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Archives for March 2021

Filters and Pills in the Google SERPs – How the addition of filters, tabs, and dynamic organization in the search results can impact visibility and clicks

March 18, 2021 By Glenn Gabe Leave a Comment

Filters and pills in the Google search results

As Bob Dylan famously wrote, “The times, they are-a changin’…” Well, based on Google’s frantic pace of change, SEOs could easily tweak that line and replace “times” with “SERPs”. In this post, I’ll cover two more changes that site owners and SEOs should be aware of. And those additions can have a big impact on visibility and clicks when they appear in the search results.

Over the past few years, I’ve written several posts about the power of certain SERP features and how those features can impact a site’s visibility and traffic. For example, I wrote a post covering Interesting Finds, which is a super-powerful SERP feature that takes up a huge amount of real estate in the mobile search results. And then I also wrote about Found on the web, which is a Frankenstein-like feature that can also take up massive real estate while yielding multiple carousels of listings.

Both of those features are important to understand, but in true Google form, there are more changes I wanted to bring to your attention today. And although these might be slightly more subtle than Interesting Finds and Found on the web, they can still pack a lot of punch.

Below, I’ll cover what the addition of filters and pills in the search results means for your business. During my research, I have seen them show up more and more recently for certain types of queries. For example, I’ve seen them show up for how-to queries and for queries that affiliate marketers might be targeting (like a search for “best {product category}” or even just the product category in general). Filters and pills don’t impact all sites and queries, but in my opinion, they are important for all site owners to at least be aware of.

Filters and Pills – Not a new punk band, but they can sure rock a SERP
I’ll start with filters, which have rolled out for specific types of queries and can be seen on both desktop and mobile. When they trigger, you will see a set of filters at the top of the search results that are related to the query you searched for. On desktop, they show up with a small magnifying glass icon, like this:

filters in the Google desktop search results

And on mobile, they show up as rectangular facets at the top of the search results:

Filters in the Google mobile search results.

Similar to e-commerce functionality, they enable users to filter the search results with the click of a button. On that note, it’s important to know that filters change the initial query to reflect the filter you selected.

For example, if you search for “best hair treatment”, you will see filters show up containing keywords related to hair treatment. If you then click the filter for “hair growth”, a new query will be triggered for “the best hair treatment for hair growth” and the search results changes.

Filter in the Google search results

After clicking or tapping a filter, the other filters still remain at the top of the search results, enabling users to continue to filter based on additional types of hair treatment. Again, very e-commerce functionality-like.

And here is what it looks like on mobile after initially searching for “best hair treatments” and then tapping the filter for “frizzy”:

Filter in the Google mobile search results

New queries, new opportunities:
The most obvious takeaway here is that sites that rank for the initial query could see people utilizing the filters and being taken to completely new search results. If that’s the case, and those site owners don’t have content that can rank for those additional queries, then they could be losing visibility and traffic. Again, the filters trigger a completely new search, yield completely new listings, and even new SERP features in some cases.

For example, you might find new SERPs with Interesting Finds, videos with key moments, “found on the web”, and more. So, while using those filters could send users to completely new SERPs, it also provides completely new opportunities for site owners. But, you need to be aware this is happening in the first place, which is why analyzing the actual SERPs is incredibly important. I’ll cover more about that soon. Next up, I’ll cover pills.

Dynamic organization and pills:
Google has been expanding what it calls dynamic organization for years. That’s where Google is organizing subtopics in the SERPs related to the core entity or topic you have searched for. You will often see dynamic organization in action for various entities in the SERPs. The data is organized into tabs and users can click each tab to view additional information related to that entity or topic. Tabs of the past have become colorful pills based on Google’s mobile redesign, which rolled out in January of 2021.

First, I’ll cover dynamic organization overall and then I’ll cover a newish version that I’ve been seeing more and more recently. Bear with me, we’ll get to the good part soon.

If you do a search for a music band, type of dog, movie, or even a topic like machine learning and you can often see a knowledge panel employing dynamic organization. In addition, on desktop you will sometimes even see a left-side navigation with tabs containing subtopics. And on mobile, those tabs are presented as pills (or small rounded buttons).

