Social Media Strategy is a guide to marketing, advertising, and branding in a world of social media-empowered consumers. Keith Quesenberry introduces readers to the steps of building a complete social media plan.
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The inside scoop on 5 content distribution planning secrets you need for improved results. Includes step-by-step guide in the form of questions to lead you.
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One of the first things that beginner SEOs get in contact with is link building, often far before they even hear about content quality or even basic things like proper keyword research or title optimization.
Link building is the most controversial topic in SEO and I believe that we should encourage people on not focusing too much on links alone . And in years of doing link building campaigns, I’ve learned a thing or two. So here they are: 12 lessons I’ve learned from dozens of link building campaign I’ve been working on.
If you’re an experienced SEO, you’re probably not very impressed about this first point. But there’s a big reason why it’s first in this list. I’ll ask you a question:
When you first started building links, what was the very first thing you tried?
If you’re an honest man, you’ll probably say that some sort of blackhat link building.
As I said, new SEOs often learn about link building first, far before they hear about anything else. Don’t believe me? Well, with all the (often contradicting) information overload on the internet, people turn to forums to get answers cleared out, because they can read the opinions of a dozen different people at once, or even ask questions directly themselves. Just take a look at one example from a forum:
Now you might be saying “Yes, but that’s a BlackHat SEO forum. I know it.” Well, that’s true, but take a look at how he says he’s new to SEO and has $600 to spend, yet he already knows about tools and link buying.
So it’s pretty clear that this beginner already knows something about SEO, just not the right stuff. Why? Because BlackHat SEO looks appealing. You apparently get quick results for very little work. Coming up with cool content ideas is hard and time consuming. Writing them even harder.
In reality, BlackHat SEO tools are expensive and have a huge learning curve. You’re better off building something solid and safe from the start.
How am I so sure? Well, because I’ve been there. I wanted to make my life easy. I purchased ScrapeBox, GSA Search Engine Ranker, Captcha Breaker and other software, in an attempt to easy my job.
I spent weeks if not months to learn the software, time in which I had other expenses that I wasn’t aware of at first, such as proxies. In the end, I realized that most links the tools were building were crap ones, because most websites didn’t only had captchas (which Captcha Breaker could occasionally pass) but were also moderator approved.
The results? Not impressive. Low to medium results with pretty much a lot of money, effort and stress put in. By low to medium results I mean not on page 1.
All this happened because I missed one key point. The user. I was so caught in my link building that I completely ignored other things. If I did any OnPage SEO, I constantly thought of ways to include more keywords on a page without looking TOO obvious, but never actually thought about the end user for a bit.
And I haven’t even mentioned penalties yet. I haven’t really experienced penalties personally (yet again I didn’t quite stick with blackhat methods for long) but many of our cognitiveSEO users and clients that I personally consult know very well the dangers of blackhat link building.
The real results started kicking in when I finally thought about how to make my website and content genuinely useful for the users. Sure, there are a lot of advanced tactics, technical optimizations and marketing schemes you can perform, but at the core, user experience is king.
There are also ISP (Internet Service Providers) issues. If you start spamming the web, they will eventually phone you to ask you if everything’s alright. You’ll have to lie, obviously, because it’s against their ToS and probably even illegal in some places.
A Black Hat Link Building Story
I interviewed a guy once and he told me about how he used to make around $1000 – $2000 per month by spamming the web. That sounds good, but he ended up with very little profit.
At first, he was only spamming with one computer and a dozen of proxies, averaging about $75 to $100 per month. So he then thought “Hey, why don’t I scale this up?”. Well… scaling up was a big investment. He ended up buying around 20 computers and also spent a lot of money on the energy bill and the internet service package. The total spending was close to $10000.
In about 3-4 months, Google started catching up with his scheme and penalized his websites. He started everything allover again, trying to stay under the radar, but each time, Google caught him. It took less and less for Google to catch up. At first 2-3 months, then 1-2 months until he abandoned everything.
With only 2-3 moths of full earnings, he ended up banking less than he spend on the whole setup. He could of course profit by selling the setup, which is a lot more time consuming than purchasing it. In the end, he ended up having nothing solid and realized it isn’t worth it.
Clients ask about links almost all the time. “They heard that it helps with rankings, so they want as many as possible.” People usually ask for SEO consultancy offers and how many links per month they contain. it seems that in order to have an “SEO package”offer, you need to have some links there.
However, coming back to reality, it just isn’t possible to promise someone a number of links per month, unless you have a predefined set of website you link out from, which makes everything less relevant and more risky.
Not only that but you also put everyone at risk, because similar link patterns attract more attention and can impact the whole network. This means that if Google hits one site for link spam, it might hit every site with a similar link pattern. This is also the case with buying links, not only with building them. BlackHat tactics affect everyone, not only the performer.
I’ve been able to outrank and pull out my middle finger to websites that had dozens of very expensive links purchased and probably PBNs, all with almost no link building at all. I also did manual ‘link building’ here and there, but we’ll talk about it later in the article. I’ll explain why I’ve put link building between brackets, so keep reading.
To be honest, building links manually is just like using a BlackHat link building tool, but 100000 times slower and infinitely more frustrating, because there’s no filter for the failure (like the software), which now goes directly into your soul.
You, doing manual link building.
A friend of mine was recently assigned to build some manual links at his work place. After about one week, he sent me this message: “I feel like I’m doing this for nothing.”
After finding out that manual link building literally makes you cry blood, I decided to purchase some links.
Here and there, you could get an occasional $10 per link, on a random worthless blogspot. For the real links, on news websites, for example, we were talking about $400 to $1000 per link. Many would also ask for monthly payments of $50 to $200 to keep a link online.
Of course, these prices apply to the markets I am familiar with; in other niches, links are probably a lot more expensive.
PBNs can probably be more efficient, however the risks are high and you also need to spend a lot of time creating them and making sure Google won’t catch them.
A Private Blog Network’s primary cost is content, which you could be very well creating on your main site.
Here’s a glimpse of how much it would cost you to build a PBN if you want to avoid doing the work yourself. Although these guys probably know what they’re doing, the risks are still there.
