This shift comes after years of Google pushing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) as a key ranking signal for Google News publishers.

Suffice it to say, times have changed.

While many SEO outlets predicted that this effectively marks the end of AMP, Mediavine decided to put this theory to the test with The Hollywood Gossip.

Our very own celebrity gossip site passes Page Experience on mobile and desktop, and gets significant traffic from Google News, making it a good test case.

We officially removed AMP from THG on December 9, 2021, and have been monitoring traffic, search rankings and revenue ever since. The conclusion?

AMP is dead. And unlike when Miley Cyrus killed pageviews, she was not the perpetrator. 

If anything, the teen crooner turned twerking, tongue-wagging pop star helped push THG to run AMP in the first place. So she’s more like an accomplice.

Don’t blame Miley, though. This time it’s Trellis coming in like a wrecking ball.

What This Means For Publishers

For publishers not in Google News, you can safely kill AMP immediately, if not sooner.

The benefits of AMP have pretty much always been strongest for Google News publishers, as they’ve been eligible for the top articles carousel.

Now that Core Web Vitals and Page Experience are good enough for those same Google carousels, the use case for AMP is virtually gone.

NOTE: More importantly, if you aren’t in Google News, get in there. Thanks to the recently launched Google Publisher Center, it’s easier than ever to submit your site.

To be in Google News, you don’t actually need to be a news website. The Hollywood Gossip is not The Hollywood News, after all. (Food Fanatic and TV Fanatic are in there, as well.) Perhaps “News” is a misnomer and it should be called Google Today or Google Lifestyle?

But that’s for an Internet Giant even bigger than Mediavine to assess, not us. Anyway. Now that everyone is a Google News publisher, back to our regularly scheduled program.

Can I Fire AMP Literally Today?

Whoa. Deep breaths. Before you officially axe AMP, you need to be passing Core Web Vitals and Page Experience, ideally on both mobile and desktop. Are you?

Find out with our Page Experience checklist. If you have technical resources, we have a great step-by-step guide on how we did this for The Hollywood Gossip and Food Fanatic.

If you don’t, we have a great WordPress theme framework that does this for you. Perhaps you’ve heard us mention Trellis?

Next Steps

There are no next steps once you’ve removed AMP from your site. No need to notify Google of anything.

As long as your website is submitting to Google News, you’re properly setting Article Schema, and are passing Page Experience, your traffic should stay the same, or even increase, as was the case with THG.

More importantly, since non-AMP pages are eligible to run the full set of Mediavine ads, including the Universal Player, your RPMs should increase.

Sound too good to be true? Still nervous to take the plunge? Wait until we show you the results from our THG experiment!

What Happened When We Ditched AMP

First, let’s head to Google Search Console, to see what happened to our Search Appearance.

Under Performance > Search Results, let’s check on Search Appearance below. Clicking on AMP Article, you’ll see a decline. 

However, you should notice a huge jump in “Good page experience,” which are the pages replacing AMP.

In fact, Google offers a chart which compares them; you can see how we more than made up for the lack of AMP in Google Search results:

As for actual Google News traffic? 

That’s more complicated, since for many sites, traffic is seasonal or just plain unpredictable, e.g. heavily based on what Ye is saying about Kim that day.

If you do a rough comparison, though, there wasn’t much of a dip; you’ll see that for the most part, it’s been pretty consistent.

Spoiler: if things weren’t working, traffic would have plummeted. The slight drop you’re seeing is simply just due to a slow news (gossip?) week. 

Since Google Discover and organic search can also show AMP, if you have those pages, let’s do a quick ranking check there as well.

Discover is a little tricky since we didn’t really have 2020 traffic for a YoY comparison, but if you look at 12/9 before and after, you won’t see a significant loss.

If anything, CTR went up after taking down AMP, while the impressions and clicks continued to ebb and flow as Discover always does:

As far as organic traffic goes, we again saw no drop from 12/10 onwards in position, and if anything, there’s been an increase in rankings after the switch.

In short, it’s pretty safe to say we had no noticeable decrease in regular Google Search, Google News, or Discover.

If anything, one could argue we went up in all three. But that’s not where the biggest gains were or why we’re celebrating the death of AMP on THG. Let’s talk $$$.

RPM Impact

Disclaimer: Every website’s traffic is different. 

Disclaimer #2: Comparison is the thief of joy.

With that said, on The Hollywood Gossip, our Smartphone and Tablet traffic has monetized nearly 2.5x better than it did with AMP.

Some sites may see an even higher differential. There are many factors involved, but the increased number of ads you’ll be able to run now vs. with AMP make this a no-brainer.

THG is only one site, but it makes a compelling case. Nearly 25% of its traffic was flowing to AMP. That kind of boost on that amount of traffic has made a material difference.

With a near 60% increase in RPM, you can see why we’re shouting it from the rooftops.

TL;DR

AMP is Dead.

Spending the time (or installing Trellis) to pass Page Experience is worth it. So is applying to Google News, if you haven’t already.

The post AMP is Dead. Miley Cyrus Was Only Loosely Involved. appeared first on Mediavine.

We’ve discussed at length how specifically to update content to improve RPM and optimize for SEO, but today we’re focusing on a specific and surprisingly controversial aspect.

How to handle the modified and published date may not seem significant, but it can make a big difference when it comes to how your content is presented to Google and users.

Google’s Best Practices For Dates

Make eye contact and don’t talk about yourself the whole time. Just kidding. (Although that is generally good advice.)

When it comes to the calendar dates displayed on posts, Google recommends displaying a visible date – as in something users can see – while also outputting the date using Article schema.

Google requires that you output a published date (in schema), and recommends that you output the modified or updated time on the post as well.

The company’s specific threshold for when you should change the visible date to the user is when you’ve made substantial changes to the content.

Keep in mind that these are best practices, which differ from policies – violations of which can result in actual, punitive action against your site.

What we’ve discussed so far applies to your content and organic search results. Google News publishers must comply with a more specific set of guidelines.

Google News-Specific Policies For Republishing

If you’ve submitted your website to Google News via the Google Publisher Center, there are somewhat stricter policies for republishing.

[Side note: If you haven’t submitted your site, you should. Despite its name, Google News will also accept lifestyle sites, such as our own Food Fanatic, as approved publications.]

Google News’ best practices are roughly the same as for regular Google search results, but the publication date is required in order for the content to appear at all.

When it comes to Google News specifically:

• The visible date should be placed between the headline and the article body.
• The published date must be the original time in which the post was first published.
• You should display only one visible date.
• You should only change the modified date if substantial changes are made to the article, as with organic best practices (this is now a policy that can lead to you being removed from Google News).
• You cannot delete an old post and redirect it to a new one.

If this sounds too strict and makes you wary of Google News, it shouldn’t.

Most of these bullet points are more or less the same as Google’s regular best practices, and Google News can be a substantial source of traffic.

The significant difference for those publishing in Google News when compared to publishers at large? As of now, republishing for the sake of reappearing in Google News can cause a penalty, all the way up to a potential removal from Google News.

Should I Show the Published or Updated Date to Users?

Google recommends you show a published and/or updated date to a user. In that same Advanced SEO article, they advise only showing one date if Google is getting confused.

Given these two pieces of advice, combined with our own experience, we recommend showing only the updated date to readers, assuring Google will show the freshest date.

Your theme should hopefully support this (Trellis does, apologies for the shameless plug), but if not, you should be able to accomplish this with a quick filter.

Remember that Google will see the published date via your schema, and via your Google News site map if your SEO plugin is outputting one for you.

Should I Change the Published Date?

Per Google’s best practices, no. You should be changing the updated, or modified date, leaving the published date as the original date.

Still, we know a lot of publishers are doing this, undoubtedly with good intentions.

Hear us out and we’ll explain why it’s a common practice, but not necessarily the best one – and how there’s a better way to achieve our shared goals.

Why Are Bloggers So Into Republishing?

It’s no secret that Google and readers love fresh content.

Taking a 2017 article, giving it a 2021 date and republishing with some new content can often result in more clicks from search results and potentially a boost in your rankings.

Which is great, but correlation is not causation here.

A lot of that boost comes not from republishing the post, but from a side effect of republishing – the simple act of bringing that post back into your feed.

If you change only the modified date and bump the article back on to your homepage, you’ll effectively get the same boost without going against best practices or policies.

How do I do that, you’re asking?

We’ll tell you!

All the Benefits of Republishing With None of the Risk

To fully replicate the benefits of appearing in the feed – homepage links, showing up to RSS readers, appearing on category pages, etc. – you’ll need to change the WordPress “loop.”

The biggest benefit of republishing is that precious homepage link – and you can get this with any static homepage through a “recently updated” section, or manually placing it inside a “featured” or “top post” area (or whatever you choose to name it).

