Post of the Week
Advanced Keyword Research: Four Tactics You're (Probably) Not Using
I always get a little bit excited when Glen releases a new post. He's always experimenting with new approaches, and offers a refreshing take on keyword research in his latest article. He discusses 4 advanced strategies to find the most incredible keywords to target, and niches to enter. Check it out!
News
Making it easier to discover datasets
Google launched a new search engine this week; datasets. I'm still not entirely sure how we can take advantage of this just yet, but with the rise of machine learning and AI, data repositories are only going to grow in demand.
Content
Featured Snippets: Tips and tricks on reaching the top
There's a ton of posts on featured snippets these days, and for good reason, there's a load of opportunity! This one is a smasher from Emily Potter which describes a data-led approach to discovering the right queries to focus on for achieving featured snippets.
Tech
Under the Hood of Uber's Experimentation Platform
I found this article fascinating. There are over 1,000 experiments running on Uber's platform at any given time! The article runs through their experimentation methodologies, use cases and case studies. Although this isn't directly related to SEO, I think there's a lot you can take from it on how SEOs can start to scratch the surface of experimentation.
Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond - Moz
Mobile-first-indexing impacts links in a big way. Tom Capper from Distilled, highlights the importance of maintaining a similar linking structure on mobile as desktop, but presenting it in way that is appropriate for the device.
Google AMP Can Go To Hell
With AMP, the general perception is that Google is trying to create better experiences online. Up until this point though, Google has pretty much enforced the standard by making it critical to appear in Top Stories on mobile. By forcing adoption, is Google trying to monopolise the web? Barry Adams talks us through his thoughts in his latest blog post.
I thought I'd lead this week's issue with a bit of a rant on how Google is stripping back the information we have available. Google made an update to how Search Console reports query data around two weeks back. Now, and going-forward, Google is removing 'anonymous' queries, defined as those which have only been searched for by a small number of users, from the data when a user applies a filter.
The impact of this change varies from one website to the next, but in the main, it has made it a nightmare for reporting year-on-year data when using filters. Our data is now completely skewed. There are ways in which we can still get accurate year-on-year data by summing last year's query data as opposed to using Google's aggregated values, but it's a bit of a work around - If anyone has an easy way to resolve this, I'm all ears. 👂
Google followed this update by moving Search Console out of Beta. Despite it being a lot of prettier, in my opinion, unless there are equivalent features migrated from the old Search Console to the new, it will be lacking. I just hope Google doesn't yet again withhold useful information, that'll add more guess work to our projects.
Andrew Charlton