For example, here is a search for AC DC. The knowledge panel shows up with subtopics (pills):

Dynamic organization in the Google search results for AC/DC.

And here is a search for the movie Escape From New York:

Dynamic organization in the Google search results for Escape from New York.

But this is happening beyond traditional entities most people think of. Here is a search for machine learning that triggers subtopics (pills):

Dynamic organization in the Google search results for machine learning.

Dynamic organization has expanded over the years to cover entertainment, weather, music, travel, sports, and other categories. For example, you can often see dynamic organization in action for actors, movies, books, artists, and many other types of entities and topics. The mobile version was implemented in 2018 by Google, while the desktop left-side navigation has been expanding more recently. Also, you will often see tests being run as Google continually experiments with the best way to present the data.

Here is another example, but this time for the entity “unit circle”, which is a mathematical concept. Yes, we are way beyond the typical entities that most people think of…

Dynamic organization in the Google search results for unit circle.
Dynamic organization in the Google search results for unit circle in the mobile search results.

Most SEOs will be familiar with what I have shown so far, but there’s a newish version of dynamic organization that has appeared more and more recently. I’ll cover that next.

Just the pills: An expansion of dynamic organization
What I’m actually focusing on today isn’t the typical knowledge panel-like feature I mentioned above. Instead, Google has started showing just the pills for certain queries and not the full knowledge panel-like result. And it’s for many queries where people are searching for products or services (so this implementation of dynamic organization is impacting commerce).

For example, if you search for “best mixers” on mobile, you will see several pills at the top of the SERPs for “overview”, “products”, “videos”, “stores”, and “reviews”.

You can see the initial SERP below:

Just pills in the Google mobile search results.

For site owners, it’s important to understand that the pills (or tabs) do not trigger a new search, but instead, dynamically load different results in the SERPs. This is similar behavior you might see on an e-commerce site that uses AJAX to load or filter results without having to reload the entire page.

For example, tap “reviews” and this is what you see:

Review tab in the Google search results on mobile.

And remember, the initial query remains intact, but the listings are changing. So, similar to what I explained earlier, if users search for a query and you rank in the top 10, but then a user taps a pill to learn more about a subcategory (like reviews), then new listings will show up in the SERPs. And if you don’t have content that can rank for those subcategories, you could be losing visibility and traffic.

Here is another example for the query “Bluetooth speakers”. Here is the initial results with pills appearing at the top:

Tabs in the mobile search results.

But when you tap the “videos” pill, the results completely change to all videos:

Video tab in the mobile search results.

From a tracking perspective, you could theoretically see impressions remain stable as your listings rank in the default top ten, but clicks might drop as some people utilize the pills to research other subtopics related to that entity or topic.

And on the flip side, you might see impressions and clicks from queries where you don’t rank in the default top 10. Instead, users might be tapping a pill to filter the results and that’s where your listing shows up. In GSC, those impressions would register once the listings show up in the SERPs (after a user taps the tab).

Here is what it looks like in practice. Notice how the SERP is changing in the gif below, but the initial query remains intact:

Basically, Google is playing chess with this SERP… and I would make sure you’re not playing checkers. :)

How do you know when filters and pills are impacting your top queries?
Now that I’ve introduced filters and pills in the SERPs, I’m sure you are wondering how to track this for your own site to understand if rankings are being impacted. The quick answer is you won’t (easily) know. You have to find examples of this happening on your own. As you can guess, you can’t filter by these features in GSC, so you have to come up with your own process for surfacing queries that are impacted.

If you think you could be impacted by filters or pills based on what I provided earlier in this post, I recommend bulk exporting your queries from GSC via the API (using Analytics Edge, Data Studio, etc.) Then check queries that might be declining in clicks, but have stable impressions. That could surface a situation where your pages are ranking in the default top 10, but users are clicking the filters or tabs, which load new results.

If you see stable impressions, but declining clicks, it could be due to certain SERP features at play (like filters and pills). I would check the SERPs manually for those queries to see if filters or pills are showing up.