There are plenty of plugins that will let you change the order in which posts appear; you might be able to sort by modified dates, or manually push certain posts to the top.

For category links, you can create static category pages, or even add links inside the category description if your theme supports outputting that (like Trellis, which by design is optimized for SEO best practices).

Alternatively, you could use the “sticky” feature of WordPress to instantly jump to the top of category and feed pages. You’ll just have to remove this later on.

Mediavine-owned sites use a custom CMS (not WordPress) which includes a feature enabling us to re-insert posts at any point in the feed without changing the publication date. 

The long and short of it: There are lots of ways to reap the benefits you might get from changing the publication date, without running afoul of Google or altering the space-time continuum.

Your main goal should always be getting internal links to fresh content you just updated. Everything we’ve just described is just one piece of the puzzle.

Go through your related content and add new links. That plus a homepage link will take you a lot further than republishing ever could.

But I Still Want to Change the Publication Date! Is it Ever Okay?

Whether it’s regarding republishing or anything else, we’re here to tell you what we believe is the best course of action, based on our own experience and Google’s own guidance.

At the same time, we understand that if every component of SEO were an exact science, there wouldn’t even be SEO, because everyone would follow the same exact rules to the letter.

SEO experts are going to differ on certain topics, and this is one of them. Some believe strongly in republishing, as we’ve just discouraged you from doing.

If you want to trust them, and you aren’t a Google News publisher, you’ll probably be alright. We still don’t suggest this, but if you go that route, at least consider this the intent behind what we’re advocating.

These best practices are in place, and Google News has stricter policies on top of those, for a reason: Google doesn’t want to confuse or mislead readers. Neither do you (we hope).

Unless you’re attempting to deceive Google by changing the publication date to artificially improve rankings, or bump yourself back up in Google News on an old story, you’ll likely be fine.

Just make sure you’ve actually made substantial changes if you’re changing the publication date. Did you change the headline, add new photos, add or replace significant content, etc.?

Put yourself in your readers’ shoes. If they just saw this same article yesterday and again today. Would it read like two different posts? If so, a new publication date will probably not hurt you.

Important: If You Have Dates in Your URLs, Don’t Republish

It’s important to note that if you have dates built into your URLs, you should not republish posts.

Doing so will cause a change in the permalink of the post, causing a redirect. Whatever SEO expert or experts you listen to on this subject, you really don’t want to do this.

If you have dates in your URLs, I’d recommend following best practices, changing the modified date and finding a way to get that link using methods like we described above.

If you can, try to follow Google best practices and Mediavine’s best of both worlds approach.

The post Should I Republish Content? There’s a Better Way appeared first on Mediavine.

Should you delete content that’s old and/or not doing a lot for you?

Looking for a quick answer? Sorry. We’re going to make you power through a 1,555-word novel because this isn’t thin content we’ll be deleting anytime soon — you’ll get the cleverness of that joke in a second!

In truth, there are differing views on whether you should delete old content and why. But before we reach our verdict, there are some key concepts to understand.

SEO theorists who advocate for you to delete content lean heavily upon the following terms.

Thin Content

Thin content is like a thin argument — a page that provides little unique value to the reader.

Commonly, these are pages such as “hallway” or “doorway” pages, existing primarily to provide links to pages with content, while the page itself doesn’t have unique content. For example, remember when you were going to spend the entire summer creating delicious tomato recipes, so you created a tag and a category page for this content in advance? But then your tomato crop was hardly bumper and you ended up not writing a single post, so that tag and category page have no content?

We could write a whole blog post on this (it wouldn’t be thin, either!) but in short, if a page doesn’t provide direct SEO value to Google, why show it to Google? It’s not going to rank.

But is there any harm in thin content?

Since Google indexes everything on a per-page basis (see our PageRank post), there’s no overall harm to your site from having thin content.

The bigger concern is that it can actually impact the second concern:

“Crawl Budget”

The internet is very large, and even Google has finite resources when crawling every site.

This leads to the concept of crawl budget, or how much time Googlebot will spend browsing each of the pages on your site per day, week or month.

Basically, Googlebot has limited time for you and everyone else. Exactly how limited? That will vary by site and based on additional factors:

• Site Speed: The slower your site, the longer it takes to crawl. (Cough, you need to pass Core Web Vitals).
• PageRank: The more you have, the higher your authority and the more time Google can justify giving you resources compared to smaller sites. (The New York Times likely has a greater crawl budget than you do, regardless of how slow it may be.)
• Updating: A properly configured sitemap will tell Google how often your site is updated, but either way, Google will figure it out. If you only post once a month, and your older content is rarely updated, Google will crawl with less frequency. If you update regularly, Google will be there constantly. 

This is where thin content comes in. If Google finds a lot of it, you have two potentially problematic scenarios on your hands:

1. Squandering your limited crawl budget on thin pages when Google could be looking at more important ones, or worse;
2. Google lowering your crawl budget altogether if it encounters predominantly thin content.

So Should You Delete Content, or What?

After reading all that, you’re probably thinking about all the thin content you need to delete. Which is why our answer to the above questions may surprise you:

No! Don’t do it!

Even Google itself, in the article linked to above, says publishers shouldn’t worry about this. As long as you’re indexing fresh content (e.g. if your latest post is indexed that same day, or that same week if you post infrequently), then you have no issues with crawlability and can likely move on.

Secondly, it’s also important to note that old content isn’t necessarily thin.

If you wrote a post a decade ago, before you knew about SEO, or before you wrote longer/more relevant posts for whatever reason, the older stuff may be shorter, but it likely isn’t thin.

Please remember, thin content doesn’t refer to the page’s length but its value; thin content means that it offers nothing unique to the reader.

Think about the summer of no tomatoes example from above, with the tag page you made for your new category which now houses a link to one whole post with no unique content ever created for it.

That’s thin.

So should you delete that tag/page? Well, 698 words later, allow me to introduce you to a strategy that I’ve used on Mediavine’s own sites with success.

Don’t Delete. Instead, Just Don’t Link.

Remember, Google’s crawler works like a spider, following the path of the web. It can only get from one page to the next via internal links.

If you simply stop linking to a page, Google stops crawling and indexing it.

As the old adage goes, if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a webpage isn’t linked to and can’t be crawled, does it still exist? (Yes, but also no.)

Going back to our example earlier, let’s say you have a bunch of tag pages that you never wrote unique content for. You could simply update your theme to stop linking to those tags.

The tag pages you do use? Switch them to a different taxonomy, such as categories.

If that doesn’t work for your overall strategy, simply remove the offending/thin tag from any posts and suddenly nothing will link to it.

Why is This Better Than Deleting?

Generally, because it’s safer. Again, paraphrasing the old saying: If a webpage has no links to it, does it exist?

In Google’s eyes, no. Not linking to a post has the exact same effect as deleting it.

So why is it better? Wouldn’t deleting said pages “speed up” your site by taking up fewer server resources? And just be faster than thinking all of this through?

As far as any modern database or hosting company is concerned, no. One page on a site will take up very little space with zero impact on your site speed.

There’s no risk involved in the act of not linking to a post or page. Removing links is safe. The dangers of deleting content, on the other hand, do exist.

What if you directly linked to that tag in another post, or unbeknownst to you, someone else on the internet linked to the tag page via a backlink?

If you delete a post without cleaning up the links back to it, you’re potentially wasting PageRank by sending it into the Vast Black Hole of Deletion.

That’s not a real term, although we should probably trademark it. You get the idea — sending PageRank into the void, never to be seen again.

Worse yet, what if the page or post you’re about to delete actually brings in traffic you may not realize it gets?

Our celebrity gossip website, The Hollywood Gossip, regularly sees traffic on posts from 5-10 years ago. A page can be stagnant for years, then all of a sudden take off once a Z-lister finds their way back into the news.

If we deleted the content, we’d lose that potential. Instead, we stopped linking to THG’s oldest content archives, keeping them alive while preserving our link equity and crawl budget.

Google still knows the old stuff is there; THG’s got the traffic on reality television stars from 2011 to prove it. This way, you get the benefits of deletion without any loss of traffic and potential PageRank.

What if You Redirect the Old Content?

“My SEO guy told me to redirect that deleted content to my homepage or some other content!”

No offense to that SEO guy, but fire that SEO guy.

Kidding. Mostly. Not really.

Redirecting does not fully transfer link equity, even in the best case scenario. Google’s own Matt Cutts has said some PageRank will dissipate or be diluted when doing this.

But more importantly, link equity only transfers through a redirect in the case of a change in URL, or a canonicalization.

For example, let’s say you changed your URL to remove the dates, and therefore, were simply telling Google that you moved a post from one URL to another.

Or let’s say you made your site https, or secure, (please tell me you have, it’s 2021, people), and set up a redirect from the old http:// structure to the new https://.

In those scenarios, you are transferring most of the PageRank, having properly used the redirect to indicate to Google that you moved the content.

