The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
In this episode, we talk about Google’s new update to search, how images affect SEO, and Facebook’s ranking signals for comments. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
Google search update aims to show more diverse results from different domain names
Barry Schwarts for Search Engine Land
Google tweeted that they were making changes to the search engines results page in order to show a wider variety of results. Google will now be restricting the same domain showing up more than once in a SERP. Google has said that the update isn’t perfect just yet and will continue to make improvements and tweaks like they do with all their updates. It seems as though you will still be able to see multiple results for most branded searches.
“However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search,”
Key Takeaways:
- Google will be treating domains and subdomains as one website. This means that if you are hosting your blog on a subdomain this update will likely impact both sites equally.
- This should only impact the core results only. This means that featured snippets like video, image carousels, or other vertical search features will still be listed among the other core results.
- Why you should pay attention to this: If you are putting a lot of your focus to dominating one specific search, you may need to rethink your gameplan. This is a perfect reason to start to adopt the Pillar – Cluster content model. This will allow you to rank for related queries that all relate back to the same core idea.
How Images Affect SEO: Can Adding a Diagram Really Drive Rankings?
Andy Crestodina for Orbit Media
As crawlers continue to evolve and search engines get more sophisticated, images are becoming more and more important. Previously, text was the only thing that crawlers could understand. Now we are seeing that images are having a more influential role when it comes to linking and ranking. This article by Andy Crestodina identifies 6 ways that images can help with your rankings.
“We used to recommend adding an image to every article. Now we recommend adding an image to every scroll depth of every article. So there is never a point at which the visitor doesn’t see something of visual interest.”
- 1. Image source link building with contributor quotes
- 2. Make friends with copyright violators
- 3. Make a new page and target the “diagrams” or “charts” phrases
- 4. Improving mobile search snippets
- 5. Win with images in featured Snippets
- 6. Increased dwell time and positive “user interaction signals”
Key Takeaways:
- Featured snippets are now appearing for almost 15% of all searches. Even when an article is ranking for a featured snippet, Google may be pulling in an image from a related search to round out the result.
- Images are more likely to get links rather than plain text or a quote. This article recommends that if you’re creating custom images for your article you should periodically do a reverse image search to make sure blogs that are using your image are properly linking back to your site.
Making Public Comments More Meaningful
Facebook Newsroom
Facebook released an update from their newsroom talking about how they rank comments in addition to posts. There are a handful of signals that Facebook pays attention to in order to show people relevant and high-quality comments.
“To improve relevance and quality, we’ll start showing comments on public posts more prominently when:The comments have interactions from the Page or person who originally posted; or
- “The comments or reactions are from friends of the person who posted”
- “The comments or reactions are from friends of the person who posted.”
This effort by Facebook is a continuation of their push for more meaningful interactions within their platform. These additions to algorithms will help people see better content that better aligns to their interests.
Key Takeaways:
- Any piece of your content that users are commenting on is going to lift that post to others that might not see it right away.
- This addition means that you should stay on top of any comments. This means liking comments, replying, or having an extended conversation within your post.
App Of The Week
Organic Research: Subfolder Data
The Subfolder Data analyzer from SEM Rush helps you perform organic research of competitors or your own website. This helps you better understand how much traffic a specific section of a website is getting.
Use Cases:
- Understand how much traffic a competitor may be getting to their blog.
- See how well a certain section of the website ranks compared to the main site
- Find out which subfolders hold more domain authority
The Lightning Round: What We’re Reading This Week
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- Lyrics Site Accuses Google of Lifting Its Content
- Adobe Research and UC Berkeley: Detecting Facial Manipulations in Adobe Photoshop
- Google launches new search menu with icons
- The most popular social media networks each year, gloriously animated
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
