What Food Bloggers Need to Know About the Google Algorithm | The Food Blogger Pro Podcast

You know, you said people didn't realize there's Google updates and you also said people didn't realize there's Google guidelines. We're going to dive deep on updates. But can you touch on guidelines? What does that mean and what is Google trying to tell us when they give us guidelines and then where can we find those?

Yeah, Google has called Webmaster guidelines in there. Again you can just type in webmaster guidelines into Google and you can find those. But they also have a very detailed schema guideline lines as well. Schema is basically the visual, the kind of the programming network that can language that is used by Google to discern the language on a page. So we mark things up, we call that structured data markup or schema so that search engines can better understand the data that's represented on the page. So for example, for recipe and lifestyle bloggers, the two, there's various types of schema that are very popular. Recipe, how to itemless schema, things like that. And you know, Google has detailed guidelines on how to correctly deploy those schemas site wide. Those are part of larger guidelines and guidelines can provide. They basically kind of give you just a very general outline of like what is good and what is not good with Google. Like hey, you know we, this is bad link building. We don't use directories or social bookmarking or reciprocal linking or I'll link to you, you link to me. Those are, those are link spam link scheme guidelines that Google has. Google also publishes detailed resources on titles. I know recently many on the call might be familiar that there was a problem with titles and that Google had decided hey, you know, you have an H1 on your page that may be better for the user. So we're just going to ignore the title that you put in Yoast and we're going to Instead take this H1 title off your page instead. And that caused a lot of, you know, a lot of issues with bloggers who didn't understand what was going on. Why is Google ignoring my titles? And Google of course had to walk that back. That happened in October. They started doing this testing in September, around the 27th, but then immediately they walked it back on around the 11th of October today actually where they pushed out over the last 48 hours they pushed out new updates, new guidelines covering page titles and recipe snippets, which is the meta description or the snippet that you see in the search results. So Google's constantly adding value to these guidelines by providing best practices that users and site owners can, can Employ to educate themselves on best practices and best.

Way to find those. If somebody wants to read those is just to search. Like Webmaster guidelines.

Yeah, exactly, just Webmaster guidelines. It's right up there. Good, good times. We'll leave them. I'm sure we can provide some links in the show notes, no problem.

Do you feel like that would be something that somebody who's not an SEO would be able to look at and understand or does it get relatively complex if you, if you start to read through it?

It's not that complex. Google's really good about dumbing this stuff down. I many of you know, if you've heard me speak, I am all about toddlers and drunk adults. I try to make sure that I present my content, my audits, my presentations, my PowerPoints in a way that's as easily accessible to as large a number of people as possible. Google's really good about that. You're not going to find any, you know, 15 words when you know a 50 cent word will work. So the good thing about the guidelines is they, they really kind of dumb those down as much as possible. And again I don't think that's a bad thing. The goal is to make this as accessible as widely possible. So I think a good job there.

So some good bedtime reading for anybody who wants to dive deep on the guidelines.

Absolutely, absolutely.

How about on the updates front? Now one of the things we hear a lot of questions about, people come to us say like hey, you know, I don't understand this. What does this mean? You referenced it by saying Google pushed this out. Is this idea of updates or the Google updates to the Google algorithm? Can you talk about what that actually means? What is the Google algorithm and do we have any idea of how it works?

Well, we only have snippets and ideas from the information that Google releases, usually in blog posts and of course patents. Bill Swaski, very good friend of mine, he now lives in Carlsbad here. Bill Slosky, if you ever are interested in reading about Google patents he is by far are the main guy in the world covering this. He's been covering it for years. If you just type in Bill Slosky or Google patents that his blog will pop up. He has an SEO by the sea blog. Fantastic information but he's able to discern a lot of information from, from, from patents and that's something that I've done and picked up over the years. Patents are provide kind of a, an inside look into where Google may have gone in the past and where we think they may go in the future, but they're usually not super reliable. They're usually outdated. Everything that we're getting is 18 months of the past, sometimes years in the past. But it gives you an idea of where we'll rethink concepts, where Google, where Google might go. So patents are one way is that.

Because they'll apply for the patent after they've been kind of testing the thing that they're patenting.

Yeah. And sometimes patents can take as many as two years to get a full approval before we even.