If you’re deleting a post and then redirecting the content to anything but where you moved that post’s content, you’re losing the PageRank.

No 301 to the homepage, or even to a related post that isn’t a true replacement, will pass on the PageRank. The robots are too smart.

(Disclaimer: If you’re replacing the content you deleted, then a redirect will work.)

By and large, just remove links to any thin content you believe to be a problem. Don’t delete it.

Is it Ever Safe to Delete Content?

Of course. If you know there are no links to a post, internally and externally, and it hasn’t ranked on anything in over a year, and thus won’t cause a loss of links or traffic, you can axe it.

But again, what’s the point?

Unless you have the tools and knowledge to understand when it’s safe to delete, it’s generally just better to nix the links to thin content and call it a day.

Or, in the unlikely event that Kim Kardashian’s lawyer wants some salacious rumor taken down, you should probably go ahead and delete that, too.

Bottom line, you’re better off spending the resource of your limited time creating fresh content about Kim’s latest arm candy rather than worrying about deleting old posts about former flames.

The post Should You Delete Content or Just Stop Linking? An SEO Dilemma appeared first on Mediavine.

The much-anticipated (or at least much-talked-about) Google Page Experience algorithm is officially in effect as of Wednesday, June 16.

What do we know (and still not know) about the Page Experience algorithm change? Let’s break down all things Core Web Vitals.

First, it’s finally live.

According to Google Search Central, “the page experience update is now slowly rolling out,” and “Top Stories will begin using this new signal by Thursday.”

As previously stated, “it will be complete by the end of August 2021.”

Bottom line: This just went into effect and is a gradual process. No matter how much work you’ve put in to pass Core Web Vitals, you may not see much of a change immediately.

More likely, you won’t see significant changes until later this summer.

The good thing is that your hard work isn’t for naught; It will eventually pay off, and you still have time before the update is entirely in effect.

Another important thing to note is that right now, the update is only rolling out on mobile.

If you check out Google Search Console, you may have a new Page Experience page that will indicate how your website is faring on mobile.

With that said, how much does desktop matter?

While mobile is always the priority, you should absolutely optimize for both. During Google I/O, the company made it clear that it will be bringing Page Experience to desktop next.

We’ve also learned, per that same I/O discussion, that Google will be using what it calls RUM (Real User Metrics) or CruX (Chrome Reader User Experience).

Translation: The pagespeed scores reported by real users as they browse your site, found in PageSpeed Insights under origin or field summary, are the only numbers that matter.

But let’s get to the important stuff …

How Are Mediavine Publishers Doing with Core Web Vitals?

If you’re not familiar with Core Web Vitals, Google established three “pagespeed” metrics that publishers must hit in order to pass:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

While running ads, CLS has been the hardest of the three for our publishers to pass — until Mediavine released the industry’s first Optimize Ads for CLS in March.

(ASIDE: If you’re not running Optimize Ads for CLS, or haven’t turned on Optimize Ads for Page Speed mode on mobile and desktop, please do it now.)

With the release of Optimize Ads for CLS, it’s possible to pass all three of Google’s Core Web Vitals — and pass Page Experience — while running Mediavine ads.

We’re excited to announce that more than 1,500 Mediavine publishers are passing Core Web Vitals on mobile — far more than any other ad management company.

Once more for those in the back: 1,500 Mediavine publishers’ mobile sites are passing LCP, FID and CLS on their origin per CruX, the same values that Google will use for Page Experience.

The end of summer is looking bright for these publishers. But what if you’re not passing yet?

We’ll say it again, there’s still plenty of time. The Page Experience algorithm is now in effect, but you have until August until it’s fully rolled out.

But How Do I Pass Core Web Vitals, Eric?

Since you asked, I’ll show you!

Here’s a full explanation of how The Hollywood Gossip is passing Core Web Vitals. It’s not short, but if you’re up for the challenge, it shouldn’t be overwhelming.

If you’re feeling adventurous and are technically capable, the explanation linked above is a guide on how we got The Hollywood Gossip and Food Fanatic to pass on both Desktop and Mobile.

These two sites, which Mediavine owns and operates, are not running WordPress let alone our secret weapon, Trellis (more on that coming soon), but everything we did there is possible on WordPress, and as we said, both are passing on Desktop and Mobile with flying colors.

Plus, as I said at the beginning of the post, the rollout is slow. So you’ve got a little time. But we recommend getting to work ASAP.

The post Mediavine Core Web Vitals Update: What You Need to Know appeared first on Mediavine.

When it comes to confusing acronyms in cryptic emails, it’s hard to top the message many of you received regarding the use of SharedArrayBuffers (SABs, natch) without the use of COOP and/or COEP headers.

As a publisher, how could you even think about using SABs without COOP and/or COEP headers?

In related news… what are SABs, COOP and COEP?

If you are confused or have no idea you’re certainly not alone. Have no fear! We’re here to explain what those acronyms are, why you got this message and why you should ignore it and NOT change headers.

What are SharedArrayBuffers?

SharedArrayBuffers (SABs) are a data store (defined as a repository for storing and managing collections of data) used by websites which work across multiple “workers” or threads.

These data stores were able to operate across multiple websites, similar to a third-party cookie if run across an iframe. Basically, a clever use of an SAB could be used similarly to third-party cookies.

What many people don’t realize (and the reason you got this email) is that the end of third-party cookies is really the end of third-party storage.

This is a long way of saying that data storage across multiple websites — including SharedArrayBuffers — is no longer going to be a thing.

It’s no surprise that Firefox has already limited the contexts in which you could use SABs; Google Chrome, in its attempt to move towards a more privacy-centric web, is now doing the same.

What the heck are COOP and COEP Headers?

Sent along with any HTTP responses, headers are used to tell the web browser how to handle the web page they’re about to receive.

Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy (COOP) and Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy (COEP) are basically two headers that will tell a web browser that it’s operating in a secure or isolated context.

In a secure or isolated context, messages to SABs and other scripts won’t be able to leave or go across the domain.

While that sounds great, advertisements — including the Mediavine Script Wrapper itself — need to serve from a different domain. Running these headers would stop any third-party scripts from running.

So, should you add COOP and COEP headers to your site?

NO!

If you’re using Mediavine Ad Management, or any other ad provider, this will break your ads and most likely your website.

Why did I get this email?

So why you and why now? The reason this confusing, probably-over-your-head GSC alert cast such a wide net is that at least one ad vendor, Integral Ad Science (IAS), is using SABs in their measurement.

They’re an incredibly popular vendor in the ad tech space, so chances are if you’re serving ads, one of those ads is running IAS.

Therefore, in Google’s eyes, your website is using SABs. But you’re not actually using SABs.

If you just ignore this message, all that will happen is that IAS will break if it doesn’t fix its script by May 25 with the release of Chrome 91.

We’ve reached out to IAS to notify them, and we’re guessing many other people have as well. Chances are their script will be fixed by then, but regardless, you won’t need to worry.

If you want to be completely sure, consider a Plugin Audit

We know that Mediavine’s scripts don’t use SABs, and we know that most websites won’t have issues (SABs simply don’t come up very often) but we can’t speak to every bit of JavaScript a site might have.

When this issue came up, our engineers found at least one publisher site with a plugin that depends on SABs.

If you run a lot of plugins, we suggest a plugin audit – a great idea anyway, for speed purposes – to determine if any might cause issues.

Unfortunately, we cannot offer support help in determining whether your site is running SABs.

But won’t this impact my search engine rankings?

NO!

Although this message came from Google Search Console, it’s actually an email unrelated to Search Rankings.

They’re just trying to be a good ecosystem partner by communicating to publishers who, ironically, they think they’re helping by informing them about the potential problem with SABs.

But again, you’re almost certainly not using an SAB yourself. You probably didn’t even know what one is (and probably still don’t).

I repeat, this will NOT impact search rankings.

Beyond that, what should you do with this email?

Ignore it. Archive it. Delete it. Whatever you prefer to do with messages you don’t read or don’t need to take any action on, do that.

Because you probably aren’t running SABs yourself, all that will happen is that any scripts on your page running it won’t work May 25 — and that’s assuming they aren’t fixed by then, which they all but certainly will be.

This email was scary because of its unknown terms, but the contents itself are essentially nothing to worry about. It was just Google trying to help, even if it may have done the opposite.

We still love you, Google. Nobody’s perfect.

The post Google Search Console: New Requirements for SharedArrayBuffer Emails appeared first on Mediavine.

Today we’re welcoming the wonderful Sherry Smothermon-Short of Cub Scout Ideas and Painless Blog Analytics to the Mediavine blog. Sherry’s years of experience have taught her how to use data to grow and improve her blog. She loves sharing what she’s learned with other bloggers by providing information, resources, training and services. Here she’s sharing her expertise in Google Search Console to help you increase traffic to older content.

