Another week’s press review with a particular focus on Google, the changes and updates it has made, and the ways SEOs can best respond to and take advantage of them. Although it might feel tedious at times trying to keep up with Google, it is part of our job and keeping up ensures our campaigns are successful.

1. Early Signs Of A Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update

Half of an SEO’s job is grappling with Google Search Engine’s indexing changes - a small change could move your website from the first position to the second page and devastate your business and lose you a ton of money. This is why most SEOs follow the news about the Google Search Engine very closely preparing to respond quickly to any changes. This brings us to this news - some SEOs have found signs of some changes in the algorithm, but the changes and their effects are still unclear. You should still be aware of it, however.EDIT (03.06.2019): Google June 2019 Core Update is already here!.Read more: Early Signs Of A Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update [seroundtable.com]

2. Google to No Longer Display Text-Only AdSense Ads

Google in an effort to make its ad-selling business more profitable and provide a better experience to its users has decided to no longer support text-only AdSense ads. This came with a larger batch of changes that included other updates like making all ads responsive by default and removing the obsolete experiments report in the reports tab.Read more: Google to No Longer Display Text-Only AdSense Ads [searchenginejournal.com]

3. Goodbye to Average Position on Google SERPs

The average position was a data point originally intended to tell you about the position of your ad relative to other ads on the page. However, it has some limitations and can give you an inaccurate impression of how your ad is doing. Because the average position doesn’t tell you where in the page your ad is displayed only its position - for example, your ad might be displayed at the top or at the bottom of the page and still be the second ad displayed on the page, and we all know how important it is to be at the top of the page. That’s why Google decided to make it obsolete in favor of two new data points.Read more: Goodbye to average position on Google SERPs [searchenginewatch.com]

4. Search Intent: The Overlooked ‘Ranking Factor’ You Should Be Optimizing for in 2019

Accounting for intent is one of the biggest improvements Google has done to their search algorithm in years. In a move to infer the intent of the user’s query and present relevant information, Google now analyzes all content it indexes into four categories based on the tone and intent of the article: Informational, Navigational, Transactional, Commercial investigation. The content of the article matching the intent of the search query will increase the chance of it appearing at the top of the SERP by two or three folds.

Read more: Search Intent: The Overlooked ‘Ranking Factor’ You Should Be Optimizing for in 2019 [ahrefs.com]

5. Time For Google To Update Your Favicon In Search?

Since Google decided to change how they display resulted in the SERP and have decided to include the website’s favicon when they index it, the way they do it has been a popular topic of debate. This article focuses on the time it takes for Google to update the SERP when you update your website’s favicon.Read more: Time For Google To Update Your Favicon In Search? [seroundtable.com]

6. Attacked by Negative SEO? Lost Rankings? Read This!

We’ve all heard about negative SEO by now: Google penalizes websites that have a lot of backlinks from spammy and distrusted websites. That’s why the disavow tool that you can use to tell Google to ignore those backlinks has been quite popular lately, but how useful is that tool? What if you don’t regain your ranking even after using it? Does it even serve any purpose at all? This article provides the background of the tool, Google’s engineers’ feelings about it, and how you can deal with negative SEO.Read more: Attacked by Negative SEO? Lost Rankings? Read This [searchenginejournal.com]

7. How to Rank Higher on Google (6 Easy Steps)

The SEO world is in constant change, and it is hard for someone who wants to get into the field to learn where to start - partially because most tutorials and articles on the matter are from a few years ago and grossly outdated and partially because there aren’t a lot of clear authorities on the net to receive information from. Ahrefs is responsible for one of the most widely used tools in the SEO world, and their blog provides very high-quality content on everything SEO, and this tutorial on how to start with SEO isn’t any different.Read more: How to Rank Higher on Google (6 Easy Steps) [ahrefs.com]

8. Google Can Crawl Web Workers That Schedule Work Immediately

Google Crawler has a well-known problem with dynamically generated HTML, and in certain cases, you need to perform certain manual actions to make sure your site gets indexed correctly. Web workers are pieces of javascript code that runs independently of the user interface in an HTML file, and if you want it to get indexed, Google advises you run it immediately after the page loads if you want the crawler to detect it.Read more: Google Can Crawl Web Workers That Schedule Work Immediately [seroundtable.com]

9. A Guide to Implementing Google’s “How-to” Schema

Google recently introduced a new feature in its SERP, much like the answer box, now there is a new box that provides answers to how-to questions by showing you a list of step by step actions you need to take. This is an on-going effort by Google to make the SERP more useful to the user, and if you want to take advantage of the new schema, you need to support the special schema Google introduced for this function.

Read more: A guide to implementing Google’s “How-to” schema [searchenginewatch.com]

10. Broken Link Building: What You Need to Know to Get Links

Broken links happen due to a myriad of reasons: updating the content, removing the content, abandoning the website, etc. A website with many broken links loses its authority and its ranking on the various search engines’ result pages. That’s why a method has been popular among SEOs to increase backlinks pointing to their website - look for websites with broken links and alert the webmaster about it and offer your content as a possible replacement. This method is a bit unorthodox, but a successful link building campaign requires various approaches, and this article will tell you all about the ways you can utilize this method successfully.Read more: Broken Link Building: What You Need to Know to Get Links [searchenginejournal.com]

Conclusion

This week, we had some excellent tutorials and guides on how to effectively perform broken link building, increase your ranking in the SERP, and adopt the “how-to” schema to boost traffic and make your content more presentable. These all present great reads that will help you level up your SEO skills and approach campaigns more strategically.