate your digital marketing efforts.
The 7th edition of PPC Trends explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the onslaught of AI tools, and provides actionable tips for thriving.
Discover the latest trends, tips, and strategies in SEO and PPC marketing. Our curated articles offer in-depth analysis, practical advice, and actionable insights to elevate your digital marketing efforts.
Join three of Reddit’s top executives in this exclusive AMA (Ask Me Anything) to discover how you can tap into Reddit’s unique platform to drive brand growth.
Join this leadership discussion for proven techniques to build long-term relationships and keep your clients coming back.
Google’s John Mueller discusses four essential things that are useful in getting more product rich results
In an SEO Office Hours podcast, Google’s John Mueller answered the question of how to get more product rich results to show in the search results. John listed four things that are important in order to get rich results for product listings.
Product search queries can trigger rich results that presents products in a visually rich manner that Google refers to as Search Experiences.
Google product search experiences can include:
The person asking the question wanted to know how to get more “product snippets in Search Console” which confused Mueller because product snippets are displayed in the search results, not search console. So Mueller answered the question in the context of search results.
This is the question:
“How to increase the number of product snippets in Search Console?”
John Mueller explained that there were four things to get right in order to qualify for product rich results.
Mueller answered:
“It’s not really clear to me what exactly you mean… If you’re asking about product rich results, these are tied to the pages that are indexed for your site. And that’s not something which you can change by force.
It requires that the page be indexed, that the page has valid structured data on it, and that our systems have determined that it’s worth showing this structured data.”
So, according to John Mueller, these are the four things to get right to qualify for product rich results:
Getting a page indexed (and ranked) can be difficult for some search queries. People who come to me with this kind of problem tend to have content quality issues that can be traced back to using outdated SEO strategies like copying what’s already ranking in the SERPs but making it “better” which often results in content that’s not meaningfully different than what Google is already ranking.
Content quality on the page level and on the site level are important. Focusing on content that has that little extra, like better images, helpful graphs, or content that’s more concise, all of that is so much better than focusing on keywords and entities.
This is another area that explains why some sites lose their rich results or fail to get them altogether. Google changes their structured data recommendations and usually the structured data plugins will update to conform to the new guidelines. But I’ve seen examples where that doesn’t happen. So when there’s a problem with rich results, go to Google’s Rich Results Test tool first.
It’s also important to be aware that getting the structured data correct is not a guarantee that Google will show rich results for that page, it’s just makes the page qualified to show in the rich results.
This is the part that Google doesn’t talk about. But if you’re read about reviews systems, quality guidelines, Google’s SEO starter guide and maybe even the Search Quality Raters Guidelines then that should be more than enough information to inform any question about content quality.
Google doesn’t say why they may decline to show an image thumbnail as a rich result or why they’ll not show a product in the rich results. My opinion is that debugging the issue is more productive if the problem is reconceptualized as a content quality issue. Images are content, if it’s on the page, even if it’s not text, it’s content. Evaluate all of the content in terms of how the images or products or whatever might look like in the search results. Does it look good as a thumbnail? Is the content distinctive or helpful or useful, etc.?
John Mueller lastly said that the merchant feed is another way to get products from a website to show as a rich result in Google.
Mueller answered:
“There’s also the possibility to submit a feed to your merchant center account, to show products there. This is somewhat separate, and has different requirements which I’ll link to. Often a CMS or platform will take care of these things for you, which makes it a bit easier.”
Mueller linked to this page:
Onboarding Guide – Create a feed
There’s also another page about Rich Snippets, which is more about text snippets:
Product snippet (Product, Review, Offer) structured data
While John Mueller listed four ways to get product rich results, Google Search Experiences, it’s not always as easy as 1, 2, 3, and 4. There are always nuances to be aware of.
Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours podcast at the 7:00 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ViDI Studio
I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO, evolving along with the search engines by keeping up with the latest …
Conquer your day with daily search marketing news.
Join Our Newsletter.
Get your daily dose of search know-how.
In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers.
Copyright © 2024 Search Engine Journal. All rights reserved. Published by Alpha Brand Media.

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Video: Google Monopoly Ruling, Ranking Volatility, Million Dollar Ad Bugs, Search Console Recommendations & More – Search Engine Roundtable

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For the original iTunes version, click here.
This week, we covered the big ruling that Google is officially a monopoly, a federal judge ruled. Google search ranking volatility heated up the day after that ruling. Google served ads for products from other merchants, paid for by other advertisers, which is why they pulled down reporting. Google then issued million dollar LSA credits, by accident, it was a bug also – Google fixed it all. Google Search Console has a new recommendations feature that is rolling out slowly. Bing may have had a search algorithm update on May 29th but Microsoft denied it. There is this new SEO scam going around, beware. Google doesn’t avoid crawling more expensive to crawl page. Google Search snippets labels for “you may like.” Google local knowledge panels are interactive in some cases. Google Local Service Ads now tell us they may show your photos in the ads, and the photos can impact ad rank. Google Shopping product images may show user review images. Google Business Profiles added “see also” which is not fun for many small businesses. Google Ads will transition smart campaigns to performance max campaigns. Google Ads is testing call extensions with advertisers/business name. Google Ads is testing “featured options” ad formats. Google Ads released version 17.1 of the API. Google Trends has a new trending now page. Apple maintains a search index of billions of websites. YouTube shared some YouTube SEO advice and tips That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
Sponsored by Similarweb, the all-in-one- strategic SEO software. Get clarity of the SEO landscape through competitor analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, SERP insights and more. With industry-leading traffic and keyword data, based on real user journeys, Similarweb gives SEO professionals the whole picture so they can strategize smartly and drive sustainable business growth.
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