Sherry was an incredible guest during Summer of Live 2020, where she talked about Rocking Google Analytics, so we knew we had to have her back on the blog.

Hi Sherry!

One of my favorite ways to increase traffic to old posts is by working to improve the click through rate (CTR).

What exactly is a click through rate? Google Search Console defines it as the percentage of impressions that result in a click.

Does a good CTR move you up in rankings? There is a lot of debate in the SEO world about whether or not CTR impacts your ranking.

Personally, I don’t think it does. Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable published this article debunking the myth.

BUT… CTR absolutely impacts your traffic, and here’s an example.

Let’s say that one of my posts is getting 15,000 impressions a month, and my click through rate is 1%.

15,000 x .01 = 150

That means I’m getting 150 pageviews a month to that post.

I work on the post to improve my CTR, and it increases to 3%.

15,000 x .03 = 450

I have tripled my traffic to that post. How many of you would love to have your traffic tripled in a month?

To improve our CTR, we need to focus on improving our titles and meta descriptions.

But before you jump in and start on these, you need to strategically choose the posts that you should be working on.

How to choose which posts to update

None of us have unlimited amounts of time to work on our blogs, so we need to be smart about the posts we choose to update. We want to invest our time on tasks that give us the best ROI.

There are several factors that we need to consider before deciding to work on a post. Three of these are potential, search intent and competition.

Potential

We want to look for posts that have a high number of impressions, a decent position, but a low CTR.

What is considered a high number of impressions really depends on your site. A post with an average position (the same as or better than your site average) is a good choice.

Any one of these four posts would be good candidates for updating. They have a decent number of impressions for my site and niche, the average position for all of them is better than my site-wide average and the CTRs are all horrible compared to my site average.

But we don’t need to jump in immediately and start updating these because we have a little more analysis to do first.

Search Intent

What exactly is a person looking for when they search for a particular term? If I search for “pizza,” what am I looking for? The closest pizza restaurant? A pizza recipe? The different types of pizza?

If our post doesn’t match the intent of the keyword phrases we’re ranking for, it may not make sense to try to improve CTR. Instead, think about whether you can update the post to match the intent.

Let me give you an example:

One of my clients has a blog post about creating a dry creek bed to help with the drainage in her yard.

Her Google Search Console results for that post seem to indicate that this would be a good candidate for updating. She has lots of impressions, a decent page position and a low click through rate.

So, let’s see what queries she’s ranking for.

Based on these numbers, we should try to improve her CTR for the keyword phrase “dry creek bed vs French drain.”

We could stop our analysis here and start working on the post, but our ROI probably wouldn’t be the best.

Here are the results we get when we search for the term “dry creek bed vs French drain.”

Based on these results, it seems that someone searching for this term is looking for a comparison between the two. They’re probably trying to decide whether to put a French drain or a dry creek bed in their yard.

My client’s post is about how she created a dry creek bed, so it would be a better post for someone who has already decided that’s what they want —not for someone who is researching the differences.

You may ask why she’s ranking for this term, and it’s because she mentions a French drain once in the post.

This particular post doesn’t meet the searcher’s intent for this term, so this is not a post she can update for a comparison.

Trying to improve the CTR for this post isn’t likely to yield results.

Competition

Another client wrote a post about making a diy bathtub tray.

The post looks like a good candidate. It has good impressions with a low CTR, so let’s see what queries it’s ranking for.

Looks like there is a lot of opportunity for the keyword phrase “bathtub tray.”

Head over to Google and search for “bathtub tray.” You may want to open an incognito window so that your results aren’t skewed by your own search history.

Unfortunately, the search results tell us this may not be a good post to optimize.

First, it’s not likely that our blog post will outrank Amazon or House Beautiful. It’s not impossible, but it is definitely not low hanging fruit.

Second, Google thinks that if you’re searching for the term “bathtub tray,” it’s because you want to buy one, not build one.

If you notice, the next two queries are “diy bathtub tray” and “bathtub tray diy.” Together, they have about 7,200 impressions, so you may decide to work on improving your CTR for these terms.

I would make note of this information and continue your analysis to see if there are other posts with higher potential.

After you’ve identified the posts to work on, it’s time to start updating.

What to update to improve CTR

We’re going to talk about two of the post attributes that impact CTR — titles and meta descriptions. Both of these can help your post stand out on the search results page.

Titles

Titles on the search results pages are usually in blue font that’s a bit larger than the other elements.

Some of the changes you can make to titles are:

1. Use a list, how-to or question title
2. Include numbers
3. Use dates if it makes sense
4. Use the proper length
5. Include keywords the post is ranking for

Use a list, how-to or question headline rather than a generic one.

These types of headlines are more likely to match the searcher’s intent.

Here are some examples:

Numbers can make your title stand out in search results.

Numbers attract our attention, so we’re more likely to click on them. I personally think there’s an “I’m getting more for my money” rationale behind it too.

If I see “9 Socially Distanced Service Projects for Cub Scouts,” I think I’m getting more information than if the title was simply Socially Distanced Service Projects for Cub Scouts.

Examples include:

• 10 Reasons Why You Should Switch to the Gutenberg Editor
• 4 Ways to Hang Holiday Wreaths on your Windows
• 7 Easy Steps to Making the Best Chocolate Cake

Include dates if it makes sense.

Did you know there’s an option to automate the year in your title? But just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.

If it’s content that you’re going to tweak each year, change the date when you tweak it. The last thing you want is outdated 2021 information on a post that says it’s for 2025.

Date ideas include:

• Spring Fashion Trends for 2021
• 2021 WordPress Updates
• What You Need to Fill Out the 2021 FASFA (for those of you who don’t have high school or college-aged kids, this is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid which many schools require even for scholarships)

Length

You don’t want your title to be too long or too short.

What is the right length for your title? It depends. Right now Google is showing a maximum of 600 pixels (not characters). As we all know, Google likes to change things, so when you’re reading this, the maximum may be different.

Because Google is using a fixed width of 600 pixels, titles with more narrow letters can include more characters.

Here’s an example:

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Both of these lines have 20 characters, but the length is very different because W is a wider letter and takes up more pixels than I.

If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, you can see how your title will look in the search results. Moz also has a title tag preview tool.

There may be times when you may intentionally make your title too long to build up some intrigue. People might click over just to find out what the missing part is.

Keywords

Are you ranking for keywords that aren’t in your title? Could you add them?

One of my posts is How To Make Super Cool (And Easy) Cub Scout Robots, and it was doing well on Pinterest but not on search.

Last October, I realized that it was ranking for the terms “toothbrush robot” and “toothbrush robots” (the plural version), but the search results were showing the title “How to Make Super Cool (And Easy) Cub Scout Robots.” If you aren’t a Cub Scouting family, you would assume that this is something specific to the Cub Scout program and would probably skip right over the results.

This chart shows my results from July through October.

I updated the post in October.

One of the changes I made was to change my SEO title to “How to Make Super Cool (and Easy) Toothbrush Robots.” If you’re on my site, the title still says Cub Scout Robots but it shows up as toothbrush robots in search results.

Here are my results for the three months after the post was updated:

You can see how much better my average position and CTR are for those terms.

One caveat was that I changed several things during the update, so I can’t say that the improvement came just because of adding the keyword to the SEO title.

Meta Descriptions

Way back in ancient times (2009!), Google told us they don’t use meta descriptions as a ranking factor and they may not show your exact meta description in search results, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important.

Think about your meta description as an invitation to visit your post. When I’m scanning through search results pages, I want to see WHY I should visit your post rather than any of the other ones.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing your meta descriptions.

1. Keep it to 155 characters

2. Have a call to action

3. Include your keyword

4. Explain the benefits

Keep it to 155 characters

Generally, Google will truncate your meta description at about 155 characters or so. If it’s longer than this, an ellipsis will be added at the end.

Now, if you want to create a little mystery, write a longer description. You can see an example of this in the second image below where we’re told, “…just imagine this,…” What should I imagine? Inquiring minds want to know, so I’ll have to click over to figure it out!

Have a call to action

A good meta description tells the searcher exactly what they should do. Check out some of these great calls to action from the examples below.

“Read on for how to get them right.”

“Follow these guidelines for success.”

Include your keyword

Make sure you include your keyword in your meta description. Google will bold the words that match the search terms. This draws the attention of the person searching because when they see their phrase bolded, they’re likely to click on over.

Explain the benefits

Basically, you’re selling your post to the searcher. And the best way to sell anything is to explain how the product (or post in this case) will help the buyer (or searcher). Take a look at the examples from the “how to improve bowling skills” search results.

One of them tells us that by practicing the techniques they’re going to share with us, we’ll hone our skills to improve our game. Another one tells us the bowling improvement tips they’re sharing will help us be more confident about our skills.

