Hey guys DDC digital marketing wonk and designated-hitter to respond with our update.
First off, I want you to know we
for sure haven't been ignoring this issue. We've had literal teams of people working on solving for this and honestly a community like Refresh helps us be better as tech provider, because it can surface these things. Sorry it seemed like we were being radio silent we just didn't want to chime in with repeated speculation. As most of you know trying to get to the bottom of what makes Google decide to rank when and where specifically in the age of AI is at best a little fine art and occasionally guesswork...and they don't open up their organic teams for consultation no matter how much you spend on advertising or scream or yell for help. So we were left doing meticulous forensic work on every individual case, but we were and ARE doing the work. It should be noted this SRP issue is affecting several other providers both in automotive and other verticals...so for the others lurking, hope this helps a bit!
WELL, we have an enterprising Product Manager named Pete who bullied his way into a conversation with
John Mueller from Google Webmaster Trends (think new Matt Cutts) at 3:30AM to bring our issue directly to them and get to the bottom of this. Getting these folks to talk to you about problems is a little bit like asking for an audience with an SEO Dalai Lama, sometimes you win, most times you don't.
This is the entire conversation that is publicly available.
So what are two short things can we glean in the TL;DWatch version?
- It SEEMS as though John thinks Google is trying to be efficient here (as they should) about making some decisions about these pages...potentially even making leaps before reading content or cannonicals Basically, they make assumptions in their decision making
- They are bringing this to the team, and they are investigating themselves, and they are going to try to help
What does it mean for the folks on the thread?
- As soon as we hear definitively back from Google. We'll post to help the other providers and for the reader's peace of mind, but the webmaster forum is open/public also!
- Even Google gets confused, but could it still be something on our end? Sure...and if it is, we will continue to crank and get it fixed.
- Can we continue to do more to keep up with the ever changing digital marketing trends? YES. I realize not everyone is a fan of our platform but just like some people like Keynote, some people like PowerPoint and psychopaths like Google Slides...it does't mean that each isn't really effective for certain applications and it doesn't mean we aren't significantly pushing technology barriers everyday!
I am a first time poster, so, gentle wolves...anyone on here who knows me, knows brevity isn't my strong suit, and I hope this wasn't too rambling and this was informative.
We love our Dealers.
We love Refreshers.