Gap Analysis: What can you do if filters or pills are present for your important queries?
If you find filters or pills are triggering for important queries, then go through the process of checking the filtered results to understand the pages ranking there and then perform a gap analysis with your own content.

Is your site’s content only present in the default listings or do you have multiple pieces of content that can rank when the SERPs are filtered? If there are gaps, close those gaps. There’s no guarantee you can recover that visibility, but you will have no shot if you don’t have content that matches user intent based on those filters.

SERP Features Can Have A Big Impact, Especially On Mobile
I’ve always said that certain SERP features can have a big impact on visibility and traffic from the search results. And that’s especially the case on mobile where you don’t have much room to play with. With filters and pills, the entire SERP is changing based on the tap of a button. And if your listings aren’t there when the SERPs are filtered, you could be losing visibility and clicks from Google. But, it also presents an opportunity for your content team to perform a gap analysis and close those gaps.

Filters and pills obviously aren’t impacting every query, but they can have a big impact for the queries where they trigger. If you are producing content focused on the types of queries I mentioned earlier in the post, I would take a hard look at the actual SERPs to see which features are present. You never know, you might see filters and/or pills showing up. If that’s the case, I would form a plan of attack for dealing with them.

GG

Filed Under: google, seo

How To Use GSC’s Crawl Stats Reporting To Analyze and Troubleshoot Site Moves (Domain Name Changes and URL Migrations)

March 2, 2021 By Glenn Gabe Leave a Comment

For site migrations, I’ve always said that Murphy’s Law is real. “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” You can prepare like crazy, think you have everything nailed down, only to see a migration go sideways once it launches.

That’s also why I believe that when something does go wrong (which it will), it’s more super-important to address those problems quickly and efficiently. If you can nip migration problems in the bud, you can avoid those problems becoming major issues that impact SEO. That’s why it’s important to prepare as much as you can, have all of the necessary intelligence in front of you while the migration goes live, and then move quickly to attack any problems that arise.

By the way, if you think you’re immune to site migration problems, then listen to the episode of Google’s Search Off The Record podcast where John Mueller, Gary Illyes, Cherry Prommawin, and Martin Splitt talk about the migration of the webmaster central site to the new search central site. It ends up they ran into several problems just like any other site owner could and had to move quickly to rectify those issues. So, if it can happen to Google, it sure can happen to you. :)

Adding Google’s Crawl Stats Reporting To Your Site Migration Checklist:
There are plenty of checklists and tools out there to help with site migrations. For example, Google’s testing tools in GSC, third-party crawlers like Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, and Sitebulb, site monitoring tools, log file analysis tools, and more.

And on the topic of log files, they provide the quickest way to understand how Google is crawling your site post-migration. You don’t need to wait for data to populate in a tool, you don’t have to guess how Google is treating urls, redirects, etc., and there are several log file analysis tools hungry to consume your logs.

But there’s a catch… trying to get log files is like attempting to complete a mission as Tom Cruise in one of his great Mission Impossible movies. If gaining log files was a scene in Mission Impossible, I could hear Tom now:

“Wait, so we have to scuba dive under a bridge heavily guarded by troops, climb a 200 story building in our underwear (in 20 degree weather), use elaborate yoga moves to dodge a scattered laser security system, steal the ancient lamp of Mueller which is protected by special forces, hack into a computer system protected by six layers of ciphers, download the log files, and then parachute off the building back into the water, only to scuba dive back under the bridge to safety? No problem… hold my coffee.”

OK, it’s not that bad, but any SEO that has attempted to get log files from a client knows how frustrating that situation can be. They are huge files, seemingly not owned by one group or person in a company, and you can even find some companies not keeping logs for more than a few days (if that). So, it’s no easy feat to get a hold of them.

What’s an SEO to do?

Meet The New Crawl Stats Report in GSC: A (Pretty) Good Proxy For Log Files
In November of 2020 Google launched the new Crawl Stats reporting in GSC. The reporting is outstanding, and it was a huge improvement from the previous version. The new reporting provides a boatload of data based on Google crawling your site. I won’t go through all of the reports and data in this post, but you can check out the documentation to learn more about each of the report sections.

