Good morning, Search Marketer, the past few weeks have been heavy on Fridays, so let's make this week a bit lighter with some useful nuggets of information to catch you up on some trending topics in search.
On the whole zero-click thing that we dug into last week, Rand Fishkin who came out with the study, updated his story on Wednesday. Rand published more data that said if you look at just US searches, the zero-clicks looks worse, from 64.82% to 68.3% but he did say overall clicks to websites, the raw number of clicks, is up because searches are up year-over-year. He shared a sample query set, saying a query like [apple iphone xs] zero click rate was 43% but a query like [donald trump age] was much higher at 95%, which just shows you, the query really matters. Rand said he hopes to break down queries more but needs more time, while Google has remained silent, giving us zero data to refute any of Rand's claims.
If you're algorithm watching, March was no different than February in terms of the number of unconfirmed updates. We had one this past weekend and several over the month of March. Meanwhile, we are waiting for that next big core update – the last one was on December 3, 2020, and we are really expecting a new one soon. So hold onto your seats.
Finally, on the mobile-first indexing side, Google is a bit delayed on migrating that last batch of sites to mobile-first indexing. John Mueller of Google said the company might finish it up in April or May, and it has stopped automatically migrating sites from desktop indexing to mobile indexing. This really should not impact you. I suspect your site has already been moved over a year or so ago.
Barry Schwartz,
Search catch-up reporter
