Brodie Clark’s Post

Semrush Sensor is now picking up AI Overviews as of May 17th. This should be considered the day that they officially launched for non-logged in users in the US. Important stats based on todays data: • They appear for 0.55% of searches on desktop and 0.81% on mobile • Featured snippets declined a very small amount (from 4.82% to 4.67%) on this day on mobile, unchanged on desktop • ‘Health’ 🙄 and ‘People & Society’ were the categories with the most AI overviews of all with 4.64% and 4.87% on mobile *Featured snippets actually increased for ‘Health’ category but declined for ‘People & Society’ on launch day • Some categories still have zero AI overviews on both devices such as ‘Shopping’, ‘Arts & Entertainment’, and ‘Food & Drink’. Overall as a SERP feature in the US, AI overviews are still quite rare to appear. I would expect Google to be doing a lot of testing in this area in the weeks to come.

SEOs of the world: grab your popcorn. You are about to witness the web migration of a lifetime. Twitter is now 302 redirecting all URLs to use http://x.com as the default. Up until this point, only some sub-domains and shareable links were migrated. Why are they using a 302 redirect at this stage? I can only guess, but I expect this is a precautionary measure while the default is changing to signify to Google that they aren't quite ready yet. Am expecting this to change to a 301 very soon, with the inevitable chaos to follow. Google will likely stop showing twitter carousels at least temporarily, which will have a significant impact on their traffic. Are you seeing x.com as the default when you log into twitter?

Big News: Google will be launching the Search Generative Experience (SGE) to everyone in the US this week and will be bringing it to more countries soon. Google believes that there has been positive user feedback – I've seen the opposite personally. Users aren't preferring it over normal search results based on forums I've seen. This should be interesting to watch. #GoogleIO

SEO News: Google is now testing the 'Discussions and forums' SERP feature much more heavily outside of the US. Within the US, it currently appears for 25M queries where Reddit ranks, being a default feature of Search within this region. In the UK (see screenshot), the feature now appears for 64K queries within a testing phase, up from 600 queries a couple of weeks ago. Seeing similar increases within Canada, Australia, India and more. Reddit, Quora, along with other forums are about to become a lot more visible globally. #seo #searchengineoptimization #google

Well... Google did warn sites that this was coming. We just got the word that they're now rolling out manual actions (algorithmic component to follow) for "site reputation abuse". This change directly targets Parasite SEO and looks to have had a significant impact based on what I can see so far. The manual action notice that appears states: "Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals." It then goes on to specify what type of content this entails: "Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users." Illustrative examples of site reputation abuse include: • An educational site hosting a page about reviews of payday loans written by a third-party that distributes the same page to other sites across the web, with the main purpose of manipulating search rankings • A medical site hosting a third-party page about "best casinos" that's designed primarily to manipulate search rankings, with little to no involvement from the medical site • A movie review site hosting third-party pages about topics that would be confusing to users to find on a movie review site (such as "ways to buy followers on social media sites", the "best fortune teller sites", and the "best essay writing services"), where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings • A sports site hosting a page written by a third-party about "workout supplements reviews", where the sports site's editorial staff had little to no involvement in the content and the main purpose of hosting the page is to manipulate search rankings • A news site hosting coupons provided by a third-party with little to no oversight or involvement from the hosting site, and where the main purpose is to manipulate search rankings If your site fits into either of these categories or has received a manual action, then Google recommends excluding this third-party content from Search indexing. #seo #searchengineoptimization #spam #google

In need of a free Looker Studio template for SEO to assess your latest ranking changes? You're in luck. Aleyda has created a brilliant template for Google Search Console data that features MoM & YoY comparisons across several views. Grab a copy: https://lnkd.in/gN9d4Xb4 #seo #searchengineoptimization #google

While there is often complexity involved with ranking in Google organic product grids, there's often simple quick-wins to go after. Title optimisation is a big one. Often times, the top ranking results will have exact mention of the search term. It can be as simple as having full mention of a query to gain more visibility. As an example, the Amazon product page is the only product in the grid that mentions all 4 words from the search term within the title. No other product in the grid has this, so Amazon is given a ranking advantage as a result. In general, my preference is to have similar content located in the product page title, the title tag, and the feed title. But it's really the feed title that has the final say when it comes to product grid rankings. It is the feed title that is used within the grid itself, so if the feed title is missing the important queries, then your chances of ranking prominently can be greatly diminished. If you work with an eCommerce store, product grids are effectively a global SERP feature at this point. Use the Semrush 'Popular Products' filter to locate opportunities, act upon them, then enjoy more merchant listings traffic and revenue. #seo #searchengineoptimization #ecommerce

Often get asked "Is SEO still a thing?". Well, yeah. Pretty much every major website in the world either has a full-time SEO employee or gets external assistance at minimum. There's trends that come and go but SEO isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Interesting. Google seems to be considering moving back to labelling their ads with the standard 'Ad' label instead of 'Sponsored'. Within this mobile test, the favicon/site name is also removed from the search result, which actually contrasts with organic results below which have a favicon by default. It's been 1.5 years since Google officially made the switch to using the "Sponsored" label from "Ad". They also were testing a "Promoted" label in the lead up to this change. Is Google considering a reversal to their ad label change? What do you think of this test and Google's intentions behind it? #seo #searchengineoptimization #google

If you work in eCommerce SEO, make sure you're getting the credit you deserve. Misattribution is common with free listings within Google Search due to sites misusing an old method within their feeds This can apply to features such as product grids, product knowledge panels, the shopping tab and more. All being organic surfaces that have a high chance of receiving a conversion. While auto-tagging within Merchant Center generally does the job for attribution in GA4 (in terms of tracking sales for specific URLs), what can happen is a misuse of the [link] and [mobile_link] attributes being assigned to "google" and "cpc" for all results within the feed itself. The correct approach should be to use [link] and [mobile_link] for free listings for "google" and "organic" instead. This would mean that the parameters within the example provided would then be attributed to SEO. Otherwise, it is also completely fine to use the standard autotagging settings within Merchant Center for tracking free listings. With this approach, this traffic is automatically categorised as ‘Organic Shopping’ in GA4 or alternatively you can filter by pages with ‘&srsltid=‘ included in them. If your settings are incorrect, then I would suggest getting this fixed. Clicks on these organic features should be attributed to SEO, not Paid. #seo #searchengineoptimization #ecommerceseo