Other types of updates

While you may be focused on these particular ways to improve your click through rate, don’t overlook other updates you can make. Does your post need a recipe card? More images? More text? Updated information? You can add these while you’re working on the post.

Look for interlinking opportunities. If you’re like me, you’re pretty good at linking from a new post to some old ones but you may forget to link to the new post from old ones.

Promote your post again. Share it to your social media platforms and also include it in your newsletter.

What to do next

After you’ve updated your old post, add a note to your calendar for about a month or six weeks out to remind yourself to check your results to see if your hard work has paid off.

The post How Content Creators Can Use Search Console to Increase Traffic to Old Posts appeared first on Mediavine.

As an avid Android user, Google Discover is one of the main ways I consume content on a daily basis because Discover is a curated collection of articles from around the web that Google’s algorithms know I will be interested in.

This is all based on my search habits, the things I ask Google Assistant or sometimes even say around my phone.

It can be amazingly useful at times, especially when I’m bleary-eyed but I want to make pancakes for my kids at 7 a.m. If I talked about it the night before, it’s likely a few web stories about pancakes will be in my Google Discover without me ever having to type a search term into my browser.

And my favorite thing about Google Discover? Seeing Web Stories of content I haven’t read yet, from bloggers I know and love. (Psst that’s you.)

Stories aren’t live in every country, so if you haven’t seen them on your Android or iPhone yet don’t worry! They’ll be coming soon.

Here’s an example on an iPhone:

Over the Christmas holiday I had the opportunity to play around with Web Stories and see how they can drive traffic to a site right away, which is huge! A part of Google you can affect right now.

The best way to explain Web Stories is… imagine if your highly-ranked blog post and Instagram stories had a baby. You’ve now got an evergreen, extremely visual and interactive way to reach someone interested in a specific topic.

Unlike those other platforms, let me say again – Web Stories are meant to be evergreen, or live forever. That means they should tell a full story on their own, for the best user experience.

As Eric described in his post, you can also think of a Web Story as preview for your post content, to an entirely new audience.

From Mediavine’s perspective, ideally any Web Story will be compelling enough to get the viewer from the Story to your actual blog post.

This will earn much more money for you as opposed to being served AMP ads in a Web Story, though you can potentially do both, depending on your website setup. Make sure you email us if you have questions!

We’d like you to think of this the way you do your newsletter audience; tell them a compelling story, but also get those viewers onto your site to see ads. To us, it’s better to do that than it is to try to monetize this very unique, engaged Web Story space.

The viewers don’t have to follow you; they just have to be interested in the topic you’ve got a Web Story about.

According to Google, “You’ll find more videos and fresh visual content, as well as evergreen content — articles and videos that aren’t new to the web, but are new to you.”

To me, that means the Story lives forever, so if the content you’re planning a Story around is evergreen, make sure that Story is timeless, or update it often for seasonality.

It is possible you’ll see a Story “drop out” of popularity overnight, but that may mean the search trend is done for the season on the Story’s topic. It doesn’t mean the Story will never be served again, or that it won’t become relevant again when the search trend picks back up again.

Web Stories can be used by any type of blogger, around any type of content. The first thing I suggest is using Google Discover to see how other content creators are using Stories.

For example, Google mentions Refinery29 in their blog post about the best Web Stories.

There are fabulous clues for how to make evergreen content that resonates with an interested Discover reader, no matter when they’re served the Story — today or next holiday season.

And, as Eric pointed out, having Web Stories for articles you already rank well for can remind Google that you’re an expert in the topic and may even help you rise higher in search results, which might then help your content show up more often in Discover.

It’s important to remember that a Web Story should be a solid piece of content that can stand on its own. Tell the full story, even if you want to compel readers to visit your site too.

CONTENT IS STILL KING.

There are a couple ways to make a Web Story. There are third-party apps like Jumprope that cater specifically to Google Web Stories, and if you’re using a non-WordPress CMS to run your blog, you’ll need to use one of those.

For WordPress users, there is an official plugin that was released by Google itself, and that is what I’m here to teach you about today!

I’m going to assume that you’ve already read Eric’s post, set up a separate Google Analytics profile for your stories and excluded the _gl parameter from your view settings, downloaded the Web Stories WordPress plugin and are ready to generate UTM codes for each Story’s URL.

If you haven’t, please hit up his post first!

Let’s Get Started!

If you’ve used Photoshop or Canva, you might find the user interface of the Web Stories plugin familiar. I’ve spent years in both, so I found the interface straightforward, if a little clunky and buggy. It’s brand new, so don’t go too hard on ‘em!

I am a food blogger, so I tell my best stories about food. Since I haven’t blogged in a while, Jamie, our Influencer Marketing Coordinator, was kind enough to let me borrow her blog and content to learn — now I’m sharing our experiments with you.

Here’s Jamie’s Story for Easy Hot Ham and Cheese Sliders that we are going to be making together:

Add A New Story

First things first, name your Story. As Eric said, pick a name for your story that makes sense for your keyword, but is enticing for the reader. It’s the first thing they’ll see, along with your cover image.

The main thing is to avoid Google filtering out one of your results with its “duplicate name” filter, so make sure your Story title is slightly different from your post name.

Working In Layers

Photoshop users will be very familiar with the idea of layers, as that’s a key component of design in that program. Each Story slide you’re working on contains its own layers to create dynamic content from slide to slide.

Layers will vary by type, from images to text to shapes to videos, and each layer will get its own settings and details, but each slide you create contains a locked background layer.

You can access any layer’s settings in the Layer Editor by selecting it in the lower right corner. The settings appear in the upper right.

You may need to scroll up and down within the individual settings area to see all the options.

Pro Tip: If you want a call to action or “swipe up” feature on every slide that links to the blog post, set it now on your first slide’s background layer, in the section called Page Attachment. When you duplicate the slide to make your next one, the link will remain and you can delete the other layers and begin fresh. Make sure the link you add here contains a UTM code, so that you can see how much of your traffic to a post is coming directly from a Web Story.

Calls to action take up space (so that they can grab attention!) and putting them in place FIRST helps make sure you’re not creating a slide design that doesn’t work well with where the CTA is placed.

You can’t change the CTA location, so adding it later might mean redesigning the whole slide.

You can create your next slide by “duplicating” your first one, which means the CTA will stay in place as you continue to design.

Layers allow you to work individually with each content piece and move it, change it, etc. without affecting the layers around it unless those layers are selected too.

Adding Text To Slides

Adding text directly to slides using the Web Stories application is best practice. If you upload an image with text already on it, that text will not be accessible for differently-abled viewers. The Web Stories tool makes sure the text is accessible for those viewers.

Remember that Google’s advice is to use roughly 10 words or 280 characters per slide.

Font choices are limited to those Google has provided, but there’s enough here to keep your viewers interested.

I’ll also pull out an old design adage from my college graphic design classes: Don’t use more than three different fonts per slide, and consider that in this small space, two might be your max for great design that readers find appealing.

Access Your Media Library

While Google does recommend photos with a 3:4 aspect ratio, it doesn’t seem to affect the success of the overall performance if you grab what you have in your Media Library and stretch or shrink it to fit.

This is where Canva users will feel some familiarity with the plugin; adding photos is extremely similar.

You can also use Shapes (one of the content layer types) as Masks for your photos. What does that mean?

Place a shape on your slide. Then add a photo from your Media Library and move it around until it’s hovering over the shape. The application should attempt to fit the photo inside the shape. This is another way to get versatile with what the slides look like.

Pro Tip: Make sure there is alt text on any photo you upload. The Stories app should pull in the alt text you’ve already got in WordPress, but if you need to make changes, do so.

Also note: there is an acknowledged bug (confirmed in the WP Support forums) in the Stories app that will tell you there’s no accessible text when there is. Google is actively working to fix this.

Animations & GIFs

Just like when creating a PowerPoint or Google Slides deck, you can quickly and easily add animations to any layer of your slide — this includes photos, text, etc. Doing so can make your story a bit more engaging.

You’ll notice I did this on slide 1 for the ham and cheese sliders, adding a slide-in animation to the post title and a “drop” to the Happy New Year GIF since we were targeting this to New Year searches.

Since then, we’ve updated the story to remove the “New Year” aspect so that if it’s served to new viewers they aren’t considering it outdated.

There are quite a few options to choose from in the Layer editor, and you can even change the amount of time the effect lasts. 

My best advice is to play with these things. Preview your Story with guesses as to what will look best and then adjust from there. You’ll find a style and form that works for you and your audience.

Other Features of The Layer Editor

The ability to change alignment, orientation, size, position and opacity are available for each layer, as well as the ability to hyperlink any layer.

Additionally, for text you can change fonts, add fill or highlight behind the text; add borders around text and access all the traditional formatting options like bold, italics and underline; adjust kerning and padding around and between letters; change the color of the text.