As long as you have multiple quality websites that you take care of, I don’t see the problem with interlinking them. However, you have to take into account the fact that Google might see it as a PBN and penalize it. I’d focus on one website first and when it really goes good and competition is already behind, I’d expand with another one.
It’s just that… sometimes, dofollow links ‘for SEO’ are more expensive than a regular advertising post on a high authority, high traffic, well established website. I consider the latter to be more effective. If you find a great advertorial opportunity/deal to get your product or website featured, then by all means go for it. But it’s a better idea if the link has a nofollow tag and if the promotion is clearly specified in the article.
Wait! Isn’t this a BlackHat Tactic? I know, this might sound counter intuitive. But the answer si no, it isn’t a BlackHat tactic.
Forums are communities in which people share opinions, ideas and they are also a great resource. Blog comments are the way readers and content creators interact with each other.
In order to get links, you need to build connections. If you build connections then you’re doing forum posting and blog commenting the right way. Connections help you get more link opportunities. You get to know one webmaster, then they introduce you to another and so on.
But that’s not the only way to build connections. You can also go to meetings. Meetings and events are probably the most efficient marketing strategy you can spend time on. You can build more connections, land more leads and secure more clients in one single event ore meeting than you can in months of online efforts.
Sometimes, it’s not easy to find an event in your niche, but there definitely are adjacent niches where you can go. You just have to think outside the box. Alcohol brands, for example, promote a lot on music festivals. If you make shoes, you don’t have to find a shoemaker meeting. Just go to a fashion meetup, or maybe sports one, depending on your products.
Me (on the right) networking at an E-commerce Summit 2018
You might often meet bloggers in similar or adjacent niches and you can collaborate with them. You can also connect with them online, on their blogs. Chances of you getting your comments approved now are much higher. Most of the forum and blog comment links are nofollow anyway, but that’s not a problem, because nofollow links actually help you rank better. I have proof, keep reading.
If you have a small/medium website or a blog, don’t dismiss comments and forum posts completely.
We all want dofollow links. Not just for SEO, but even for our own sake. A nofollow sounds sort of like mentioning someone, but talking badly of him. In reality, nofollow links aren’t bad. They can still help you rank better. If you want proof, check out this article about nofollow links.
Countless times has it been proven to me that nofollow links help you rank higher.
If you do purchase an advertorial with a link, not only will you theoretically be legal by using a nofollow link, but you’ll tell Google “Hey, I’m following the rules. Are we cool?”.
Try it and you’ll see for yourself. Just don’t bother building useless nofollow links from spam or random posts on random blogs and forums. Use proper advertising on relevant websites with good traffic and adequate audience. That’s the best way to go for.
It’s funny, I’ve even found another “X link building mistakes” article which states that building nofollow links is in fact a mistake. A mistake is having an unnatural link profile and a 100% dofollow link profile is definitely unnatural.
The problem with dofollow links is that Google wants them to come naturally, without any monetary incentives. So Google decided to create the nofollow tag to be added to sponsored links. Obviously, nobody cared about that and Google had to bring in penalties.
So everytime you buy dofollow links, you’re exposing yourself to the risk of penalty. Google penalizes sites both ways, so publishers started avoiding giving dofollow links altogether.
John Mueller confirmed that adding a nofollow tag to any kind of paid or incentivised link will remove the risk of a Google Penalty.
Nofollow links are fine.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) January 15, 2018
Now I’m just making assumptions, but I don’t find it hard for Google to realize a MyBusiness review is fake, if some account with a high activity in local stores from Texas reviews a restaurant from North Dakota, without ever visiting it.
Same goes with buying links. We’re all using Gmail, and even if we don’t, we’re probably logged in a Google account in some way, through our browser. It wouldn’t be hard for Google to figure out connections between webmasters.
I know, it sounds paranoid, but since they have patents on listening to what you say through your microphone to server you personalized ads… I don’t know what isn’t possible.
At first, when looking at a very competitive niche and seeing a ton of BlackHat links, you might be thinking that it works and that’s the way to go. That’s not the point. Google doesn’t rank the website with the most links, it ranks the best website.
What John is saying is that most unnatural links are actually ignored. So if a site does have unnatural links, it doesn’t mean it isn’t still the best result out there. Google tries to satisfy the user, not the other websites. If the user isn’t satisfied, it stops coming on Google.
For example, let’s suppose that Adidas and Nike do a lot of BlackHat SEO, but some Chinese ghost brands like Abibas and Nikae do WhiteHat SEO. Should Google rank those when people search for “best sport shoes brands”?
And if all websites that rank for a keyword were to be penalized… who would be ranking? Nobody?
If your competitors are ranking above you but they have a lot of spammy links, you might want to read this article about how to outrun them.
You have to take into account that Google gives a lot more damns about user experience that it gives about links. If you build 100 links and Google boosts you up, it won’t be long until it drops you back forever if your website sucks.
If your competition is full of spammy links or purchased links, you’re at an advantage. Google is always looking for the perfect candidate to put it on spot #1. Focus on doing something better or just as good as them. Only after that think of ways to promote your website and obtain backlinks.
Also, if you start doing SEO for a new client, unless the client is obviously penalized, focus on earning new links instead of getting rid of old ones.
Now… Don’t get me wrong. Links are useful. You should try to get them, as much as possible. You should be always looking for new link opportunities.
So if someone tells you “Hey, cool content man, I’ll write about it and link to you.” don’t go and tell them “No thanks, man. I don’t do link building.” That would be… dumb. It’s just that people get it wrong and instead of acquiring links the right way, they sell their souls to the devil for links.
Quality links are a byproduct of good marketing, the one thing you should be chasing instead of links alone.
Even here, at cognitiveSEO we’ve focused more on content creation and promotion over the past 2 years. The results were visibly better than anything we’ve tried in the past, when building links was the cool kid. Our traffic went up and so did the interactions with our content.
