It’s already the second week of September, time sure flies by huh? Anyway, I’m here with this week’s latest SEO news update. Here is a breakdown of what they are:

-Google May Automate The Removal Of Recipe Rich Results For Listicles
-You Can Now Add Google Posts Directly From Google Search
-Avoid Using Knowledge Graph IDs For SameAs Property
-URL Parameters Don’t Make Links Unnatural
-Google Ads Content Exclusions Do Not Hurt Organic Search Rankings

7/9/2021- Google May Automate The Removal Of Recipe Rich Results For Listicles

Google’s John Mueller said that he reviewed a bunch of recipe related queries and noticed a nice number of sites using rich results markup incorrectly. He also said that Google might start automating the removal of those rich results for those sites. 

He said structured data for rich results, including recipe listicles, should not be used on list pages. He said “it should be just one item on the page and it shouldn’t be like a list of recipes for you to use the recipe markup.”

John said that based on the queries given in the example question “they’re just a lot of websites that are doing this.” So he said “I think the smarter approach would be on our side to see if we can algorithmically recognize this and kind of just not show those rich results for those kind of pages. So instead of manually trying to chase everyone down, find a way to do that in a more scalable way.”

So we might start seeing a bunch of recipe sites losing their rich results soon.

7/9/2021- You Can Now Add Google Posts Directly From Google Search

Back in June, Google said you will be able to add Google Posts directly from the Google search results page and it seems like it has happened.

Users on Twitter have started to point out this recent development where you can add Google My Business posts directly from the search result. 

7/9/2021- Avoid Using Knowledge Graph IDs For SameAs Property

What is SameAs property?
It is an URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item’s identity. For example, the Wikipedia page of an item.

Google’s John Mueller said technically you can use the knowledge graph ID URL for the URL in your SameAs property but it is not recommended.

It is not recommended because that ID might change, so you probably want to use URLs that are less likely to change than the knowledge graph ID.

8/7/2021- URL Parameters Don’t Make Links Unnatural

Google’s John Mueller had to say that links that have UTM parameters, or tracking parameter, added on to the end of the URL, does not make them unnatural links.

Google defines unnatural links as “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

This is what John Mueller had to say: “They’re just URL parameters. The unnatural part comes from them being unnatural links or not. You don’t make them natural by removing the parameters, and you don’t make them unnatural by adding parameters.”

8/7/2021- Google Ads Content Exclusions Do Not Hurt Organic Search Rankings

Google Ads have many policies, particularly around content exclusions. 

Google’s John Mueller was asked if the Google Ads labels in this area can impact or hurt your organic rankings. John said no, he said “those systems are quite separate; I can’t imagine any tag like that in Ads even being visible to the systems in Search.”

Google Search has its own means of determining mature or adult or sensitive content and that does not come from Google Ads. The two are very separate on purpose.

That’s all, folks!

Thanks for catching on this week’s SEO news. Hope you come back next week for some more!

Updated: 15 November 2024