Weekly SEO news: 19 February 2019
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Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. New in SEOprofiler: Open Graph link checks and picture element URL checks

In addition to many other things, the website audit tool in SEOprofiler now checks Open Graph URLs and URLs in <picture> elements. The website audit tool ensures that search engines can index all your web pages.

SEO audit with Open Graph and picture element support

What is Open Graph?

Open Graph was launched in 2010 by Facebook to offer an easier integration between Facebook and other websites. Major social media platforms now also support Open Graph tags.

The purpose of Open Graph tags is to provide information for social shares. For example, when you share a web page link on Facebook, the Open Graph tags can provide the correct thumbnail image and the correct description for the page.

Open Graph code has no influence on search engine optimization. However, good thumbnail images and descriptions can increase the number of clicks that your shared web pages get on social websites.

Open Graph meta tags are put in the <head> section of a web page. They can look like this:

<meta property="og:title" content="This is an example title" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.seoprofiler.com" />

The website audit tool now checks URLs in these Open Graph tags:

  • og:url
  • og:image
  • og:image:url
  • og:image:secure_url
  • og:video
  • og:video:url
  • og:video:secure_url

Checking the Open Graph tags makes sure that social networks will display your shared pages correctly.

What are picture elements?

The <picture> element was designed for responsive web pages. The <picture> element contains zero or more <source> elements and one <img> element to provide versions of an image for different displays or devices. The browser will consider each child <source> element and choose the best match among them.

If there is no match for the current display, the URL of the <img> element's src attribute is selected. A picture element can look like this:

<picture>
<source srcset="/images/large-image.jpg" media="(min-width: 800px)">
<img src="/images/small-image.jpg" />
</picture>

Web pages load much faster on mobile devices if only small versions of images are loaded. That's why it makes sense to use the <picture> on your web pages.

The website audit tool makes sure that your images load correctly on all devices (smartphones, tables, notebooks, desktop computers, etc.).

What else does the website audit tool check?

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler checks everything that can influence the position of your web pages on Google and other search engines:

Indexability, HTTP status codes, broken links, titles, duplicate content, spelling mistakes, images, body text, canonical tags, link depth, content topics, redirects, viewport, headlines, nofollow tags, file sizes, robots.txt, structured data, web page performance, and much more.

Get a detailed SEO audit

Check your web pages now to make sure that Google can index all of your web pages:

Check your pages now

2. Internet marketing news of the week

BingBing Ads: improvements to your search term reporting

"Bing Ads has expanded search terms management capabilities to include shopping campaigns. You'll now have more visibility and control over search terms than ever before in a single, convenient grid."

Does AMP improve rankings, engagement, and conversion?

"Overall, 22 of the 26 websites (77%) experienced organic search gains on mobile. Other areas of improvement include SERP impressions and SERP click-through rates. [...]

This data suggests that there were some rankings gains during the time period. So that still leaves us with the question as to whether or not having an AMP implementation is a direct ranking factor. In spite of the above data, my belief is that the answer is that it’s not."

John MuellerGoogle: why expired product pages might be marked as soft 404 errors

"In a webmaster hangout on YouTube, Google's John Mueller explained why Google might mark expired product pages as soft 404 pages.

A webmaster redirected outdated product pages to new product pages that showed alternate products. Google marked them as '404 not found' although the pages worked."


Google Ads: click share coming to search campaigns

"Click share is the estimated share of all achievable clicks that you have received. Click share has been available for Shopping campaigns since 2015. We’ve begun rolling it out for Search campaigns and plan to have it available for all Search campaigns in the coming weeks.

The lower your click share, the more opportunity you have to capture additional clicks. For example, if your ad is clicked 20 times, but we estimate that it could have been clicked 100 times if you had more extensions, higher bids, or higher budgets, your click share is 20%."


+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • India antitrust watchdog probes accusations that Google abused Android.
  • Google shows 'trending' icon for some searches.
  • Google shows ads in Google Assistant results.
  • Business owners now can reply to reviews on Google Maps for desktop.
  • Apple may have been paid $9.5B by Google in 2018 to stay default Safari search option.
  • Google Local restaurant packs showing "find a table" filter.
  • Google shows 'recently viewed' images on image search.
  • A new design for Google Autocomplete.
  • How to link to any word on any webpage using Chrome.

3. Previous articles

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