By writing quality content we were even able to land a couple of guest posts every year, without even asking for them. People would simply read our content and ask us if we can write for them. That’s a great way to get a link back to one of your articles or even products. Now imagine our success rate if we actually chased guest posts. However…
You see, when you do guest posts, the best possible outcome for you is to write something really good. If you write low quality guest posts, you get low quality results with them. Nobody will read them and the host will probably never work with you again.
If you write a successful post, that ranks high and actually drives traffic to the hosts website and even gets people to link to it, then you’re prone to write again there soon. Isn’t it awesome to have a writer that can bring traffic to your website? I hope you see where this is going.
Wouldn’t you rather have a good writer that brings targeted traffic… on your own website, instead of someone else’s website?
A couple of guest posts here and there on really authoritative websites in your niche are useful, of course, and you should go for it. But I’d rather spend some money on an advertorial on a website that won’t accept guest posts but could actually bring me real traffic. It’s a lot less work and probably a lot more profitable.
Often times the links you get from guest posts aren’t even dofollow. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the best outcome would be if those links actually drove targeted traffic to your website, instead of just staying there only for Google. It’s not even guaranteed that Google will take it into consideration.
Spend more time creating quality content on your website instead of creating quality content on other people’s websites.
When you analyse a website, you should always perform an SEO competitor analysis as well.
Most of the times, the #1 competitor has a higher percentage of branded anchor texts, averaging at about 60-70%.
Here’s one competitive analysis from the cognitiveSEO Tool:
If we take a look at the anchor text distribution or the top competitor (the one with score 9), we’ll see that it mostly has branded anchor texts. They know it works, so they do it. This is valid regardless of the naturalness of the link profile. Even if the links are natural or unnatural, sites with more branded anchor texts tend to outperform the ones with only commercial anchor texts.
Branded anchor texts are great because they help grow the overall authority of your website. This means that when you’ll have new posts, they will rank better on their own, without needing to get any links to them.
However, it’s always a good idea to also have some commercial keywords there as well. This will let Google better understand what the page is about.
But it’s just so more much natural for people to link to a website using it’s brand rather than a very specific keyword. Just think about it. If you were to link to a new product, how would you rather do it?
Example:
Go to shoes.com if you want to purchase these awesome running shoes.
You can find these awesome running shoes on shoes.com.
Using commercial anchor texts just feels so… forced. It’s so obvious even for a common reader to realize that the keyword is put there on purpose.
Many times, editors and webmasters even naturally use miscellaneous anchor texts like ‘official website’ or ‘click here’.
Example:
To get these awesome shoes from Nike you can click here.
However, you don’t even need to build commercial anchor texts externally, because you can do it on your own website, which takes us to our next lesson…
If you can’t get any commercial anchor text backlinks without emptying your wallet, then you can use your own website to create keyword right anchor texts through internal linking.
The only issue here is content. If you don’t have any, you won’t be able to interlink. If you have a very popular article about a very common question in your niche that you’ve answered, you can use that article to pass its authority to a page you want to rank, such as a product category one.
Lacking internal structure is a massive waste of opportunity, because it’s something you have complete control over. It’s easy to do, but as anything else in SEO, overdoing it is risky. Read our guide about internal linking if you want to learn how to do it the right way.
If you want to get some relatively easy links, then look for people that have mentioned you, but haven’t linked to you.
A great and easy way to find these unlinked brand mentions is to use … BrandMentions. Pretty straight forward, isn’t it? The tool does a great job at identifying these and also at filtering them.
Before you reach out to the webmasters asking them to quickly link to your website, remember that building a connection is more important. It’s a good idea to thank them first and then suggest or ask for a link.
This only really works well if you’re an already established brand, but also for local businesses and events. You can also use the tool to monitor when any other keywords (such as your product category) shows up on the web.
I’ve ranked plenty of websites without any link building, just by creating great content consistently and promoting it properly.
I’m not saying that these websites didn’t have links at all, I’m just saying I wasn’t building or buying them. The came naturally from genuine connections and proposals and quality content.
Instead of link building, you can take the link earning approach. The concept is simple. Do stuff that deserves and attracts natural links
Easy to say, right?
Well, it’s not that hard to do either, actually. Here are just some ideas, besides the general rule of thumb of creating high quality content.
However, for this to work, you have to remember that building connections is the best thing you can do. Although network marketing can be annoying, the truth is that we all are network marketers, one way or another.
These 5 years of experience taught me enough to know that I can spend my time better somewhere else. I’ve learned a lot more things, but I’ve tried to cover the most important ones. Maybe I’ll expand the list some day.
As a closing note, content creation and link earning > spam & link building. You can try both paths to figure it out yourself, or you can just avoid the pain by taking my advice. In the end, you’re the one to decide.
Building content isn’t only helpful for SEO, but also from a marketing perspective. If you don’t become a publisher, you’ll keep paying publishers to feature your products.
Most of the publishers out there are usually review and affiliate websites, because that’s what people look for before they buy. Of course, if you’re a maker, you can’t review yourself or your competitors. But you can win their trust by answering questions. And trust, in business, is priceless. It cannot be bought. Only earned.
What have you learned about link building in your SEO adventures? Share it with us in the comments and let’s chat about it!
The post 12 Lessons I’ve Learned from 100+ Link Building Campaigns – Wins & Fails appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
I wish I knew earlier about this Google update! is something many site owners or marketers say on a daily basis. Moreover, it would be heaven on earth if we also knew how all those Google algorithm changes, be they official or unnamed updates, should be dealt with.
Most times, we get to see how rankings fluctuate, traffic drops, and still, we don’t know what to do. What’s more, we always think it’s us who made a mistake and, therefore, got downgraded. This blog post will both prove you’re wrong and agree with you. Plus, we’ll teach you what every change Google made so far in 2018 is doing to your site and how you can improve your marketing and SEO moves.
After a year like 2017 with significant algorithm changes and updates, Google doesn’t seem to want to settle down. Danny Sullivan, the officially-appointed ombudsman from Google, made it clear that they do various minor updates daily plus some more serious ones during the year: We do some type of focused update nearly daily. A broad core algorithm update happens several times per year.
