Possible Google Serving System Tweaks for Q4 - Crawl or No Crawl Report 16 October 2022
Welcome to Crawl or No Crawl - this is Carolyn Holzman and today is October 16 - 2022 -
I didn’t report on yesterday because well frankly I have never seen this before.
If you’re having a weird time with your rankings - you may want to hear this.
First let me say this -
You’re looking at the data log of the Indexation Research where all the dates and times and updates are laid out to confirm that Google is taking in new content. And using the bots to inform what we’re seeing
Today is an observation day
So how to describe what I’m seeing in a useful way, even if we can’t change it for the time being it might inform our actions during this time.
Semrush is reading back in normal range
As you know I have been testing new content indexation for over a year.
Last year - I had no success indexing using google’s recommendations for how to submit in SC and request indexation.
It wasn’t until February that basically if you don’t follow google’s guidelines you get really good indexation rates.
This is the first 4th quarter that I’ve had documentable new content indexation going into Q4.
It started first as rollbacks - content that previously was findable by it’s keywords no longer being findable by it’s keywords - and that has always been in a new chrome build bot testing and it has always worked out -
However, this is proving different.
I set this up as a wordpress site - trying imitate normal conditions. And many of you know the interlining within a wordpress site is just built in - you’d have to work to Not have it interlink.
We learned this in the early days of seo testing - even going so far as to have a theme developed that didn’t have it.
So what I’m seeing is that the test keywords are pulling up the category pages - if there were 5 posts on the category page - both the simple and js keywords assigned to those 5 test pages - total of 10 keywords - each one of those 10 keywords pulls up the category page
We do know that the reason wordpress category pages are so strong - is that all those related topics for say “business” topics - it makes sense it would strengthen the category pages.
So why did not only these pages rollback - but have their keywords essentially reassigned to a page with more internal backlinks?
Are you following me?
Another reason it took me a day to report is I checked each of those URLs in SC to see what if anything had changed and they are all still showing indexed.
Just not findable by their keywords.
This starts for content published in the week of Sept 16 - backwards - the keywords have been reassigned
The test content after Sept 16th is in a rollback -
So it’s possible that you have content that is showing as indexed in search console but that is NOT being served.
Going back to the three systems - and looking at their with a 4th quarter lens
We know the crawl system has tested almost 2 months to get a crawl.
We know the indexing system using the Google Indexing API gets our content into the supplemental index
Now we may be seeing what the Serving System does - it may be Where the keywords are assigned. And in Q4 - the criteria or filter to WIN a keyword is at a much higher threshold. So your pages are published, they are indexed they are just no longer findable by their keywords.
So that would operationally appear to be a loss of ranking, a loss of traffic for pages that do not meet the now current criteria for keyword assignment
Let’s look at the bots.
We’ve gone 3 days without any refresh render crawls -
Yesterday the desktop version of the mobile bot was launched - which means that we’re not likely to see GBs 15 in either mobile or desktop
I’m inclined to launch an additional test site in Q4 - and set them all to the same category and see if there is a threshold for number of internal links to assist keyword assignments in Q4
Subscribe to these reports
If you want to get more SEO content - check out Confessions of an SEO podcast - New episodes launch every Friday at 8 am
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de...