SEOFOMO is brought by Conductor, PreWriter, WeGlot 🙌
Would you like to advertise? Ask here!​

🗞️ Search Updates and News from Search Engines

​

​Google Discontinues Sitelinks Search Box
​John Mueller / Google Product Updates
​Google will be removing the Sitelinks Search Box visual element starting November 21, 2024. “This doesn't affect rankings or the other sitelinks visual element, and won't be listed in the Search status dashboard”.

​

​Google Now Recommends Higher Resolution Favicons
​Roger Montti / Google Search Guidelines
​Google updated its documentation to recommend higher-resolution favicons: "we recommend using a favicon that’s larger than 48x48px so that it looks good on various surfaces".

​

​Google Revises URL Parameter Best Practices
​Matt G. Southern / Google Search Guidelines
​Google updates Search documentation with standardized URL parameter guidelines, recommending "=" and "&" for optimal website crawling.

​

​Google Published a Google Trends Documentation page
​Google Search Central / Google Product Updates
​Google published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to better understand your market and find information that can help you as you're developing your content strategy and refining how you talk to your audience.

​

​Google’s Answer on Ideal Content Length for SEO
​Roger Montti / Google Search Q&A
​John Mueller's answer on content length challenged assumptions and encouraged a different approach to content strategy.

​

​John Mueller On How To Handle Legacy AMP Subdomains
​Matt G. Southern / Google Search Q&A
​John Mueller advises site owners on managing outdated AMP subdomains, suggesting redirects or complete DNS removal.

​

​Google: It's Tempting To Optimize For Tool Metrics; There's No SEO Shortcuts
​Barry Schwartz / Google Search Q&A
​John Mueller shares clarification on Moz's DA, how Google is not impacted by it, the temptation to optimize for SEO tools, a theory on why SEO is interesting to many, thinking longer term, and what it means to be unique.

​

​Google Trends for Journalists [Video]
​Google Search Central / Google Trends Tutorials​
​Daniel Waisberg and Hadas Jacobi share how journalists can use Google Trends to create data-driven stories. They also explore practical techniques to create data-driven news stories by leveraging trending searches.

​

​Google’s AI Fails At 43% Of Finance Queries, Study Finds
​Matt G. Southern / Google AI Trends
​A study finds Google's AI overviews provide misleading or inaccurate information in 43% of finance-related searches.

​

​​Don't wait until next week to learn about the latest search updates! Subscribe to the SEOFOMO News Whatsapp channel​

🚀 Achieving SEO Success Today: It's about Brand Authority and Product Execution Alignment

​

The elephant in the SEO room nobody talks about is the role of brand authority in SEO success.

​

Although we usually share about the challenges of securing SEO execution buy-in and resource alignment, which are pretty much product management challenges usually found at bigger sites (mostly due to bureaucracy) we almost never talk about the powerful role having an authoritative brand has in SEO. Why is branding, in particular, brand positioning critical for SEO?

​

Brand positioning “aims to create a unique image, value proposition, and identity for a brand in the consumer's mind.”
​
We can argue that the sites that tend to be continuously hit and struggle with Google (with exceptions of course), have an issue with brand positioning:

• Targeting topics outside their expertise.
• Giving a bad user experience, from UX to low-quality, shallow information for the sake of more revenue.
• Don't attract a high share of branded searches and/or direct traffic.

​

Also, sites with strong online branding efforts that get SEO involved, taking users' search needs into account, while optimizing and leveraging campaigns:

• Become more popular faster by attracting relevant backlinks thanks to their promotional actions and useful, attractive product resources.
• Have usually a higher CTR in SERPs for non-branded queries, due to higher trust and better brand recognition vs other well ranked players.
• Have a continuously increasing trend of branded searches of whether "warmer" potential new users that already recognize them, more likely to convert with them if given the right "bottom of the funnel" information they were looking for at that stage of their journey and/or of existing customers who need additional insights to keep using the brand products/services to upsell/cross-sell to, benefiting by good retention rates and lower churn thanks to a better-optimized post-sales web experience.

​

All the shifts Google is making look to reward real, authoritative brands (rather than "made for Google sites with shallow, or no real product/service experience or expertise". And yes, we can argue they’re not quite yet there … but that’s the goal.

​

Learn how to leverage and grow brand recognition within an SEO process (including tools to use) in my presentation from Ahrefs Evolve: Achieving SEO Success Today.

