Hi Lunch Buddies!

I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and remained safe and healthy. I took both Thursday and Friday off which was a nice little break before we head into the new year. I would be amiss if I didn’t share with you all one of the coolest gifts I received. Officially licensed Minnesota Vikings Nike shoes. According to my wife, my weekend “outfit” is now complete!

Let’s jump into this week’s #SEOForLunch

-Nick

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Official Search Engine Updates

Article:

Google “Product Reviews” Update Done Rolling Out

What's Important:
Google employee, Alan Kent, confirmed with Barry Schwartz that the recent product reviews update has been fully rolled out.

Nick's Take:
Barry’s article does a great job of recapping the most important information regarding this update. For instance, the rollout officially launched on the 1st and was completed on the 21st. It’s also not considered a core update and impacts product review content exclusively.

Video:

The Past, Present, and Future of Robots.txt

What's Important:
Google’s Gary, Lizzi, Martin, and David discuss the crawling of a website. How does a manual initiated request differ from a bot initiated crawl and what impact does the robots.txt file have on crawling.

Nick's Take:
This podcast is a bit long (53 min) but I highly recommend listening to it in the background as you go about your work. The concept of crawling is CRITICAL and is often overlooked within a larger SEO strategy. I really enjoyed the conversation point about “what is considered a well-behaved crawler?” at the 23 min mark.

Video:

Google Search News (Dec ‘21) - Google ranking algorithms updates, interactive checklist, and more!

What's Important:
Google’s John Mueller covers some of the recent updates such as the pain in the butt Log4j security issue, mobile indexing, and recent core updates. There is also a link to a SEO quiz if you feel like having a little fun too!

Nick's Take:
John always creates quick and informative videos that are worth your time to watch. It’s great that he also included an SEO quiz that Matt Tutt also created. If you haven’t yet taken it yet, check it out here.

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Top SEO Resources From Last Week

Improving Core Web Vitals, A Smashing Magazine Case Study

Barry Pollard, SmashingMagazine.com

If you’ve been a subscriber for any length of time you likely realize I have an obsession with case studies. This Core Web Vitals case study covers a 6-month effort to enhance the scores across the Smashing Magazine website.

14 Must Listen to SEO Podcasts in 2022

Supple.com.au team

I get an occasional email or two that asks me for podcast recommendations. I don’t listen to too many so it’s always a hard request to fulfill. However, this article lists out many of the podcasts I have listened to myself and have regularly heard good things about.

Google’s December 2021 Product Reviews Update

Glenn Gabe, GSQi.com

You read that the product update is now fully rolled out but what has been the larger impact of the rollout? Glenn conducted his own analysis and you may be surprised to see the rollercoaster of traffic surges/drops that many sites are seeing.

SEO 2021 Year In Review

Corey Patterson, SearchEngineLand.com

I don’t care for the popular posts guessing what will be “hot in SEO” for the next year. However, this post does a great job of recapping the significant updates that occurred during this past year. Most notable, spam updates, page title rewrites, COVID-19 updates, Search Console updates and so much more.

You Made It To The Bottom. You’re AWESOME!

Thank you for reading this week's issue of the #SEOForLunch. If you know anyone who may also enjoy this newsletter please consider sending them to the signup page. https://nickleroy.com/newsletter

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Learn More About The Guy Behind The #SEOForLunch: Nick LeRoy

Nick LeRoy is a professional SEO Consultant specializing in technical SEO, content strategy, and website migrations.

Nick is also the author of two SEO-focused newsletters: #SEOForLunch and The SEO Freelancer.

You can connect with Nick online through Twitter and LinkedIn.