SEO Wash-up Monday 14th March 22

Google Update

Google Ads has a new experiments page now live – Google has rolled out a new Google Ads experiments page that promises to help you create, manage, and optimize your experiments in one place. There is a new summary page for your experiments and a sync feature.

In Google Ads if you were running an experiment, you would first have had to create a campaign draft and then test that draft separately in an experiment. Now Google has changed the process, you can select a campaign and create a custom experiment for it in a single step. So when you set up your experiment, you can specify how long you’d like it to run and how much of your original campaign’s traffic and budget you’d like to use

With the new Google Ads Experiments page, it will let you choose to apply the new bid strategy to your base campaign. By applying this, it helps you avoid any implementation issues and makes it easier for you to see the expected uplift from your experiment results.

The search giant is also rolling out a new way to sync your experiments with their corresponding campaigns. So in the past, keeping your experiments up to date meant that you had to manually copy changes over from your original campaigns. Well now it will automatically update your experiment with any changes you make in your original campaigns.

New Google Robots Tag indexifembedded allows you to control indexing with embedded content – Google mentions a new robots tag it will obey going forward, it is named indexifembedded. This lets you control if you want Google to index a page with embedded content, which allows Google to index the content of a page if it’s embedded in another page through iframes or similar HTML tags, even of a noindex directive. The indexifembedded only has an effect if it’s accompanied by noindex.

So, let’s say you embed a piece of content using an iframe or some type of code embed method. That piece of content often, if it is media, has a directive to be noindexed, but when you embed it on your page that has more context around what you are embedding, it might tell Google that since the embedded content is noindexed, do not index the page you embedding it on. Here, Google is giving you more control to say, index the page the embed is on despite what the embed page says.

Google also mentions that the indexifembedded tag addresses a common issue that especially affects media publishers, while they may want their content indexed when it’s embedded on third-party pages, they don’t necessarily want their media pages indexed on their own. As they don’t want the media pages indexed, they currently use a noindex tag in such pages. However, the noindex tag also prevents embedding the content in other pages during indexing.