Those would be focused, yes. We also have lots of updates focused on specific little things each day that go into the core algorithm. This is a broader general change to the core algorithm.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 12, 2018
Guess this is how we could explain the hectic fluctuations in various Google algorithm monitoring tools. Webmaster and marketers alike often felt overwhelmed by the density and frequency of these ranking fluctuations and tried to interpret their activity, correlating their analysis and findings, and reaching a conclusion or providing an educated guess until Google would have officially confirmed them.
Screenshot taken from cognitiveseo.com/signals
Google likes messing around with people’s website traffic and site owners’ feelings – it sort of gives people mixed feelings regarding Google: both love and hate.
Many updates or changes in the way Google’s algorithm works is given by an interesting paradigm skillful webmasters know how to read. And that is the one provided by Barry Schwartz, the update guru of our digital marketing world:
| When you have both signals, SEO chatter, and tools start lighting up, it is a good sign something major changed in the core ranking algorithm with Google search. | |
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barry schwartz |
| Founder at Search Engine Roundtable @rustybrick / rustybrick.com | |
The 2018 updates pace is pretty aggressive, one might say, while March seems to have been the busiest month in terms of changes and ranking fluctuations. We’re not talking officially announced updates here, but only the SERPs activity as seen in forums and Google algorithm updates tracking tools.
Talking about Google-confirmed updates, it’s quite seldom for Google to officially confirm updates; it only happens several times a year. As a result, many updates that impacted websites across the world wide web might not be named and talked about as much as those regarded as significant by the Googlers. A fit example would be the March 7 one, widely known as a core algorithm update meant to reward “the under-rewarded sites”, as some webmasters would say. It has greatly impacted traffic and rankings while also needing a longer time span than usual.
| The specifics of Google’s algorithm will always remain under wraps. | |
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sam gowing |
| Writer at Fifty Five and Five @_SamGowing / fiftyfiveandfive.com | |
However, even when Google does give official statements about one update or another, they are quite evasive when it comes to confirming or guide users through. Maybe that’s why Barry Schwartz often says: “The answer, according to Google, is really nothing”.
Whenever site owners or fellow marketers want to dig more into what it looks like being an algorithm change, they turn to Barry Schwartz, as the go-to high-quality source regarding monitoring, researching, analyzing, and dissecting Google both confirmed and unconfirmed updates. Even though Barry’s posts often start as being speculative, they’re nonetheless worth checking them out and following him as they usually get confirmed later on either by fellow webmasters or by the Google team itself.
Either way, be the update Google-confirmed or unconfirmed, bearing a name or not, impacting websites over a shorter or longer period of time, it’s clear that there are fluctuations and while some sites might see drops in traffic, others might notice gains. As a consequence, both the lucky and the unfortunate sites should neither rub their gain in, nor lose confidence, but stick to building great content that makes searcher want to return to your page.
There’s no “fix” for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 12, 2018
Without further ado, we shall talk about the 2018 Google updates that happened so far, focusing on those that were Google or webmasters-backed and already influenced the traffic and ranking flow of many websites.
This update happened in the first month of 2018. Usually, December comes with a good share of inactivity, but this last December 2017 proved to be quite busy, were we to look at all the updates that have rambled on the Google streets: the Google-confirmed Maccabees updates that made a target out of some celebrity sites as well, knowledge graph updates, SEO starter guide update, extended meta description space, rich results testing tool new release and many more.
Mobile Page Speed as a Ranking Factor
source: seroundtable,com
Getting back to our sheep, January 18 was marked by a Google-official announcement that regarded a page speed update scheduled to come into effect this July (we’d better hurry and make the right changes to our site, don’t we?). Google said this is a new ranking algorithm designed to lower the SERP position of some mobile pages that deliver a really slow experience to the end user.
Therefore, here we have it: a brand new, officially-announced Google ranking algorithm: page speed. Starting July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for all mobile searches.
Slow mobile pages that will get hit by this update will most likely not be notified in the Google Search Console given that this is an algorithmic thing, not a manual action. The good news, though, is that Google forecasted their actions to hit only a small percentage of pages presenting the slowest loading time and therefore a handful of queries. Schwartz, too, thinks this update is not very disruptive given that a page would have to be super slow to really get hit by this major update.
| To be clear, there is no ranking boost for being fast, just a downgrade for being really slow. | |
|
berry schwartz |
| Founder at Search Engine Roundtable @rustybrick / rustybrick.com | |
Apart from what we’ve previously said above – that it won’t impact the traffic and rankings lest you provide (at least) a reasonably satisfactory and fast experience to your users (which comes pretty obvious),- some webmasters raised a question: what comes first – canonical URL or AMP URL? This comes after many started worrying on how big of an impact will this update cause on their sites.
If a page’s canonical page is very slow but the AMP URL is very fast, will Google use the AMP or the mobile URL for measuring speed and ranking the page? Although, in theory, Google uses the canonical URL regardless whether there’s a desktop or mobile page involved and they have an AMP URL, Google confirmed that since the AMP URL is provided and is mega-fast, then no downgrade in rankings will take place. Berry’s answer is this:
| The answer is AMP for speed will be what Google uses for this algorithm, not your canonical URL because that is what is being served. But for other signals, like content, links, etc, Google will use the canonical mobile URL. Confused? Yeah, thought so.” | |
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berry schwartz |
| Founder at Search Engine Roundtable @rustybrick / rustybrick.com | |
What’s more, many Google users confuse this new speed ranking update with the Mobile-First Indexing update – they’re independent from one another, so don’t mingle them.
Last but not least, this January/July major ranking update will not boost the rankings of those pages that are fast, but only downgrade those that are extremely slow.
This update seemed to drive people crazy after Google: digital marketers and webmasters alike were very happy to learn that starting on January 8, the search giant released a new version of their Search Console with 16 months of stored data.