For images, you can change the corner radius (to make rounded edges), add a border or link and add accessibility text.

Document Editor

Before you ever publish a Story, you must make sure this section in the Story Editor is filled out completely.

Add your Logo. You can also add this in Story Editor Settings so that it’s automatically there in each Web Story you create.

Add a Poster Image. Typically we pick our favorite vertical hero image from the post.

Story descriptions seem a lot like meta data you would write for post content. You have 200 characters to describe the Story, so use your keyword and make it enticing! According to a sub-note in the Story Editor, “Stories with a description tend to do better on search and have a wider reach.”

Permalinks are automatically created when you type a Story’s name. If you changed the name at any point, or want something different, change the permalink before you publish.

Page advancement! This one is important. It’s how you speed up or slow down auto-advancement of your Story when it is viewed.

I don’t see a reason why anyone would ever choose “manual” here (that means someone has to click or tap the screen to see the next slide), but paying attention to how your Story flows is a good idea. If the advancement is too slow, your viewers might get bored and keep scrolling their Discover feed instead of waiting for your next slide.

If it’s too fast, they can’t read what’s on the slide or have to hold it in position until they’re finished reading, and that’s not a good experience either. Play with this based on your individual Story and what you’ve added content-wise so that it flows in a way that feels good to you.

You’re ready to publish!

Go through the notifications on the Checklist tab and make sure there are no glaring errors that would prevent someone from reaching your Story. Preview your Story to make sure it flows and that the call to action links where you want it to.

Hit Publish. Then, visit the URL for the Web Story and grab the permalink. Go to the original post and link to the Web Story somewhere in your content, where it fits naturally, on the keyword you’re targeting.

Adding a link to even a highly ranking post shouldn’t affect it negatively in SERPs, but you can always roll it back if the change seems to have upset the Google algorithm gods. Internal linking is such an important part of SEO strategy, having the link there should only help, not hurt.

You’ve published your first Story! Hooray!

Now What?

When you view the separate analytics profile set up for Web Stories, you should be able to see what is getting the most traffic. In your main analytics profile, if you’re using UTM codes, you’ll be able to see specifically how your Web Stories are converting into actual pageviews on your website.

It can’t be overstated — converting Google Discover traffic into a pageview on your website is incredibly valuable. Those are dialed in, interested readers already looking for content like yours.

Monetization of Web Stories

Web Stories can be monetized via AMP ads, but our opinion for now is that you’ll get far more value from your reader if you can convert them over to your website to see display ads there.

Web Stories are still in alpha, making monetization currently a very manual process, with not a lot of availability from advertisers.

Web Stories use AMP ads, which mean they’ve currently only got access to AdExchange, rather than having competition from a multitude of partners like your website display ads. Less competition means lower CPMs.

The AMP ads are only allowed to appear once every seven slides — which means your Story would have to be at least that long to serve even one ad.

Given that Stories are only live in the US, India and Brazil, advertising competition and availability will be even further diminished, meaning ROI on running an ad in your stories is hardly worth it. Get viewers to your website instead through quality story-telling.

Make sure you’re running Grow to capture them as logged-in users who favorite your content and they’ll be even more valuable — and very likely repeat readers.

I am hopeful that this inspires you to create your own Story, no matter what kind of content you Create.

How To Create A Google Web Story

Yield: 1 Google Web Story

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Active Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 1 hour

Difficulty: Easy

A Google Web Story can bring new-to-you, engaged readers to your site. Make them for your top content and new content that readers might be searching for.

Print

Materials

• Photos
• Blog post
• Video relevant to blog post content (optional)
• Short descriptions

Tools

• Google's Web Stories Plugin for WordPress

Instructions

1. Plan out your story. Using a storyboard format can be helpful here.
2. Set the "Call to Action" link on the background layer of your first slide in the Page Attachment section. (This allows slides duplicated from the first one to automatically have this in place, and shows the call to action button on your slide as you design, so that you can design around it.)
3. Make slides for each point in your storyboard. Use a combination of images, text, shapes and video to engage viewers in Google Discover. Make sure all items that need it have accurate alt-text.
4. Check that all items in the "Document" tab are complete, and any errors in the Checklist tab are remedied to the best of your ability.
5. Publish!
6. Take the permalink from your story and make sure to link back to it in any post content on your site where it makes sense to. i.e. if you make a web story about the best places to eat in San Francisco and you have multiple blog posts about things to do in San Francisco, link to your web story in them!

The post How to Make A Google Web Story appeared first on Mediavine.

As you may have heard in the news or from other publishers, Google’s AMP story format has recently been rebranded.

Welcome, Google Web Stories!

Stories are all the rage online these days, and with this new name change, they’ve at last become a “first class citizen” over at Google.

Web Stories will have their own dedicated carousel in Google Discover, which means a whole new opportunity for publishers to position their content for coveted, organic search traffic.

So how do you build Web Stories for Google and optimize them for SEO? Glad you asked, because we’ve got answers for you with the return of Mediavine’s SEO Like A CEO series below!

What Are Google Web Stories?

Google Web Stories are mini-AMP pages, or embeds that you create for posts on your site. They end up looking like the visual slideshows you’ve likely seen grow in popularity on Facebook and Instagram stories.

Think of Stories as a series of quick images or videos that a user can flip through and, well, tell the story you want to tell.

When it’s over, there’s a nice little Call to Action (CTA) that can encourage audiences to visit your site for additional information.

How Do You Make Web Stories?

If your website is powered by WordPress, you’re in luck.

Google has released an official Web Story plugin for WordPress, and that’s literally all you need to make Web Stories. It’s a great little drag-and-drop interface that includes templates to help get you started.

We’ll save the full web stories tutorial for a Amber’s blog post, and Google has some great documentation on the plugin to walk you through that part too.

Once you create the story, the plugin makes a new Web Story custom post for you to publish – though it won’t appear on your homepage feed.

So where does this post live, and how do you start getting traffic to it? That’s where this guide fits in.

How Do You Get Traffic To Web Stories?

Web Stories live on their own mini-pages within WordPress, and you don’t actually have to embed them or send them traffic yourself.

In fact, you don’t want to.

We’ll talk a little more about ads for Web Stories in a bit, but in short, they will not monetize as well as a regular blog post.

You want to use Web Stories to augment your blog post, and make readers want to read it as well as enjoy your web story. You do not want to divert traffic from the blog post to its Web Story.

For that reason, we do not recommend embedding Web Stories.

The goal is to bring in thousands of new visitors to Web Stories from Google Discover. Then, the CTA at the end of those stories will entice readers to visit your site, where your ads are optimized.

Sound good? We had a feeling it would. Follow this short guide to Web Story SEO to make it happen.

1. Create Stories For Top Posts First

This may seem counterintuitive, as you obviously want to rank on your latest content. However, this follows my usual mantra:

If Google thinks you’re an expert on a particular topic, they’re going to think you’re an expert in a Web Story about it.

Creating Web Stories for a top post is the same strategy as making a Recipe Card or a video for it. Think of it as an ad for your content.

The reason you’re doing this is twofold. One, you’re likely to rank well on that Web Story and two, this is a NEW spot for Google to show off your expertise.

It’s additional traffic in Google Discover you wouldn’t have received with your organic ranking alone. Even if you’re already ranked #1 for a particular article, it’s still a net gain of new traffic!

According to Casey Markee of Media Wyse, publishers are already seeing serious results from Web Stories.

Markee, who recommends bloggers create stories for their top 3-10 posts, says “the results have been fantastic … I had one blogger who generated 20,000 clicks from Google in ONE DAY from stories.”

To give you an idea of the potential here, another blogger he spoke of has generated 50,000+ sessions in December with Web Stories thus far!

2. Don’t Embed Web Stories in Posts

While Google recommends that publishers embed the Web Story in your posts, I don’t actually like this tactic, and I’ll explain why.

First, featuring the embed is going to slow down your page.

Additionally, if you create Stories the way we’re encouraging – and the way in which they make the most logical sense for both user experience and ad monetization – they’re previews of your content. Putting that preview within the content itself doesn’t serve any purpose.

Finally, and most importantly, you simply don’t have to. If you’re running the plugin, each story gets its own permalink on your site, and its own chance to rank. You do not need to embed them to rank, so don’t.

3. Link to Your Web Story

Google also recommends “deeply integrating Stories” in ways such as linking to them from your homepage or relevant category pages.

That’s definitely a great idea if you have static homepages or category pages, where it’s easy to add unique content, like on Trellis.

If you don’t have an easy way to link from relevant categories, or end up with too many Stories for this to be practical, I have an easier solution.

As with regular organic search, Google is trying to learn about the Story based on what external and internal links go to it.

Can you guess what content will be the most similar to the Story you’re writing? That’s right, the post you’re telling a story about.