That's. It's not until they get full approval.

That we can actually see the documentation. Yeah. I mean, so they're much faster than we are. I've seen patents be approved for Google in 120 days, which is crazy. Sure. But the. Generally that's not the case. But yeah, with patents we're getting kind of an eye, a look inside. But it's usually an outdated and antiquated look of things where we think they're going. And usually though, we want to look at the blog posts that Google publishes. Google has a blog. It's called blog.google.com and again, this is very easy to use. One of the things that they, that they push out a lot is when they make changes, big changes to their algorithm. Now Google makes literally hundreds of thousands of changes to their algorithm every year. Dozens and dozens of changes every day. We don't really have one big algorithm. Google would like to say that they have millions of baby algorithms that work in conjunction based upon the query and the everything from the query to the search, the search that triggered to what kind of platform we're using, whether it's mobile or desktop or whatever.

And these idea being just as some examples like local would maybe be. There'd be hundreds of or thousands of algorithms which within like crazy ice cream near me versus using a, a Google device, voice device versus recipes, for instance, versus video. Like it goes on and on and on. All of those. Cumulatively, you're saying create kind of one technically big algorithm, but it's actually just millions of little algorithms combined together.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And then Google has an engine, and this engine is usually powered by various artificial intelligence algorithms, which we have no idea what they involve. But Google does let us know sometimes when they make a really big change. For example, back In October of 2019, we found that Google had been using a new algorithm, a new main algorithm called Bert that they'd been testing in the wild probably for a year before we even realized about it. And BERT was a. BERT basically stood for Biodirectional Encoder representations from Transformers, which I know is a mouthful $15 word. That's why Bert. Bert seems to work a lot better. And BERT was just a refinement to how Google was returning query. It was query refinement is what it was. It's just, you know, it was easier for, for Bert to pull out information across various different modules and, and the like. And it's crazy how these algorithms work. You know, we, Someone, yeah, much smarter than me would have to explain to you in details how they work. But just recently, as an example, Google at Google IO, which is their major kind of industry conference that they have every May, they introduced, they said, hey, by the way, Bert's old news all now we're going to be using mum. And I'm like, mom? What's mom? And MUM is a new algorithm called Multitask Unified Model. And basically what MUM does is. It's crazy, it's a quote. This is per Google, 1000 times improvement over BERT. And basically how mum works is it's better understanding of language. It doesn't just understand language, it generates it. So it's trained across 75 different languages and it could do many different tasks at once. And basically the whole point of MUM is to develop a more comprehensive understanding of information and world knowledge than these previous modules. And you know, I'm going to provide, well, happy to provide the information for your audience and they can read through this because again, it's so exciting. It's incredible nighttime reading. If you guys ever want to, you know, make sure that you have a good night's sleep, just read these blog posts that we're going to share to you at the presentation today.

When you say, well, we'll make sure to grab some links from you and put those in the show notes. When you say it's exciting, is it exciting in terms of the capabilities that it can, that it has in order to get answers to people, or is it exciting in regards to the opportunities that it presents to publishers?

I think both. I think what it does is that Google is just trying to make it easier for publishers to overcome their own mistakes. Maybe they're trying to optimize for a specific keyword, but maybe they just haven't done a very good, a very good job of it. Or maybe they, maybe they don't understand the concept of entities where Google has been using what's called the somatic web for years, which is basically a ability for you to pop various entities in a post and for Google to understand, oh my gosh, this post is about all these different topics. You know, if I'm sure writing a post on Abraham Lincoln and I want the post to really do well, then that post needs to have known entities in it like his assassination. And he'll reference to his wife Mary Taub and Todd and here's his Getty Berg address and here's a John Wilkes Booth. And these are various entities that Google has been looking for to make sure that that returned result is the most qualified for the audience. Maybe researching a report on Abraham Lincoln.

Sure.

For, for the food space. That would be very similar to someone who's picking a pumpkin pie. A pumpkin pie. There are various things that you're looking for in a pumpkin pie to make sure that it is germane to what you're looking for. A full recipe card, detailed instructions. Are there individual step by step recipes. Have I taken the time to answer some common questions about, you know, maybe I'm not using canned pumpkin, maybe I am. Is there a difference? Those are, there's various characteristics of a good pumpkin pie recipe. And the whole point of these algorithms from Bert to Mum is to make it easier for Google to find and and rank those recipes based upon an improvement in entity classification.

