SEO Wash-up Monday 14th January

Google Updates

Use 404s & temporary sitemaps to speed up page removal – If you have a lot of pages you want removed from the Google index but don’t want to use the page removal tool for each URL then you can try to 404 and noindex all the pages you want removed and then submit a temporary sitemap to Google.

This might speed things up as Google will know to re-crawl & reprocess them. However, this is something you would want to do for a limited time and then remove so that you don’t end up in the long run with a sitemap file that’s not needed by your site.

Do not 301 pages that should 404 to your home page – The search giants has mentioned if you use 301 redirect pages that should 404 to your home page, then they will treat them as soft 404s anyway, which basically means that you are confusing your end users. Google said that there is no benefit in using a 301 redirect for a page you took off when you are redirecting it to a page that is not relevant to that 404 page.

Google rich results test now with code editing – Google has mentioned on social media that the Google rich results test lets you not only test live or sample code, but also lets you make edits to code that you run and test it on the fly. So after you run it, you then can click into the code on the left side panel and edit what you want, then run it again.

Google manufacturer centre with analytics, new content, & availability – Google rolled out some new features to the Google manufacturer centre. Below are the new added sections on shopping product detail pages;

• New content – A new shopping product detail pages that populates your product pages on Google Shopping with encouraging and high quality content. You can highlight the product features and capabilities that you know your shoppers care about the most and even build brand equity directly with shoppers on Google.
• Analytics – This shows you performance trends like top selling product groups and significant changes in price. Also insights on product variants such as top search terms for your products, average price trends, product group stats and products appear most often with yours.
• Expanded – Google also expanded manufacturer centre availability from seven countries to 24 countries.

Google local listings tests your match scores – The search giants is now testing a feature in their local listings, the local pack, which shows how closely the listings match you. This is a feature that they have announced but did not launch back in May 2018 called your match. Through their machine learning, it shows a number that suggests how likely you are to enjoy a place and reasons explaining why.