It's here! Google officially announces the new Google Search Console: "We are now starting to release this beta version to all users of Search Console" with many updates including 16 months of data in Search Performance – Thanks @googlewmc
https://t.co/W0DNDFexxu pic.twitter.com/mCPV8EvaMz
— Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) January 8, 2018
Today's Search Console launch is the start in the biggest revamp of this tool in 12+ years. Excited to get your feedback on it! https://t.co/2VS8faUHLl
— Elliott Ng (@elliottng) January 8, 2018
Besides Google Search Console Beta getting live for everyone with 16 months of stored data in the Search Performance report, Google also added various enticing new features to this version, such as an updated Index Coverage report (alerting you when bumping into new issues and helping you monitor their behavior), and a changed AMP status and Job Posting report.
Everybody can now understand how to optimize their site for Google, given how simple everything is (or at least it seems). In addition, having an extended period of data storage, you can now deploy more in-depth analysis of long-term trends that might impact more than one year. You will be able to work with really actionable data and make a wiser decision regarding your website and the overall user experience.
source: webmasters.googleblog.com
Also very important is the fact that the Google team intends to make this Google Search Console updating process a long-term one, hence they will continue adding new features and changes to their version. As a consequence, the Google team is asking for continued feedback – after all, how do you think the new GSC version got launched?
Danny Sullivan, Google’s public search liaison, decided to create a brand new Twitter profile meant to inform, guide, explain, and be in contact with all Googlers and users and announced it on January 26. Most of us already got those from following Danny’s profile but he found it more suitable to deliver messages regarding Google search on an entirely new profile and spare his following of Star Wars and Star Trek tweets, should they be interested mostly in the search side.
While this isn’t really a Google algorithm or ranking update, it still counts as a smart move meant to benefit all of the Google fans out there. I myself am quite thankful for this twist of events and seek to follow the Google SearchLiaison profile as closely as possible.
Why, you might wonder. Well, simply put, as Berry Schwartz is the primary source to check when it comes to Google updates in general, such is the new Google SearchLiaison profile the go-to source of information when it comes to every search-related thing, explanation, debate, or piece of news.
This security-centric turn comes to prove once again the Google really cares about the user experience and trust websites provide to their visitors. Similar to the page speed update mentioned earlier, Google announced on February 9 that starting July 2018, websites should have an SSL addition to their site and provide an HTTPS-backed experience to their users, or else they’ll be punished.
source: searchenginejournal.com
This HTTP-to-HTTPS issue is twofold: first, it’s for your own good and safety to use HTTPS instead of HTTP (“S” actually comes from “security”), two, Google will straightforwardly warn your visitors that your website is not safe browsing, leading to a pretty high bounce rate.
source: searchenginejournal.com
Given that Chrome holds a good browser version market share of 50% worldwide, we can say this update will impact many web owners. Therefore having a protruding notice in the Omnibox warning users that your website is “Not secure”, might increase bounce rate and take a toll on advertising impressions, affiliate links, and e-commerce overall sales. Here’s a list pointing out how many Chrome users there are and the impact level this update might have on various regions and countries, should website not switch to HTPPS.
source: searchenginejournal.com
Switching to HTTPS might be a bit difficult but it pays off. Most web hosting providers already provide this service for free or manage to give you HTTPS certificates at a rather low cost. So you have no excuse postponing this as money shouldn’t really be a problem.
This Google change got live on February 13 and got fully implemented on desktop search already. Somehow, it’s similar to “people also ask” section except that this one directs people to other SERPs.
Anyone else seeing this behavior in #Google‘s serps? Different look than before and they appear after clicking on the link then coming back to the serps. @rustybrick @jenstar #SEO pic.twitter.com/YVMbCsMHio
— Sean Van Guilder (@seanvanguilder) February 13, 2018
The new look is one search refinement meant to benefit organic results. Should you not qualify for a keyword entered in a search query, Google could lead visitors to your site when offering them variations of the first query. Or the other way around: if you focused on optimizing your page content and used both short and long keywords that might answer to a vast array of queries, you might appear twice in SERPs.
Google showing 'People also search for' suggestions when we click through to a result and then go back. @JohnMu has said before that click data doesn't affect rankings, but this suggests it's at least monitored. Seen this before @rustybrick @randfish? #SEO pic.twitter.com/65hwz6jIxI
— Glass Digital (@GlassDigitalLTD) February 13, 2018
Starting February 19 this year, Chrome v64 cuts off unnecessary tails and the end of an URL when sharing it using the URL streaming “Share” in Chrome.
Berry Schwartz had a feeling that this new feature is tied to the canonical page URL. AMP has similar sharing features in order to deliver an easy-to-use and relevant URL.
Besides the impact we’ve mentioned above, the one with using and delivering a usable URL, there are two more consequences to this update.
On one hand, having the original URL trimmed when shared could be a little annoying, given that when it opens the page, it would load only the top of the page and lose the specific location it had when attached to, say, the anchor text.
On the other hand, who knows, maybe this feature will become really useful at some point in the future.
One major update from Google happened on February 19 when the giant search engine radically changed the Search Console crawl limits due to spam and abuse.
Although there’s only a small percent who could abuse the system, it happened nonetheless and the team had to take action.
The Search Console limits per option changed:
Google Search Console also changed numbers here:
Barry Schwartz thinks this update might not be such a big deal to white-hat SEOs who don’t use this tool so often, given that a submission for indexation normally happens on a limited basis. But it might block some spam and unnatural activity from black-hat users.
This Google update birth story is quite a soap opera. Once upon a February 22 day, webmasters and digital marketers alike gave a shoutout to a big announcement Google made at PubCon regarding a new ranking algorithm. Gary Illyes from Google announced onstage that the search engine webmaster team intends to roll the mobile-first index for more sites in the following weeks.
Announcement – In the next month and a half or so, Google is moving a LOT of sites to mobile first.@methode #Pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 21, 2018
The mobile-first indexing update didn’t come into effect until around March 26, as John Mueller didn’t give an exact date regarding the full start. Those monitoring fluctuations in Google rankings and traffic couldn’t tell either when exactly this updated started given the quite lengthy period of activity. What’s more, it almost gone completely unnoticed as there were few to no sites to signal their new ranking position from which to determine whether they were hit by this update or not.