Linking to Stories from posts you’re writing them about will definitely help Google find them, without the disadvantages of embedding.

4. Link to Your Web Story Landing Page

Google also wants publishers to create a separate Web Story landing page, which will feature links to all of your Web Stories, and then link to that landing page from your homepage.

I recommend going with the default landing page WordPress makes for custom post types (e.g. yourblog.com/web-stories).

Chances are, the page won’t look pretty, but it will get the links you need. So try linking to this page in your sidebar – less prevalent than your top navigation, but still noticeable enough to get the job done.

Think back to my site structure post. Your goal is to keep the landing page one click from your homepage, so Web Stories are two clicks from the homepage. (Google and SEO Like a CEO, intersecting as always.)

5. Submit Your Web Story XML Sitemap to Google

Assuming you’re running a plugin like Yoast to generate XML Sitemaps, you should have one for Web Stories. It will likely be at yourblog.com/web-story-sitemap.xml.

If not, make sure to configure your SEO plugin to generate these and submit it via the Google Search Console.

6. Naming Your Web Stories

This one is a little trickier, because you obviously know it’s important to optimize the page title for SEO, but it’s also important to remember to avoid creating duplicate page titles on your website.

Your goal is just not to trigger the Google Search duplicate title filter. Pick a name that makes sense for the keyword you’re targeting, but isn’t the name of your post. Make sure it’s enticing for the viewer, because they will see your title in Discover, over the cover image of your story.

7. Content is Still King

Google says the secret to a Web Story ranking is still all about content. In Google’s best practices advice, they recommend 10-20 slides, keeping the content per slide brief, and keeping it visual, with plenty of images and videos that fill up the screen.

They’ve since expanded on that with this article on what a web story should be.

• Make the story have value for the reader all on its own.
• Stories that are only 2-3 slides long and force the reader to the website for any useful information about the proposed topic is NOT good user experience.
• Stories that convey information about a post from a different angle can be great – such as a “making of” for a recipe or craft post.
• Stories should make sense and have a logical beginning and end.

As usual, with any “content is king” strategy, it also means you need to make a lot of content. Create stories for all of your top posts, then consider a Web Story for any new post you create as well.

Yes, it’s work, but once you see the traffic, you’ll find it’s worth it.

8. Use All the Rest of Our SEO Advice

When it comes to SEO, Web Stories are just like any other page to Google. Everything from using alt text to properly using your keywords in your content will make a difference. As Google says, “If it helps rank your non-Story pages, it’ll probably help the Stories as well.”

Additional Technical Notes

According to Markee, who as we mentioned above has already worked extensively with bloggers on Web Stories in this early stage, there are some common technical caveats to be aware of as well:

• If publishers do not have Organization Schema filled out in Yoast, Web Stories will not validate.
• If you use the WordPress Media Library to upload videos for your Web Stories, be careful of consuming too many hosting resources. Video uses a lot of storage and bandwidth. These are NOT running through the Mediavine Video Player, but rather your web host, so proceed with caution.
• If websites are running WP Rocket, you’ll need version 3.7.5 or later. Otherwise you’ll need go under “Advanced” and “Caching” to exclude Web Stories from caching. Basically, publishers can paste the following in under “Never Cache URLs” – /web-stories/(.*)
• Make sure you’re running the most recent version of Web Stories to mitigate potential errors.

Tracking Web Stories in Google Analytics

The Web Story plugin provides a place to input your Google Analytics ID, and it can automatically insert the proper tracking code for you.

You do not need the Google Site Kit plugin, despite the language in the settings page, in order to do this.

My recommendation is to consider setting up a separate Google Analytics Profile to track Web Stories. Why? Because traffic to Web Stories is not really the same as traffic to your site.

As we’ve touched on multiple times above, think of stories as ads that run inside Google Discover for your content. The goal of Web Stories should be getting users to click over to your site, that’s it.

It’s not really your traffic until they leave the Web Story experience and arrive on your website, so don’t count it as such.

If you combine stories with your primary Analytics, you’ll see a surge of users who are virtually un-monetized; all that will do is hurt your RPM calculation, while also making everything harder to track.

Markee and Google recommend you set up a separate Dashboard inside your Google Analytics in order to track the performance of your stories.

Setting up a new dashboard to easily track your Web Stories’ performance, so you’ll know how to optimize them to convert more users into real traffic, but in left inside your regular unfiltered profile or view, will still impact RPM calculations. Here is our help guide on setting up a new Google Analytics Profile ID for your Web Stories.

Additionally, to prevent the Web Stories tracking URL parameter from breaking your dashboard page-level reporting, you should set your analytics profile to ignore the following parameter: _gl .

You can follow our help doc on how to exclude a URL parameter easily in Google Analytics. Reach out to publishers@mediavine.com if you have any questions on how to do this.

One More Caveat: Web Stories Appear in Search

We’ve talked a lot about looking at these as previews or ads, in a sense, for your content. Unfortunately, since Web Stories are their own “pages” on your site, they may show up when a user searches your site.

This applies both on your internal site search itself and on Google results pages.

For internal searches, you can control this; Users can find the “exclude option” for Web Stories if they go into their Web Stories plugin, go to their list of Web Stories, and click on “Quick Edit.”

Nevertheless, there’s always some chance that Web Stories will appear in Google Search Results, and that’s just a fact of life; removing them from Google Search would negate their ability to get you traffic.

Just do your best to make sure your main post ranks better through SEO than your stories, and don’t overthink this.

Mediavine Ads in Web Stories

As of this post, integrating Mediavine ads in Web Stories is still in its very early alpha/beta testing.

If you’re receiving significant traffic from Web Stories and want to help us test Mediavine ads within them, email publishers@mediavine.com. We hope to release these ad solutions more widely in early 2021.

However, even when we’re able to monetize stories at a wider scale, there are some important caveats:

• As with other AMP ads, Web Stories will run on Google’s domain and are largely outside of our control. We can’t provide the full Mediavine ad auction or use things such as first-party data, etc.
• These are specialized, full-screen ads. There is currently low demand for them, and that means a significantly lower fill rate than you’re used to.
• Google, not Mediavine or the publisher, controls the placement of these ads, and they only appear after seven slides, which means typically only one ad per Story.

All of the above bullet points can be summarized as such:

Your ability to monetize traffic will be many times stronger on your post. If and when you can run ads on these stories, we’re still only talking about a single, low-filling ad per story.

Not to sound like a broken record here, but you shouldn’t expect to make significant revenue from the Stories themselves right now. Instead, think of Web Stories as a cool way to access an entirely new audience for your site and its great content.

We’ll keep working to improve how Stories monetize, and continue to bring you updates on this exciting platform as they develop.

The post Google Web Stories SEO: What You Need to Know appeared first on Mediavine.

Allowing for easy, effective navigation of your website sounds obvious, because every user and publisher knows (and wants) that.

So what do we mean by site structure, and why does it matter?

When we’re referring to site structure, we’re talking about how content is organized on your website — in other words, how visitors can navigate the site to find the content they want.

From an SEO standpoint, this is important enough that the Google SEO Starter Guide features an entire section on site hierarchy.

If you’ve read the starter guide (if you haven’t, you should), you’ll see that it focuses a lot on URL structure. We’ve already published an entire guide to optimizing your URL structure (see the link above), so we’re focusing on the rest of Google’s hierarchical advice in this article.

Homepage Navigation

There are a number of components of site structure, but at the heart of it all is the navigation of your homepage. Think of it from the perspective of a user first visiting the homepage. How do they get to the content?

When we first discussed PageRank, you may remember us saying that the homepage is your most valuable page when it comes to link equity.

This is because — if you’re following standard web design principles, every page will link to your homepage, either through linking on your logo, via your navigation or perhaps breadcrumbs.

It’s also the most likely place for other websites to link to, so it makes sense that it’s your most valuable page — from an SEO perspective.

Moreover, it’s the most frequent entry point for returning or loyal users, who you’ll want to present with content as effectively as you can.

This is why when we discussed cornerstone content, we emphasized that your most valuable content should be 1-2 clicks away from the homepage.

Anything beyond those 1-2 clicks, users might not find it easily from the homepage. If your users can’t find your content, neither can Google.

That’s why it’s crucial to think of your site structure from the perspective of navigating from the homepage, and ensuring that all content you want to rank on is one or two clicks away.

Okay, so how should you ideally set up your homepage navigation?

If your homepage is basically just your 10 most recent posts, then you’re probably going to struggle. The good news is that even with WordPress, your homepage doesn’t have to be set up that way.

WordPress offers publishers the concept of a static homepage, in which the homepage becomes another page you have complete control over. You can use Gutenberg to edit your homepage this way.

In fact, this is what we recommend for publishers running Mediavine’s Trellis themes. Although we included a default homepage of your most recent posts, that’s not always the best experience for users.