And the reason that's exciting for publishers is because. Tell me if I'm tracking with what you're saying here, right. That means that publishers who are doing good work and creating rich full content, answering questions, essentially doing the work of creating a good blog post with a recipe that Google will reward that hard work by understanding, hey, this question has been answered. These are step by step photos that are connected to it. And so a publisher can just essentially focus more and more and doing their job which is creating great content and Google will recognize it. Is that kind of the what you're getting at with that?

Exactly. And the whole point of these, these new algorithms is these AIs are trying to make information more useful. They're trying to basically pull together connections and tentacles between related content on your site and off site to, you know, make sure that the users are getting constantly updated intent based searches. So for example, you've we've talked about core updates. I know we've mentioned core updates previously when we've spoken and I know that core updates is something that has come up with some of your other other guests. But a core update is an announced update by Google. It's something that is so important that it affects a not small percentage of the search index. And core updates happen two, three times a year. And Google is really good about announcing those. We a, we had a June core update that went out on 2 June, lasted till about the 12th. We had a July core update that went out on the 1st of July and lasted till about the 12th. And then, you know, we also have things like these, these. The title update which we mentioned earlier, the August title update which Google announced on 824 but then refined on 917 by introducing these two new pages in the webmaster guidelines, talking about how they're going to be generating this stuff so that you have an idea of what you could optimize for accordingly. But these core updates are really just a refinement of search intent in many cases where the June one is a great example of where myself, Arson Rabinovitch of Top Hat Rank and others have done analyses of what happened before and after these updates. And it's crazy to see that, you know, they've changed the results completely around certain queries. So if someone is searching for, for example, vegan recipes before June, it would be very common to actually have individual vegan recipes show up on page one of Google. Now that's hardly the case, actually. If you were to go today, you're not going to see individual vegan recipes. You're going to see a more of a roundup approach. There's lists of vegan recipes. There is interesting.

So it's almost like in that regard Google shifted and they said, well, we're not going to show you a roundup in the sense of like a bunch of different individual vegan recipes. We're going to show you search results for people who have said, here's a bunch of vegan recipes that we think would be a good fit or maybe a really well structured kind of category page that would be a vegan recipes category page. That was the shift that happened.

Yeah, that's exactly it. We saw a lot of that kind of refinement where bloggers who had roundups that were sitting on their site doing absolutely nothing for months or years, all of a sudden those roundups were revitalized by Google and started sending their traffic. And you know, we, we definitely want to optimize that. But. But then that also brought another issue to Google's attention, which they're now going after. And you may have heard us talk about this or may have heard it in the forums previously, which is that Google announced basically that they were starting, they were going to go after abuses of listicle articles. They, they announced that basically, gosh, what was it in September where they had been finding issues with. And this has been something that's been happening in the food blog niche for a while where someone would add a recipe card to a roundup, with the whole point being to generate a rich snippet or a carousel result. And that's just not what you do. A lot of bloggers fail to understand that especially with recipe schema, there are very specific parameters that you must abide by. A recipe is one item, so you can't. For example. I'll give you an example that I saw today. I had a blogger email me, and they said, hey, I, I need to know if this is something that I could do. And she sent me a, she sent me a, an example of a blogger who had put together a post which had five green bean recipes in it. And the recipe card was like, five different types of green bean recipes. And I'm like, that's a violation. Recipe cards are for one recipe singular. You cannot use a recipe card for multiple items. And so what was happening is people were popping these recipe cards in on roundups and saying, you know, 12 Easter recipes or 12 vegan recipes that are great for the fall harvest or something like that. And that's just a violation of schema guidelines. We call that spammy structured data markup. And John Mueller went out, you know, it was actually brought to his attention by someone on a live call, and he pulled up some examples, says, yeah, that's not correct placement. So we're gonna be escalating that. And so it's important that users understand that if you're, do, you're on the call and you're listening to me and you're saying, gosh, I do have some posts here, but, man, they're ranking well, they're on page one. They're, they're, they're. I did this, and Google doesn't seem to be going after me. I totally get it. You know, maybe they're generating very good traffic for you. Just understand that eventually Google might go ahead and go after you for that. And, you know, here's what happens. For those of you on the call. If this is affecting you and you want to take the risk, I get it. It's all about risk assessment. If you're getting very good traffic from these roundups and you don't want to, you don't want to correct them, just understand that what would happen is that Google would go through. They'll remove your rich snippets from your entire site.