To best explain this update and what it does to your site, we could say that mobile-first indexing points out to Google’s attempt at indexing and ranking your website from a mobile point-of-view, when applicable. That is, should you have a mobile-friendly website, Google would index and rank your mobile version first. When I said “when applicable” it meant that Google will treat the world wide web this way only when bumping into sites that follow the best practices required by mobile-first indexing, therefore wouldn’t impact the other websites that didn’t check this aspect on their list. At least for now.
| We evaluate each site individually on its readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the best practices and transition the site when the site is ready. | |
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google search |
| developers.google.com | |
This update is a global and multilingual rollout, thus it’s meeant for everyone and will impact everyone.
It's global – across countries & languages.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) March 27, 2018
Regardless if your website is ready from a mobile-friendliness standpoint or not, optimizing and having mobile-friendly content is still relevant in marketing strategies that seek to make the website perform better in SERPs. Given there is a vast array of ranking signals that may influence your position in search, you might deliver content that is not necessarily mobile-friendly or is slow-loading. Having said this, optimizing your website for mobile would set your marketing strategy on fire, so you should definitely not postpone it.
N.B.: This update is mobile-first indexing, not mobile first index, where the primary index is still the desktop one, this one only being added to the core one.
A new form of featured snippets was released on March 1 and it’s meant to answer queries that might be driven by more than one need and search intent.
Last month, we shared how Google would be displaying more than one featured snippet, when deemed useful. This is now rolling out live on mobile and will eventually come to desktop over time. More here: https://t.co/b2u4T9RvUW pic.twitter.com/ENJFa8ppkE
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) February 28, 2018
Google said they intend to provide more than one featured snippet for queries that might serve or have several potential intentions or purposes associated. This is one more step forward in what Google is trying to better understand the users and update it’s AI algorithm to deliver the best and the most satisfactory result possible.
Having a Google update such as multifaceted featured snippets is great news for both site owners and content marketers. This means that more sites will get the chance to be featured on position 0 in SERPs.
Site owners will have a double shot at ranking high in search while content marketers’ efforts of optimizing their content in order to be featured up there, will finally be rewarded.
On the other hand though, I sense this update might be a bit nagging to the user, given that this will only get the page more crowded than it already is.
On March 9, there were some unnamed updates, yet online marketers knew how to interpret them and realize how big it was. while inquiring Google webmasters. John Mueller from Google confirmed in a Webmasters Hangout that these updates had to relevancy:
| The updates that we made are more about relevance where we’re trying to figure out which sites relevant for certain queries and and not so much quality overall. It doesn’t means its a bad sign, we may just be finding that your site isn’t relevant for these particular queries. | |
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john mueller |
| Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google @JohnMu | |
Marie Haynes and her team investigates several site that got hit on March 9 and noticed similarities among most of them. Many of the victims were relatively big brand who lost rankings on their articles, which , on a closer look, showed signs of duplicate content in regard to other sites’ content. This clearly pointed out the fact that Google intends to sift sites that don’t raise up to the standard of providing helpful, useful, and unique content on their pages.
| This is not an update pointing to who is bad and who is good – but they rather seek to refine their answers to people’s queries – hence, they want to give the good answer not just the one that ranks for it. | |
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MARIE HAYNES |
| Blogger @Marie_Haynes / hiswebmarketing.com | |
Seeing a drop around March 9 might show you were hit by this relevancy update. Getting downgraded doesn’t necessarily mean that your content is awful, but because Google saw one or more of your competitors being more qualitative than you.
Should you start optimizing your content and trying to fix everything so to see results as soon as possible won’t help you on the spot. When refining your marketing strategy, start with a site audit, read the Quality Raters’ Guidelines very carefully, and ask someone who’s close to you but unfamilliar with your website to compare you with your competitors and tell you what they see, and last but not least, cut off from duplicate content.
If Google has a hard time reading JavaScript Sites, then this update comes as a great surprise and a piece of great newson March 10. Tom Greenaway from Google, at Google I/O 2018 said that Google approaches indexing and ranking of JavaScript pages very differently than non-JavaScript ones.
In more human words, the Googlebot might have issues indexing and rendering the contents of a JavaScript page and might need to do it in more than one wave. Hence, Javascript powered website in Google are deferred until the fit resources to process that content.
And yet, Google worked their mobile-friendly and rich results rendering tools to be able to work with sites built in JavaScript language. In more technical words:
| Those tools can now both show the screenshots for JS-based sites, rendered DOM, show JavaScript errors and stack traces as seen by the Googlebot’s web render service. The tools will show rendered HTML, the console log, exceptions, and stack traces. | |
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berry Schwartz |
| Founder at Search Engine Roundtable @rustybrick / rustybrick.com | |
Well, from now on, websites built in JavaScript will be readable from a mobile-friendly standpoint, while also appearing in rich snippets when somebody would enter a query from the mobile phone. Websites will double, if not triple their visibility, rank higher, and get increased traffic to their sites. This update is pretty much self-explanatory.
Many website owners complained about Google not mentioning where the carousel info was taken from so the switch is quite significant. Google added on April 11 a new featured to their carousel and is visible to both mobile and desktop end users.
source: seroundtable.com
When clicking on the carousel, it leads you not to the brand site but to the actual Wikipedia page of that brand or product.
It’s still not clear to what kind of searcher this carousel appears or in what country, yet one thing is clear. Big brands or websites that got featured in Wikipedia doubled their chances of appearing in Google SERPs.
What’s more, some searches trigger a featured snippet instead of a carousel, hence this is quite an intricate update.
Starting early this year, Google added new AdWords features almost every month: January, March, April, and May. In January, Google started allowing advertisers to add, edit, or remove keywords while they’re busy doing something else. Also, users have now the chance to quickly identify and name Display ads issues from the Overview page and find out more about every impression shift in search results. March had its fair share of new features, while April and May showed low activity with only one update each, April promising the chance of getting an insider look into keywords that aren’t showing ads together with an explanation, plus “get more done in less time”.
source: support.google.com
All these AdWords updates are meant to positively impact your advertising efforts and help you learn more from an environment you’re so much expecting results. Google’s aim is to allow you get deeper insight from your data in order to make the right selling decisions.
