Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne, these days mainly interested in Technical SEO and Machine Learning.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

PSA: if you're using GSC Impressions with individual XML Sitemaps, the Impressions data Google is showing are aggregate for the site.
Previously, they returned the Impression count for the URLs in a sitemap. This seems to no longer be the case.
Bug or feature? I'm not sure.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@DavidGQuaid Not trying to flex at all David. It's a weak argument based on very limited cases where HTML sitemaps *might* have some slight edge over XML sitemaps. I didn't see any context about small sites in this thread, but even then I'd take XML over HTML all day long. YMMV of course.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@DavidGQuaid Without telling me you've never worked on a large multi-million url site. Never mind a massive 8- or 9-digit url site...

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@DavidGQuaid Tell me you've never worked on large multi-million url site

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

And here it is:
https://t.co/Fx5nPHdOc0

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

I'm now seeing some very serious fuckery by Google on SERP Page 2 served to trackers. For commercial queries:
- Page 1 includes things like alternative locations to the users.
- Page 2 sometimes replaces the main entity altogether.
The giveaway is in PAA, Maps, AIOs etc.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

Looks like Google may have switched from blocking scrapers to instead serving poisoned responses. Very interesting strategic move IMO. Far more damaging, and much more difficult to counter than getting blocked. Have to be honest - smart change.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

Page 1 might be for [product for sale in location] and include pages clearly targeting different cities/locations. Page 2 includes only legal/govt sites related to a location called "sale", with nothing related to product whatsoever. AI fanout using this garbage is gonna hurt.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@rustybrick @semrush So they have systems to identify this, yet they are asking - cap-in-hand - for users to report issues for further investigation? Their ranking data has been useless for some time now due to this issue. Any claims of mitigation are at odds with reality inside their product.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@JHTScherck @seroundtable @nozzleio Fair play to Nozzle publishing this. Not really in their own interest, and the other tools seem pretty tight lipped about it. But hopefully Nozzle will get the attention they deserve for their research.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@aleyda @nickwilsdon This is awful. Far too young. He was a super nice person. RIP Nick.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

Some very serious data analysis showing just how much poisoning is going on:

https://t.co/N0vW1OLKYa

TL>DR;
27.5M SERPs analysed
660K+ keywords with poisoned SERPs
49 countries - Austria had 18.8% of scraped SERPs show poisoned results.
8.0% of SERPs poisoned

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

I'm now seeing some very serious fuckery by Google on SERP Page 2 served to trackers. For commercial queries:
- Page 1 includes things like alternative locations to the users.
- Page 2 sometimes replaces the main entity altogether.
The giveaway is in PAA, Maps, AIOs etc.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@gaganghotra_ I think we're safe for a little while longer...
Pretty poor imo.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@gaganghotra_ Most likely a third party product summarizing the reviews, and I'm pretty confident the bad reviews being left in is a conscious decision. Very easy to train or prompt out the bad in this response.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@alattimore @gaganghotra_ Not good. At all.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@natzir9 @thijsvanhal @g33konaut I think you and I are doing something very different. I need to dog out my old tests and screenshots. The one major difference I see immediately is that I always tested rendered real content instead of dynamically painting elements. But we seem to have very different outcomes.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@natzir9 @thijsvanhal @g33konaut On the flattened DOM - this I was aware of previously, and has been the case for a decent time IIRC.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@natzir9 @thijsvanhal Ok. Good to know. I think this is new behaviour since I last tried it. I'll have to get testing again to see how this works now.

[Richard Hearne @RedCardinal]

@natzir9 @thijsvanhal Why is innerHeight changing after 5s? I think you may be doing something which isn't typical of what WRS does. I tested this by loading a very long page and then outputting read innerHeight at top of page. Then just read this from the screenshot. No dynamic loading involved.