Sure.

So you'll just wake up one day, you'll most likely have a notice in your, in your Google search console. It will be for a spammy structured data markup. And it'll say, we've detected schema that's outside our accepted guidelines. You're going to need to remove it. Sometimes they provide one, one or two examples. Usually they do not. If you go back to that roundup and you find out that that roundup is now, you know, the markup's all gone, then that would be the first thing that we would troubleshoot. We would go in, we remove the recipe card from all of your roundups. We would then go back into Google. We'd submit a reconsideration request noting, hey, it's possible that these roundups violated your schema guidelines because, you know, I'm not supposed to put schema recipe roundup on a roundup. And then within a week or two weeks, all your schema pops back. Yeah, you have to make the decision. I mean, you're, you're. Are you going to suffer a traffic drop? Absolutely. Sometimes I've seen clients suffer 20 to 30% traffic drops because they've lost all their rich snippets. And as you're aware, it's not their wrist snippets are a ranking factor. They are not, but they increase conversion considerably. Right. So, you know, all of a sudden you, you wake up and you had all these carousel listings. Now you don't. That's going to be a big drop in your overall traffic.

Yeah, we have a really good example of that on Pinch of Yum. We have a cookie post, chocolate chip cookie post, and was a really good performer for us. And then over time, it started to drop off and we couldn't figure out why there wasn't an image included in the search results. And like you said, that's not a ranking factor, but it is a click factor. Like people see it and especially with the recipe. Anyways, we found out there was a change made within Yoast, which is an SEO plugin for people who don't know where they started to and maybe track this for familiar. They started to prioritize the social graph, meaning, like the Facebook picture as the search picture. And in our Facebook picture for that post, we had text that was explained what it was.

That's a violation. Yeah.

Suddenly, because of this update within Yoast, our previous image that was being shown, the one that we wanted to show, was now replaced and it was telling Google, hey, use this one that they also use on Facebook that has text. And Google was like, they didn't Tell us this. But it was like, wait, you can't use text on an image. We didn't know that change happened until we looked at the git repository for the code updates and changes. The developer we work with, Daniel saw that. And then also shout out to Kingston from slickstream, who's somebody that we work with, helped us figure this out and what it was is, you know, exactly to your point, Kasey, where it's like a violation in Google's eyes. They say, well, we don't want text on images showing up in search results. As soon as we change that. In our case it was the next day when we replaced that we saw, we saw a lift from that. So it's, it happens and you can see it sometimes even on, you know, probably more often than not unintentionally. But even more so if you do know that you're in violation, those are some of the things that can happen. A couple things that I want to pull from that would love to hear your thoughts on from that segment that you just talked about. John Mueller. First, can you explain who he is and why he's important in the search world?

Yeah, John Mueller is a product service engineer for Google. He's also a Google Web trends and analyst and even more, he's basically one of the two main spokespeople for Google. He does the Google Webmaster hangouts. He's been active doing that for at least the last six, seven years. He, he replaced Matt Cutts who previously was the head of kind of the public arm, the visual arm of Google. Matt went and worked for, took a job working for the US Government. He just ended that association actually. I'm not sure what he's doing. He might be actively retired right now, but he worked for the US Digital Command actually, which is a great opportunity, basically handling all of the websites for the US government. And John is our main pipeline as SEOs to Google. You know, if we notice there's issues, we'll tag John sometimes.

Sure.

Or he tends to be someone who we have speak at most of the major conferences to let us know where Google is going. And of course, these webmaster hangouts that he does every week are invaluable because it allows regular people to log in and ask him questions germane to their own site so they could get personalized feedback. And that's where a lot of the issues, a lot of the changes to the existing guidelines or a lot of the, what we call illuminations of these guidelines come into play where we're saying, okay, we're just saying this, but what about this?

What you actually interpret the.

Can you interpret this a little bit for us? And yeah, says well, you know, in this case, blah, blah, blah. So I mean, yeah, we have to, we have to take all that into consideration. But yeah, he's very important with regards to helping us understand the mysteries of Google as it works on a daily basis.