The updates that got launched so far in 2018 had to do a lot with user experience:
Google wanted pages to load fast (page speed), not have intrusive ads, lacking mobile optimization, and be relevant.
Even though, as Schwartz names them, many ranking fluctuations didn’t point out to a heavy or core update and were more some sort of “hiccups”, one thing is sure: Google is set to make their search engine as human as possible and as smart and cunning as a human being.
Every month, there has been a lot of chatter, debate, educated guesses in forums such as WebmasterWorld, Black Hat Forums, Google forums, as proved by the tools that monitor Google’s changes that mainly affect traffic and rankings (cognitiveSEO, SERPmetrics, Mozcast, Advanced Web Ranking, Accuranker, Algaroo, RankRanger, SEMRush).
Overall, we can expect more from Google as the time passes. Should you want to be ready for the upcoming updates or just fix your websites as much as you can for the ones that come into effect this July – page speed update and switching from HTTP to HTPPS -, make sure you read this post.
Google has one love and one heart: their users, and that’s why they’ll continue focusing on mobile that’s on the rise lately, improved user experience (UX), and richer and more relevant content experiences.
| User experience will continue to be in the spotlight and more specifically will be driving users to spend less time in the search results and more time on websites with the richest content experiences. | |
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victoria doherty |
| Digital Marketing Executive at blubolt / Victoria Doherty | |
The post Google’s 2018 Updates So Far And How They Already Impact Your Website appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Want to boost your mobile content marketing? Tap the power of 3 emerging television viewing habits. Use research data to guide your mobile content usage.
The post Boost Your Mobile Content: How To Profit From Emerging TV Habits [Research] appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Everybody is talking about high-quality content but what does it even mean these days? That’s what we are going to find out today. There’s no content marketing inception. The truth is that high-quality content is contextual and for maximum results, it requires three steps: keyword research, good content writing, and on-page search engine optimization.
Let’s find out how to perform top-notch keyword research, how to measure results and optimize pages up front for astonishing on-page SEO, respecting Google’s quality guidelines. It might sound sophisticated but as long as you write unique content, provide valuable content to the user compared to other pages, offer insightful analysis, Google will reward you.
We have to admit that there is a noisy environment due to the high amount of content on the web. So let’s try to shed some light within the “high-quality content”; what does it mean, how to create it and how to measure it.
I have a saying that I go by in the whole process of creating high-quality content: don’t be a dwarf against giants, but rather the peak they are trying to reach.
Google explains very well what is high-quality content and how you can achieve it:
| If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. | |
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Google Panda algorithm was designed to distinguish and reward the high-quality content from all the worthless one. In order to have good results, content should first answer some questions regarding its quality, such as:
You can find lots of other questions you should ask yourself on Google Webmaster Central Blog.
After all the algorithm updates that passed by us, being witness to tons of (sometimes useless) content written every day, we got to the point where we can easily spot the quality of the ordinary in the web. As you can see, everybody is talking about quality and not quantity, but few of them really know what makes a piece of content qualitative.
If you’re starting to use the quality content terminology for everything that you think “it is a great idea”, then you might not distinguish the good from the bad.
Quality content is defined by success. It is defined by a goal and it must bring good metrics/results.
Performance is what really matters. Avoid tricks intended to improve your search rankings and “get you on the first page in one week”.
It does matter how much time you spend creating the content or if you think it might be a good idea. You must understand that your audience has the final say.
Your content must be lovable.
That’s right. You must attract the audience. Context is a great help for getting lovable content. We can define quality content by that type of content that fulfills the needs of the user. Especially now, when personalized content is on the rise and native advertising is a content marketing trend.
But what exactly does context mean?
Google developed patents for discovering the contextual content through topical searches to offer valuable information and increase the user experience. Actually, through context Google wants to recognize the user intent.
If you want to have contextual content you must think very well at your topic and point out all the answers.
If you’re searching for “Batman” in October, most likely you’ll be shown websites selling Halloween costumes. If you’re searching for “Batman” while you are in Turkey, you will probably be redirected to info related to the city of Batman.
Contextual content relates to the location as well. You have to know your niche very well in order to provide value through your content and appeal to them.
Your audience gives value to your content.
You’ve heard it before: if your audience loves the content, Google will definitely love it too. No more shenanigans, no more shortcuts or shitty content. Talk from your heart, in your own words, from your experience. And give wisdom and pieces of advice.
Lots of SEO specialists say that the era of “content is king” has ended, and made room for the saying “context is king”.
Evergreen content can be an example of quality content. Is that type of content that will always be “available”, accurate. It will teach your audience. It passes the test of time, being relevant at every hour of the day. It won’t bring you spikes in traffic, it will sustain it.
Imagine if you can offer a quality answer to a question that is timeless. You’ll be sitting on a gold mine. Original content is considered to have quality. Zach Bulygo agrees.
| Original also means originality. Your ideas should be original! Rehashing the same concepts or other posts over and over again is not original. If your content is played out, no one will link to it – and that defeats the purpose of writing content in the first place. | |
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Zach Bulygo |
| Content writer at Kissmetrics / @zachcb1 | |
Quality content doesn’t come very often and it is not something you can achieve fast. Nobody can predict with accuracy if your articles will be successful, but there are some things you could do to influence the outcome.
You could find yourself in one of these two situations: either you have already written some articles or you are starting fresh. In case you are finding yourself in the first situation, you have the advantage of testing the market and having a clue about your audience. In case you are on the second situation, then it’s our time to shine, see what your competitors are doing, know your product, and start to write content, test and write again until you find what is working for you.
If you are already on the “content market”, first you need to check the data of your previously published articles to see which articles worked best (with high numbers in traffic and higher rankings).