👌 This week's SEO Awesomeness

​

​The Billion-Dollar World of Parasite SEO: How to Cash In
​Lars Lofgren / Search Trends
​"The bias that Google shows to major domains is simply absurd at the moment."

​

​A Nightmare on Affiliate Street – How Google is picking off sites one by one that are violating its ‘Site reputation abuse’ spam policy
​Glenn Gabe / Search Trends
​"It seems Google is improving its systems for understanding when content located in subdomains or subfolders is “independent or starkly different from the main content of the site."

​

​Wrong Direction: Google’s Leadership Shakeup Long Time Coming
​Kevin Indig / Search Trends
​Get insights into the recent changes in Google's leadership: Sundar Pichai's latest move and what it means for the company.

​

​Beyond SEO: Why Search Data Is Powerful Market Intelligence Data
​Tory Gray / Search Trends
​Discover the untapped potential of search data; gain insights into markets, behavior, and preferences to make more informed business decisions.

​

​How to scrape customer reviews for actionable insights
​Giulia Panozzo / SEO Automation
​Giulia shows how to get qualitative data directly from customers and scrape brand reviews with Python with a Colab included in this guide.

​

​How to Create Custom Heatmap Audits With the Screaming Frog SEO Spider
​Miloš Gizdovski / SEO Automation
​Miloš explains how to create a heatmap report for any group of similar pages using Screaming Frog to feature the trend of specific parameters over a period of several months or even a year.

​

​TF-IDF Text Analysis in SEO
​Sara Taher / Technical SEO
​Learn what is TF-IDF, what are the benefits of analyzing SERPs using this method, and what that means for SEOs. Sara goes through it in this guide.

​

​When is cloaking a good idea? [Presentation]
​Victor Pan / General SEO
​Victor shares why and when cloaking might be considered as a solution of certain challenges in an SEO project.

​

​Elevating Your SEO Career and Team in the AI Era — Whiteboard Friday [Video]
​Travis Tallent / SEO Careers
​Travis goes through how to thrive in an AI era with the SOAR framework: Streamline processes, Orchestrate teams, Automate tasks, and Reposition your focus for career success.

​

​​See more SEO Conversations in the SEOFOMO Forum or get the latest SEO news alerts in the SEOFOMO News Whatsapp Channel.​

💸 Latest SEO Jobs

• ​SEO Director, Content Planning at TrendyMinds​
• ​Sr. SEO Specialist at Searchbloom​
• ​SEO Team Lead (Contract) at WebMatriks Technologies ​
• ​SEO Content Strategist at Guidebook​
• ​Sr. SEO Analyst at LegalZoom​
• ​Content and SEO Specialist at Eppo​
• ​Head of SEO Solution at Milestone​
• ​Senior Manager, SEO & Website at Azul ​
• ​SEO Specialist at Owner​
• ​Senior SEO Specialist, Lending at NerdWallet​

​

​See more SEO Jobs in the SEOFOMO Job board and subscribe to the email alerts​

🛠 Free(mium) SEO Tools

​

​Black Friday SERP Product Report [Looker Studio Dashboard]
​Nozzle
​Which are the top players featured the most for product carousels in Black Friday most popular SERPs? Monitor them for free with this dashboard.

​

​Validate XML Sitemap​
​SEOTesting
​Validate your XML sitemap with one click.

​

​GSC crawl stats downloader
​Valentin Pletzer
​Efficiently download crawl data from the Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report.

​

Are you looking for more SEO Tools? Take a look at the SEOFOMO SEO Toolbox​

🎙️ Upcoming SEO Events

​

​The eCommerce SEO Summit
​Digitaloft / Online / Free / November 6, 2024
​​Join Aleyda Solis, Brodie Clark, Freddie Chatt, and more for a half-day free virtual event to help you accelerate your online store's organic success.

​

​International Search Summit Barcelona
​Webcertain / Barcelona, Spain / €275 / November 14, 2024
​Join Aleyda Solis, Martin Splitt, Nitin Manchanda, and more to get international SEO and PPC tips and tactics in Barcelona.

​

​See more upcoming SEO events in the new SEOFOMO Events Section​

[Announcement]​
​⚡ Submit Your SEO Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals for 2024

Do you have an SEO targeted Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal?

If so, submit it for free and it will get featured on this SEOFOMO Hub Deals Page for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It will be featured in the SEOFOMO newsletter too!

​

​