Hi there! 👋

In The SEO Letter's first issue, I'm sharing a note on why you should optimize your site's favicon.

Also, passage indexing is live now in US English search results, which will affect around 7% of search queries when fully rolled out in all languages.

This means that Google can now rank pages based on the individual content sections even if the overall page is about a broader topic.

Google has also updated core web vitals metrics, which was used to be less than (<) are now defined as less than or equal to (<=) for LCP, FID, and CLS reports.

So you can see a lot more green scores in the core web vitals GSC report because of this change.

Hope you enjoy this letter. 💥

In this first issue of The SEO Letter, I am sharing a tip that is not much discussed but is important: Favicon optimization.

Google now displays the favicons in all the listings in search results, which can affect the CTR (click-through rate) if they're properly visible or not visible.

So you should use a good favicon on your site so that users can refer to your brand in SERPs.

Also, keep your favicons consistent across your site — for consistent brand perception.

If, by any chance, your site's favicon isn't showing up in Google search results, make sure both the favicon file and the homepage is crawlable by Google, the favicon file is a multiple of 48px square, and the favicon is a representation of your website's brand.

You can also refer to Google's guidelines on this.

• Google has recently added a whole set of new manual actions for Google News and Google Discover guidelines violations.
• New policy violations are related to adult-themed content, dangerous content, hateful content, manipulated media, transparency, and medical content.

• On the issue of Black Hat SEO and permanent side deindexation, Google's John Mueller notes that...
• Sites don’t get permanently removed from Google — there’s always a way to get the site indexed again. Sometimes it takes a long time & a lot of work, but Google doesn’t have a list of permanently blocked sites.
• For manual actions (aka penalties), usually, the things that lead to complete removal are quite severe, like when a site is just pure spam with nothing useful of its own on it.

Exciting post on Semantic SEO with four different case studies and then the implementation of Semantic SEO.

In this post by Ahrefs, you'll find 16 marketing tactics that can help you achieve your marketing objectives. Some of the listed marketing strategies are:

• Promote your content as much as you can
• Repurpose your content
• Publish content optimized for Google Discover
• Regularly update your internal links to boost rankings
• Monitor and respond to HARO requests

• In GSC (search console), you can only see whether a page is marked good, needs improvement, or bad, and it not shows the individual scores.
• So, to assess individual pages, you can now use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider and PageSpeed Insights API to easily measure Core Web Vitals (CWVs) for each page on your website.
• Screaming Frog will crawl the site and will show what pages are failing the core web vital and precisely what metric they are failing in — then, with the data, you can work to improve the scores.

If you like this, please consider forwarding this to a friend, or share on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Until next week! :)

Saksham

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