Last Updated on July 4, 2023
What a week. Just when you thought Organic SEO was lemon squeezy, the tech giants sneeze, and we all fall down. Did you miss it?
If organic SEO is of interest to you, then two events are going to keep you busy. First, the announcement by Google that they are phasing out the sitemap ping. The second event is Twitter’s blocking views of tweets unless you are logged in.
Perhaps you noticed when you searched for something in Google, that the Twitter carousel is gone. Right? Wow.
What does this all mean? That two of our favourite organic SEO tools are gone. Almost.
Tweets Not Showing Up on Google (or any other search engine)
Off-Page SEO (any information about you not on your own website) was always a very important part of my SEO process. You can see for yourself, if you google your website there are possibly one snippet for each page. Unless you have a massive website, that’s a finite way to be found.
Look for yourself in any other way, and you will probably find thousands more links. That’s important. Whether it be an Amazon profile, social media, press, backlinks from partners, guest posts – off-page SEO is amazing.
With Twitter not allowing Google & co to scrape their website, all those public tweets are now invisible. That’s scary.
Why Off-Page SEO is so Important to an Organic SEO Strategy
Search for someone or something on Google, and you will find not only websites but also YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, links to Amazon and Pinterest, and much more. Google indexes most of what happens on social media.
Social media is important if you want to be found.
- + Social media content (can be) indexed.
- + Social media helps builds authority (backlinks)
- + Drives traffic to your website
- + (very) Helpful for local SEO
- + Social media involves real people
- + Social media helps build brand awareness
- + Social media profiles (can) rank on Google
- + Assists with keyword research: hashtags = search terms
Google’s Hummingbird algorithm (2013 is ten years ago) valued high-quality content that was relevant, authoritative and shareable. Ergo social media.
Google can’t display tweets and pages from Twitter in search results as effectively as it usually does because of changes at Twitter, according to a statement given to The Verge. “We’re aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results,” spokesperson Lara Levin said. “Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content.”
Tweets aren’t showing up in Google results as often because of changes at Twitter – The Verge
Google Phasing Out the Sitemap Ping – and What this Means for LastMod
Google announced that it will no longer support pinging your site when content has been updated – or created, I guess. I’ve always been a big fan of this feature. It’s great that Yoast and other SEO plugins are alerting Google. However, it’s also a good point that not every update to our content is important. Or helpful.
Google says, and after the initial shock, it’s true, that “the last modified date should reflect the date the content changed SIGNIFICANTLY enough to merit re-crawling.”
The goal of Google’s helpful content update is to reward content that visitors are happy with. Useful content. As always, Google strives to remain the most successful search engine by providing us with the very best search results.
The Google Helpful Content Update – Warren Laine-Naida // Digital Consulting (warrenlainenaida.net)
Don’t forget: Your job as a website owner is to quickly provide users with the content they want, in the format they want it. And that’s the heart of good SEO.
The Sitemaps Protocol was introduced in 2005 to help search engines with the discovery of new URLs, and also to help with scheduling new crawls of already discovered URLs. While the general idea is still useful, some aspects have become less practical in today’s internet.
To that end, we’re announcing deprecation of the sitemaps “ping” endpoint and providing additional recommendations for the use of the
Sitemaps ping endpoint is going away | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developerslastmodelement.
The Importance of the Sitemap for Your Website
Websites have two sitemaps, and Google wants us to implement both. One sitemap is for visitors (like this: https://warrenlainenaida.net/sitemap/), and the other is for search engines (like this: https://warrenlainenaida.net/sitemap.xml).
One sitemap contains individual sitemaps for each type of content. Categories, authors, products, events, tags, posts, pages – whatever you offer on your site that can be crawled and indexed. Yes, even images are listed in your sitemaps.
We don’t often use sitemaps when visiting a website. It is usually located in the footer, and when we search for something, we use the search box. If there is no search box, a sitemap can be very useful.
You can create a sitemap manually using HTML on a page of your website, or use a plugin like WP Simple Sitemap that automatically lists all existing pages as well as the pages you create in the future.
The sitemap.xml
This is one of the most important files available to us. This file allows search engines to quickly get an overview of our content. We can use it to collect the search terms that we have seen in Google Search Console.
How Will These Updates Change Your Organic SEO Workflow?
I will be updating my SEO book before the next edition in August. Both of these are going to be important considerations for anyone interested in the visibility of their content.
Social Media / Twitter Changes: I noticed a large drop in search engine visibility over the last few days, but it is slowly coming back. Social Media accounts for about 25% of my organic visits. Twitter was the largest source. I have used medium.co in the past, and I may be putting more content there.
Sitemap Ping Changes: Regarding the sitemap ping, I will be much more proactive manually submitting any significant changes to my content. I don’t play around with this – I don’t make minor updates just for the ping – it won’t be much of a change in my workflow. I will be more aware however.
Let me know what you will be doing!