Larry Kim explains it better:
| You need the quantity to find the quality. | |
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Larry Kim |
| Founder of WordStream | |
Once you know what topic works for you, you can search for keywords and try to find out the lexical field to know all the terminology. Keyword research is mandatory in this phase. There are lots of tools that can easily do the job for you. Keyword Tool is an example that is very easy and fast to use. In a quick search, it reveals thousands of related topics & keywords opportunities.
There are some things you should know once you get here. Look at the volume and keyword difficulty. Look for keywords with high search volume. If the difficulty score is around 50, that means the competition for that keyword is medium.
In the screenshot above you can see what search results for “protein shakes”. You can find new topic ideas, search for specific keywords depending on which user intent you are tracking.
You search for questions in case the user wants to learn how to do something (for “how-tos” articles); for focus keywords in case you want to cover a more comprehensive blog post; phrase match for specific situations and so on.
Keyword research will never be out of style. It will always be in trend. It’s a must. But another must is knowing to be selective and wise.
Keyword Tool can work very well with other tricks I am following myself. Google is a bundle of information. You can search for the specific query in the search bar and see what other people are searching for with the autocomplete feature.
Since Google becomes more contextual, it is best if you try and use this practice. Results might differ from one location to another. Also, on Google’s bottom of the page, you can see searches related to your query.
Performing these quick searches might help you get a better understanding of what do people are looking for, and also what type of information you can find on the first page. Do you differentiate yourself from the competition? Are you providing added value? Will your piece of content be unique? If your answer is yes to all thse questions, then you’re on the right track.
There are also free tools that can strengthen your keyword research:
Google Adwords offers historical information of your data you can use for driving SEO traffic. For example, you can see the time frame when your campaigns are performing best, which keywords work best, and how much traffic you’re bringing to your website, and you can optimize those metrics.
You can receive information for monthly searches and see exactly which month has more or lower searches. That is influenced if you are searching for a query for seasonal content. The available data for the free account are average monthly searches, competition level, lowest and highest bid.
When you finished with the keyword research, you should focus your attention on the competition. We mentioned it before and it is a step you shouldn’t skip. Look at the first 10 positions in Google or Bing to see what topics were debated, what is already written, what’s missing with the purpose of highlighting your added value.
In terms of content, there are a lot of things to take into consideration and that’s why tools have high benefits in the content creation process. For example, Keyword Tool will show a list of all the pages with some extra information that is hard to collect by hand.
In the screenshot bellow, it is highlighted the data gathered for each page:
Having an idea of your competition is a good insight for you to cover-up what’s missing and improve search engine content discovery offering the best piece of content. With such a rich handful of data, you’re prepared to go to the next step: optimization.
If we are talking about optimization you must understand that natural language paired with traditional on-site SEO techniques are the key to success. Highly readable pages are the winner in the whole content-discovery adventure.
Google is evaluating multiples factors using various quality signals to see if your content is relevant to a specific query. At this point, there is nothing tricky, just a lot of math and natural language processing. To save time and effort, Content Assistant will help you identify the exact keywords your content is missing to rank higher.
The mechanism is simple and fast:
Of course, the content performance score is not the only factor that matters when Google ranks a webpage but, it can give you an idea of the position you can achieve. Link metrics are important as well.
I’ve written about content optimization before, even cited a few success stories, from Jason Acidre, co-founder at Xight Interactive, Greenlane Agency, and lots of others, and they all had one thing in common: knowing their market and adding content naturally – in context, I might add. No spamming. No duplicate content.
The story and the idea remain the most interesting part.
Getting the public to like you isn’t an easy job. First, you get into their sight, and then make them fall in love with your content. Even if these two seem to be two separated steps, their work together. Here’s the content strategy I follow and try to stick to each article:
In the optimization phase, you must follow a natural path to use focus keywords. As I mentioned before, you must think at the context, and that translates into adding keywords that are relevant to your focus keyword in the article.
If you use a keyword research tool you’ll get a full list of recommendations, that is very good to add them in your content. If you are using Content Assistant, then it will be easier for you to select from auto-generated keywords list, getting insights into how well you will rank in Google.
Start with “keywords you should use” and focus on the ones that have a bold font and a dot in front of them, then circle around the rest from that list. Once you finished adding all the relevant keywords, move the “keywords you should use more often” by following the same procedure.
Once you finished this step, you can promote your blog post and keep track of the outcome.
Measuring the results is a step that can’t be avoided. You should keep track of the keyword you optimized the content to see the evolution.
GSC or Google Webmaster tools is a good support for this. Go to your account » Search Traffic » Search Analytics and track individual pages.
As you can see in the next screenshot, you have data on the number of impressions, average CTR, and average position. Search for your page to see how well is ranking: Pages » Filter Pages and paste the URL.
You can also use the Rank Tracking tool to see the whole list of keywords at once and follow the historical trending line. You have to add the keywords and after that, you’ll have to wait to see how it is evolving day by day.
For a massive content optimization, you should look at the search visibility to see if you’re on an ascendant line or not. The search visibility shows you how your websites ranks overall for all the possible keyword combination that you might be or might not be aware of. Below you can see an example:
Google Analytics is another provider that can offer qualitative data, most of the times. I’ve conducted an informative guide some time ago on how to improve search engines rankings using Google Analytics data which I recommend you reading it. It is a good starter for understanding your audience: likes, interests, behavior, demographics. You’ll find out how to improve your conversion rates and see which type of content brings more traffic, from what sources and other technical information.
All the data you get will help you have a better content management.
Writing high-quality content isn’t so hard, but it isn’t piece of cake either. It requires knowledge, desire, strategical thinking and tools to ease up the work. If you understand what quality content and relevant content means, then you’re two steps forward.
You need an idea and then craft unique content around it to differentiate yourself from the audience. On-site optimization is the next step. Use the right keyword to create context and highlight the quality of your content. In the end, promote it and track the results.
Analytical data offers valuable insights into your content, audience, and business in general. It can bring a lot of benefits to start mushrooming your inbound marketing strategies and outperform your actual content marketing campaign. All these steps will help you fulfill your goals so best of luck in using them!
The post How to Create, Measure and Optimize High-Quality Content – Google-Friendly appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
