It’s been a relatively quiet week in the land of Google after last week’s long list of big updates. However, there was a lot of advice straight from the mouths of Googlers for SEOs and developers and some exciting new integrations including Google Analytics now exporting ecommerce data to BigQuery and the new PayPal integration with Google Merchant Center. ICYMI, here’s what happened at Google This Week.
- Google Analytics Now Able to Export Ecommerce Data to BigQuery
- Google Shopping Adds Curbside Pickup Option
- Google Warns SEOs on Common Pitfalls of Indexing and JavaScript
- Google Says the Disavow Tool Was Not Created for Negative SEO
- New PayPal Integration with Google Merchant Center
- Google Still Crawls #! But AJAX Crawling Schema Not Officially Supported
Google Analytics Now Able to Export Ecommerce Data to BigQuery
Google Analytics is now finally able to export Ecommerce item data to BigQuery as well. This works on Google Analytics on the web and the app. What should you do?
- Back up your analytics data in BigQuery
- Export all of your raw, unsampled events
- Query your data, question it using SQL-like syntax
- Export your data to external storage
- Import other external data for the purposes of combining it with your analytics data
Looks like @GoogleAnalytics App+Web finally exports the Ecommerce item data to BigQuery as well!#measure #googleanalytics pic.twitter.com/bIpjzq0PtP
— Simo Ahava (@SimoAhava) May 7, 2020
Google Shopping Adds Curbside Pickup Option
Google Shopping is beta testing a “curbside pickup” option to help brick-and-mortar retailers show more options for customers during COVID-19. The new feature is available for sellers using local inventory ads on Google shopping. The curbside pickup option appears above the product photo.
As the feature is currently in beta it is only available to advertisers who have completed onboarding for store pickup. This includes retailers who run on a Google or Merchant Hosted Local Storefront. The curbside pickup alert is also available to those without local inventory ads under their Google Business Profile under their pickup and delivery options.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Google Warns SEOs on Common Pitfalls of Indexing and JavaScript
“You might shoot yourself in the foot when you don’t expect it, so why would you build something more brittle if all it does is solve a non-problem?”
Google’s Martin Splitt warned SEOs and developers during a crawling and indexing session of Live with Search Engine Land.
During the talk, Splitt shared how SEOs could avoid the most common pitfalls when it comes to indexing and JavaScript. Essentially saying, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
“These are the things that worry me a lot and, oftentimes, it is either very over eagerly excited developers or SEOs who understand enough of the technology to be dangerous with it.”
Creating needlessly complicated solutions can lead to crawling errors.
“There is an HTML link tag, you put a URL in the href, that’s how you link and I don’t know why people are reinventing the wheel.” Splitt also warned not to opt for JavaScript if there’s a simpler method.
“Another thing that I see relatively often is that people rely on JavaScript to do things that you can do without JavaScript — that’s not something that you need to inherently be careful about, it’s just something that I think is pointless.”
Google’s go-to advice continues to be “build sites for users, not search engines.” Complicated workarounds could cost you over the long run.
Google Says the Disavow Tool Was Not Created for Negative SEO
Google’s John Mueller has again said that the disavow tool was not created for negative SEO.
“Not to put more fuel on the fire, but negative SEO is not a reason we have this tool — and I honestly can’t recall a situation where a site ever needed to do a disavow for that.”
In the original blog post for the launch of the tool back in 2012 Google stated that the tool is designed “to help clean up if you’ve hired a bad SEO or made mistakes in your own link-building.”
Google’s algorithms are designed to not be impacted by negative SEO. Over the years, Google has said that if you feel threatened by negative SEO then you can use the tool, however in general to simply ignore negative SEO.
Not to put more fuel on the fire, but negative SEO is not a reason we have this tool — and I honestly can’t recall a situation where a site ever needed to do a disavow for that. I’m sure there are a handful of cases, but for the most part, it’s totally unnecessary time spent.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) May 12, 2020
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
New Paypal Integration with Google Merchant Center
Last month Google announced that its Shopping search results would include free listings along with an integration with PayPal. This integration is now live. Retailers using PayPal on their site can now link their account to their Google Merchant Center accounts to onboard products across Google.
This integration can also speed up the merchant verification process if you’re new to the Google Merchant Center. In order to use the integration, you’ll need to opt into Surfaces across Google to appear in organic listings on Google Shopping, Search, Images, etc.
PayPal is the first integration of this kind, but Google has stated that “Soon there will be more platforms to choose from.” These integrations lower the barrier to entry for retailers to list their products on Google.
Source: Search Engine Land
Google Still Crawls #! But AJAX Crawling Schema Not Officially Supported
Yesterday Google’s John Mueller said that Google still technically crawls #! but that the AJAX crawling schema is not officially supported. In 2015 Google stated they would deprecate the AJAX crawling schema and then in 2017 they did. However, Google still technically crawls #!. On Twitter yesterday Mueller said,
“For the moment, we would still support it. But since we’ve flagged it as deprecated so long ago, I wouldn’t assume that it’ll stick around forever.”
While it’s still technically crawled I certainly wouldn’t suggest using it. Mueller went on to say,
“We try to keep old technology supported as much as we can, but that doesn’t make it a reasonable alternative for when you’re setting up something new :). Build for the long run, especially when it comes to URL structures.”
I know AJAX crawling was deprecated, but the 2017 blog post said that Google will render the #! URLs directly. I was wondering if that was still the case and if Google will still crawl links to those URLs? Or are they ignored like hash URLs?
— Mike Jarosch (@mjarosch) May 12, 2020
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Thank You for Reading
Have you noticed any changes from Google this week and how were you affected by the recent algorithm update?
Check back in next week for the latest from Google This Week.