With Trellis, you can create custom, static homepages. Take a look at these three sites that are running Trellis:

So what should your homepage be?

That depends on your site and how you can organize your content. This is where categories, tags and landing pages come in handy.

First, you can and should list some of your recent posts. Using Gutenberg, you can use the built-in Recent Posts block or the upcoming Mediavine Create Indexes to make them look pretty.

This is key for both users and search engines to see your most recent content. Otherwise, how will they identify and keep up with it?

Beyond the new posts you’re churning out, consider the perspective of a user when it comes to finding older content as well.

Think about listing some of your most popular posts — a great way to help improve rankings on some of your cornerstone content.

Of course, there’s limited space on your homepage, and you can only have so many links on there without it becoming cumbersome. This is where your categories or landing pages can play a major role.

Category and Landing Pages

While being one hop away from the homepage will give your content the best shot at SEO success, sometimes being two clicks away is the best you can hope for — especially when you have a lot of content.

For example, this is where you could link to the “Cheesecake Recipes” category on your homepage, with the ultimate goal of boosting the “Strawberry Cheesecake Recipe” you’re trying to rank on.

It’s not just categories you can link to, either — Google recommends that websites feature a separate navigation or sitemap page.

Note: We’re not talking about the XML Sitemap.

Those are super important for crawling, but not necessarily ranking and we’ll talk about them in a future blog post.

In this case specifically, we’re talking about a sitemap page for users — a designated navigation or landing page.

Basically, you create landing pages (posts or pages in WordPress) that you can link to from your homepage, with those landing pages linking to your other pages. This keeps everything of value within 1-2 hops.

This style of sitemap can’t link to everything, but you can make many of them. Let’s use a simple example everyone can relate to.

If you were, say, the CEO of Mediavine and writing both an “SEO Like A CEO” Series and an “Improve your RPM” series, you could build a navigation page for each and link to them from your homepage.

In this not-really-hypothetical case (as you probably figured), I used two category pages: SEO Like A CEO and Go For Teal, with custom content up top. Hey, another cool feature of Trellis!

In any case, even using a static homepage with Gutenberg can only be so long before users give up on scrolling. So where else can you get links to the posts you want to rank on?

Site Navigation, Footer, Sidebar, and Other Linking Spots

Publishers actually have a few more valuable spots to link to top content on all of your pages: your site navigation, your footer and your sidebar (on desktop and wider tablet devices).

The navigation at the top of your page can link to your most popular pages. If you use a nested nav bar, you can often fit 10-20 links up top in a very user-friendly fashion.

This is a great way to allow users to find content on ANY page of your site. Think about it: If you link from every page, by definition, it’s linked from the homepage AND every other page on your website.

That’s a great way to signal to your user and Google that this page is extra important. The same rule can apply to the footer, but since that’s lower in your page, it’s less likely to be clicked.

With limited space available, try to prioritize placing your most important navigation in the header and putting lesser-used things (like your privacy policy, legal requirements, etc.) in the footer.

Another great spot to capture user attention? If you maintain a shorter sidebar, users will likely see a few widgets before they tune out. We typically recommend running things like a search, about me and something like the top posts-style widget described above.

Using these three spots, in addition to your homepage, should hopefully position all of your top content within a few clicks for users.

Finally, remember that your individual posts are a likely entry point for a large portion of your readers. This typically opens up another great spot to show additional content to readers: Both inside the content via internal links and below the post with related content-style widgets.

Breadcrumbs

Google also recommends the use of breadcrumbs in your navigation, and I completely agree. These are a great way to link to your homepage and the landing page or category containing a post.

Breadcrumbs, like so many things we touch on in passing, are worthy of a separate blog post that we’ll write in the near future, but here’s a quick look at our Vice President of Support Nicole Johnson‘s site.

See the text “Home > Grilling > Traeger Recipes” below her post title? Those are the breadcrumbs.

Site Structure Sets You Up For Success

Like so much of the SEO advice we provide at Mediavine, there’s not a lot of technical mastery you’re missing. A commitment to the right principles and the right thought process goes a long way.

Think like a user to improve your website experience, and Google will likely reward your efforts. As always, our award-winning Publisher Support team is available to help with additional questions.

The post Site Structure: Navigation Matters for SEO appeared first on Mediavine.

Whomever who coined the old adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” probably never considered search engines.

It may be true as far as your readers are concerned, but when it comes to Google, they’re only worth as much as a computer can read.

That’s why, when it comes to optimizing images for Google, the #1 search engine recommends using descriptive filenames for images.

Below, we break down filenames — what they are, why they’re important and how they can help your rankings.

What is an image filename?

The filename is what you probably expect. Typically, it’s the same name of the image file that lives on your computer before you upload it.

This is especially true if you use the WordPress media library and most image hosting services.

If you’re exporting photos from your camera or phone, chances are the filenames are going to be a random set of numbers and letters such as “IMG_3073.jpeg”

In this case, the filename is the same name that’s sitting on your local computer (IMG_3073.jpeg), including the extension (.jpeg).

If you were to simply upload that to WordPress and insert it into a post, then that would be the filename on the internet as well.

Why Google cares about filenames

If a user downloads your photo from the internet, its default filename when downloaded to their computer is that same filename.

Just like Google cares about SEO-friendly URL structures so it’s easy for users to see at a glance what’s on a given page, it recommends user-friendly image filenames.

The idea is simple: A user knows what a photo is without having to open the file. It’s just a better overall user experience.

SEO for image filenames

In the Google SEO Starter Guide, Google gives the same advice for writing filenames as for alt text and it’s easy to execute:

Keep things short and descriptive.

Google also wants you to use an extension that accurately describes the file type. Again, it’s easy and makes perfect sense.

For example, if you’re using a jpeg image, use .jpg or .jpeg. If you’re using WebP or PNG, use their respective extensions, .webp or .png.

Chances are your photo editing software will automatically take care of the extension for you. Just make sure that when you go to rename your image, you’re not changing this to make it less accurate.

Let’s look at a real world example of an image and how you should name it:

Now, if you had to describe this image in a few words to a reader so they could see what you were talking about before showing them the image, what would you call it?

Hint: You can use a similar description to what you’re writing for the alt text, or the alternative text for the writing for the visually impaired.

It’s the same idea: Use a name that assumes if the user never gets to see the image, they’d still know what’s in it.

Google flat out says not to use filenames like “image1.jpg” or “1.jpg” in their examples of what not to do. In other words, don’t just use what your photo software spits out by default.

Rename the file so it’s descriptive. That’s the long and short of it.

Use hyphens to separate words and don’t use special characters

An important thing to note: Since you’ll be manually naming these photos, you won’t have the luxury of WordPress making sure your formatting is written out correctly.

Instead, you’ll have to do the work of making sure you’re only using letters and numbers, and ensuring you’re using a hyphen (-) and not something like an underscore ( _ ) to separate words.

If you stick to using only letters, numbers and hyphens, avoiding apostrophes or other special symbols, you’ll be in good shape.

Should I use keywords in image filenames?

Similar to our advice regarding alt text SEO, you’ll want to use your focus keyword in your filename when it’s an organic fit.

Put another way, if your long tail keyword happens to naturally describe the photo you’re uploading, then 100% use it.

Of course, there can be too much of a good thing. If you have four photos, all described by the same keyphrase, you run the risk of keyword stuffing.

Use synonyms and vary things up so all photos in the same post aren’t called “cheeesecake-photo-1.jpg,” “cheesecake-photo-2.jpg,” etc.

Instead, think about file names much like you would your alt text, e.g. “completed-cheesecake.jpg” and “cheesecake-filling.jpg.”

Similar to alt text, if you can’t think of different filenames for every photo you’re using in a post, are they really providing value to the reader?

How long should filenames be?

Historically, filenames on operating systems were meant to be shorter. There are historic filesystem limitations, such as a limit of 256 characters, which means you should err on the side of shorter for your names.

What the heck is the human translation of that? While we’ve recommended using your alt text as guidance for your image filenames, you’ll probably want to think shorter.

Keep your filenames to under five to six words and you should be fine within any character limits, and still have enough language to accurately describe the image.

Again, these are theoretical limits with most modern filesystems and operating systems. However, it never hurts to go short and descriptive, especially when that’s Google’s advice in their SEO Starter Guide.

What about existing images?

WordPress makes it difficult to rename files once they’re uploaded to the media library, so chances are you’ll have to re-upload them.

How important is this for SEO?

Image SEO is just one aspect of SEO overall, and not the most important one. Without sweating this too much, I’d recommend you just adopt this process for images you upload from now on.

If you have an incredibly important, highly-trafficked post, it may be worth the time to give your images more useful file names.

In general, however, this is a small part of your SEO — but an easy and intuitive best practice to put in place going forward.

The post Image Filename SEO appeared first on Mediavine.