I’m going to cover what Google considers “site moves with url changes”, which covers domain name changes and url migrations. I’ll focus on domain name changes, but you can absolutely use the new Crawl Stats reporting to troubleshoot url migrations as well.

For domain name changes, you can view crawl stats reporting for both the domain you are moving to and the domain you are moving from. So, using the crawl stats reporting can supplement your current migration checks and enable you to see how Google is handling the migration at the source (the old domain).

And for url migrations, you can also surface problems that Google is experiencing post-migration. It’s not as clear as a domain name change, since you can’t isolate the crawl stats reporting by domain, but it can still help you surface issues based on bulk-changing urls.

Note: There is a delay in the Crawl Stats reporting.
The Crawl Stats reporting lags by a few days, so log files are still important if you want to see a real-time view of how Google is handling a site migration. The reporting updates daily, but lags by 3-4 days from what I have seen. Below, you can see the report was last updated on 2/26/21, but today is 3/2/21.

How to identify problems with domain name changes and url migrations using the Crawl Stats reporting in GSC:
As mentioned above, for domain name changes, you can analyze the Crawl Stats reporting for the domain name you are moving from, and the domain name you are moving to. Below, I’ll cover some of the ways you can use the reporting to surface potential issues.

How To Find The New Crawl Stats Report in Google Search Console (GSC):
First, I know there’s some confusion about where the new Crawl Stats report is located. You will not find the report in the left-side navigation in GSC. Instead, you first need to click “Settings”, find the Crawling section of the page which contains top-level crawl stats, and then click “Open Report” to view the full Crawl Stats reporting.

Now that you’ve found the Crawl Stats reporting, here are some of the things you can find when analyzing and troubleshooting a site migration.

404s and Broken Redirects:
The Crawl Stats reporting for the domain you are moving from will list urls that Google is crawling that end up as 404s. All urls during a domain name change should map to their equivalent url on the new domain (via 301 redirects). By analyzing the source domain name that’s part of the migration, you can view urls that Googlebot is coming across that end up as 404s. And that can help you find gaps in your 301 redirection plan.

For example, you can see the reporting for a site that went through a domain name change below. 4% of the crawl requests were ending up as 404s when most of the urls should be redirecting to urls that return a 200 header response code on the new domain.

If you click into that report, you can see a sample of the top 1,000 urls with that issue and you can inspect the urls as well:

And here is what it should look like. 100% of the requests are 301 redirecting to the equivalent urls on the new domain:

Important (and often confusing) note: It’s worth noting that GSC reports on the destination url, so a 404 showing up for the old domain name could actually be showing you a redirect to the new domain name, but that new url 404s. In other words, the 404 is actually on the new domain, but shows up in the reporting for the old domain name. That’s extremely important to understand overall with GSC, and it can cause confusion while analyzing the reporting. I tweeted about this in January with regard to the Coverage reporting:

Reminder: GSC reports on destination urls in the Coverage reporting. So if you see urls that are categorized as blocked by robots.txt or noindexed, but they aren't, they could be redirecting to urls that are. And that's what is reported. Can send you off on a wild goose chase: pic.twitter.com/QYSWUcVTc1

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 5, 2021

Image Search: Googlebot Image
If image search is important for your business, you will definitely want to review the “By Googlebot type” section of the reporting. You will see a listing for “Image”. You can click into that reporting to see the urls Googlebot Image is crawling. If you see 404s, 5XX, etc., then make sure you jump on those issues quickly. You should see plenty of 301s if you redirected images properly during the migration (which you should). I covered that in my Mythbusting video with Google’s Martin Splitt about site migrations. The video can be seen later in this post.

As you can see below, Googlebot Image is coming across 404s as well. This is from the site that went through a domain name change.