That makes sense. And one of the examples that you gave was, he was looking at, was it food posts, like a recipe post that had multiple recipe cards in it. And the reason that's incorrect is because essentially Google has said when you do a recipe card, you should only have one recipe. In order for us to understand this correctly, it has to be one recipe within an article or a blog post. That's not to say that you can't do roundups, right? Roundups are open.

Absolutely. Yeah. But use roundups item with schema modules and all that. Yeah. And this is why I believe Tasty is doing this too. This is a Tasty WP recipe maker. I'm not sure so much about Create these days, but there's an, an auto setting there. If I insert two recipe cards into Tasty or WP Recipe Maker, it automatically recognizes. Hey, oh, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. You have two recipe cards in here. We're only going to export out the scheme on the first recipe card on the page that we detect. And that of course will overcome a lot of mistakes by novice bloggers. But what we're seeing is again, the big issue right now is with these roundup posts where bloggers are putting these roundups together and then they're popping a recipe card at the end of the roundup.

Sure.

This top 15 fall harvest recipes. And they're popping a recipe card at the end where it literally says top 15 harvest recipes. When recipe card schema is very clear. A recipe card is for one individual item. So that's something we don't want to do. And there's also a clear guideline where if it's a, it's a list of items, a category, list of items, you don't use recipe cards. So just an FYI on that. So I mean, it's just one of those things where eventually Google, Google has a lot on its plate, but there's probably someone working on this. And usually when they see a big issue like this, it's just, they'll just push out an update. Yeah, you're gonna.

And that would be one of those micro updates that goes out one day you suddenly notice something has shifted or changed.

Somebody you Notice something and it's gone. Now they could take, they could take a more manual approach and just send out a wave of, we call that manual action reports. Basically, they'll send out a wave of manual actions and you'll just wake up and you'll have a notice in your Google Search Console. You know, we've detected that you're using spammy structured markup. And then those are of course easier to correct because we know immediately what the issue is as. Whereas if it's algorithmic, we have to look at clues what changed and then make changes based upon that data.

That's a really great takeaway. And I know there's some, a lot of people who have Google Search Console set up much like Google Analytics. Yeah, but you talk about what Google Search Console is and then also, not only just for the data perspective, but also it's literally like a mailbox for Google to occasionally send you information and why it's so important to have it set up. So what is it and how should people use it?

Yeah, Google Search Console is probably the most important thing you can do for your blog. The minute your blog is launched, you want to go in and verify your site with Google. And you verify your site either through using a simple HTML tag you can use by using an SEO plugin like Yoast, or you can verify your site through Google Analytics. You know, you link your Google Analytics to your Google Search Console, click a button and it says, hey, yeah, you own these. So we're going to start populating your Google Search Console with data. Or you can actually use DNS, DNS values or your host to verify your site with Google Search Console. All three work fine. I think for newer bloggers I would just say get it verified. Worry about the verification method at a later date when you visit with someone who it wants to do an audit or something like that. But the data is your only, this is your only avenue for Google to, to receive actual feedback. Google's going to crawl your entire site. They're going to start populating the Search Console with a plethora of information on your URLs, your keyword queries, crawling errors. They're going to be able to submit your sitemaps that you can see in real time how Google is crawling and indexing your content. You'll most important, especially for a food blogger, is the schema. Because our schema is really what determines how we are going to do with Google and making sure that you're using a supported plugin and that you're using the right types of schema. That's a big feature of Google Search Console because it'll show you all the various detected schemas on your page and most importantly, let you know when there's errors detected. Now, warnings and errors are very different things. A warning is okay. It's not going to kill you. An error is always bad. An error means I'm not going to get a written. An error means I could not actually rank at all for this query because I've done something I shouldn't do. So we want to fix all errors, but we want to, you know, if we could fix all warnings, great. But it's not going to kill you if you, for example, don't have video in all of your recipe cards. Sure, that's an example of a warning which, you know, it's suggested we try to fix, but for most bloggers, it's not going to kill you. Either way, you're fine.

Yep, yep. And Google Search Console free tool. And essentially it's absolutely to reflect back to you what's happening with your site and things that you can correct and improve.