Post of the Week
Does Google's news algorithm display political bias? (Thread)
This thread has done the rounds on Twitter, and rightly so, it's fantastic. James Tozer analysed whether Google displays political bias in their search results.
Content
How to Win Featured Snippets Like a Boss - interview Izzi Smith
An interview with Izzi Smith by the lovely folk at ContentKing. Izzi discusses how to leverage the power of Featured Snippets to your advantage 🔥
Tech
How to Correctly Implement Pagination for SEO & User Experience
Love this pragmatic article on how to correctly implement pagination by Lily Ray, with three different approaches.
Exponential smoothing for time series forecasting in R
This one is for all of the techies out there. I have a somewhat love hate relationship with SEO forecasts. Partly because most agency forecasts are ludicrous, and partly because forecasting is so complex, it interests me. This post is a good introduction to time series forecasting in R, and how to use exponential smoothing.
Case Study
12 reasons your SEO traffic is plateauing and how to fix it
We've all seen plateauing performance in SEO. It hurts. And as Kevin acknowledges in this article, it's seldom as a result of one thing. There are some core issues that cause organic traffic to plateau and he has listed most of them in his most recent post.
Tools
How to Identify Keyword Cannibalisation (Tool)
Brilliant Data Studio Dashboard from the guys at StrategiQ. This report makes it easy to identify duplication and explore cannibalisation. Superb effort 👏
So...just a few days after Google pre-announced then launched a core algorithm update, they rolled out a change to display more diverse search results. In a nutshell this means only a maximum of two results from the same domain should now display in search results for a query (kinda).
This is such a positive change. It means websites such as Pinterest should now not monopolise queries where the user intent is to discover images. My first thoughts when the change rolled out was to analyse those such as Pinterest which would have undoubtedly been affected, as it presents a huge opportunity for smaller players. Positions for queries have opened up; it's your chance to rank for them.
On a final, but completely unrelated note, I recently found something really, really cool.
If you input document.designMode = 'yes'; into console on Chrome dev tools, you can edit texts on the front-end on the fly. Check this out
I've always edited it in the code - perhaps I'm a noob.
Enjoy the issue!
Andrew Charlton