This is what you should see. Notice how the Googlebot Image requests all properly 301 redirect to the images on the new domain:

Robots.txt issues:
In the host issues section, you can see if Googlebot is having problems accessing the robots.txt file for the domain(s) involved. If Google cannot fetch the robots.txt file (which returns a 200 or 403/404/410), then it will not crawl the site at that time. Google will check back later to see if it can fetch the robots.txt file. If it can, then crawling will resume. You can read more details about how this is handled on Google’s support page (or in the screenshot below). Note, you can 404 a robots.txt file and that’s absolutely fine. This is about Google having problems fetching the file (i.e. Google seeing a 429, 5XX).

And here is what it can look like in GSC’s Crawl Stats reporting. Although this falls under an “acceptable fail rate”, I would sure check why the robots.txt fetch is failing at all:

Other host issues: DNS Resolution and Server Connectivity:
Along the same lines, you can see if there are other host-level issues going on. The host reporting also contains DNS resolution errors and server connectivity problems. You obviously want to make sure Google can successfully recognize your hostname and that it can connect to your site.

Performance Problems:
The reporting also will show pages that are timing out for some reason, so keep an eye on that report. You will find that in the “By response” section.

Subdomain Issues:
Hopefully you picked up all subdomains that were in use before you pulled the trigger on the domain name change. But if you didn’t, you can see Crawl Stats reporting per subdomain that Google is crawling. The catch is that you need a domain property set up in GSC for the domain you are moving from (unless you had those subdomains verified and set up already in GSC).

If you did, you could view the crawl stats reporting for those subdomains separately. Domain properties make this easier since all subdomains being crawled by Google (the top 20 over the past 90 days) will be shown in the Hosts report in the Crawl Stats reporting.

Below, you can see that the crawl stats reporting shows 17 different subdomains with crawl requests over the past 90 days.

Note, I always recommend having a domain property set up. It’s amazing how many companies have not done this yet… If you haven’t, I would do that today. It doesn’t take long to set up and it covers all protocols and subdomains.

Crawl Stats For Site Migrations: Final tips And Recommendations
The Crawl Stats reporting can help site owners and SEOs get closer to log file analysis, when gaining those logs might be tough. Although there’s a lag in the data populating (3-4 days), the Crawl Stats reporting can sure help surface problems during domain name changes and url migrations. And the quicker you can nip those problems in the bud, the less chance they become bigger issues SEO-wise.

Here are some final tips and recommendations:

  • Set up domain properties for each of the domains involved in the migration (if changing domain names). This will give you access to all subdomains in the Crawl Stats reporting.
  • Once data starts populating in the Crawl Stats reporting post-migration, dig into the domain you are moving from. You might see a number of issues there based on what I explained earlier. For example, 404s, performance issues, robots.txt problems, and more.
  • Nail the redirection plan. If you see gaps and problems with your 301 redirects, move quickly to rectify those problems. Nip those problems in the bud.
  • Check for host-level problems (like robots.txt fetch issues, DNS resolution issues, and server connectivity problems). Your redirection plan doesn’t matter if Google can’t successfully connect to your site.
  • Look for pages that are timing out. This would show up in the “By response” section of the reporting. If you see that, dig into those problems to see why the pages are timing out. Again, move quickly to address performance issues.
  • Don’t forget your images! Make sure to 301 redirect your images and then check the section labeled “By Googlebot type”. Then check the “Image” reporting to see how Googlebot Image is crawling your content.

More About Site Migrations: Mythbusting Video
If you are interested in site migrations, then you should check out the Mythbusting video I shot with Google’s Martin Splitt. In the video, we cover a number of important topics including domain name changes, url migrations, redirecting images, when a site should revert a migration, site merges, the Change of Address Tool in GSC, and more.

Summary – GSC’s Crawl Stats as a proxy for log files.
After reading this post, I hope you see the power in adding Google’s Crawl Stats reporting to your site migration checklist. The reporting provides a boatload of great information based on Google crawling your site post-migration. I’ve found it extremely helpful while helping companies monitor and troubleshoot domain name changes, url migrations, and more. And remember, Murphy’s Law is real for site migrations. Things will go wrong… which is ok. The important part is how quickly you handle and rectify those problems.

GG

Filed Under: google, seo, tools

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