Consistent content defined complete with examples and actionable content marketing tips to build your audience and support distribution.
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Just last week Google made waves with its announcement of quantum supremacy – the claim that they have developed a quantum computer that has been demonstrated to solve, in a matter of days, a problem that a “classic” supercomputer would most likely take thousands of years to solve. Elsewhere, stories about robots taking our jobs abound, while machine learning seems to be on everyone’s mind.
But change is not always flashy or even visible. Last week, Google introduced a new update named BERT, which is characterized as a massive and the biggest step forward for search in the past 5 years, as well as one of the biggest steps forward in the history of search altogether. Yet, look and ask around in the SEO community and you’ll see very little that announces as much. Also, it is not yet very clear what Google’s BERT is targeting and how will the SEO landscape be influenced by this big update. So, let’s figure it all out!
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s the title of a novel by visionary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. If it doesn’t sound familiar, you might better recognize it under its movie adaptation title, Blade Runner. Both book and movie concern themselves with questions on what it means to be human in an ever more technological world and how to (still) distinguish between humans and androids. 2014 indie sci-fi Ex-Machina, by director Alex Garland, asks a similar question by referencing the concept of the Turing test: if a robot were to pass as human to every other human in the universe, would it still be a robot? These are fascinating questions and luckily we can still ponder about them in sci-fi literature and film. We’re not there yet in real life, although one has to wonder how long will it take until the more trivial “I Am Not a Robot” captcha will get checked by a robot (it has).
Even though we are still far away from sheep-dreaming androids, we’re seeing constant progress in the way of more human-like computer interactions.
Putting it simply, Google BERT is supposed to help a machine understand what the words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.
Yet, to respond to the question what does BERT mean? we need to talk in a more explanatory note.
BERT, which is what the latest and the biggest Google algorithm update is called, stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing.
So, is BERT a language model? (geeky alert ahead)
Yes, we can say that it is a language model. Yet, you need to know that even if BERT is a new concept, is not hot new. The BERT concept was made public in 2018, in a paper published by researchers at Google Artificial Intelligence Language.
According to Google researchers, “unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide
range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.”
Language model pre-training has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks. These include sentence-level tasks such as natural language inference and paraphrasing, which aim to predict the relationships between sentences by analyzing them holistically, as well as token-level tasks such as named entity recognition and question answering, where models are required to produce fine-grained output at the token level.
If we were to ask Google what the BERT name means, we’ll get to see a range of interesting results. In all fairness, my search query was for “bert name”, nothing related to the update. Yet, if we’re looking at the “people also ask section”, we get three different pieces of information. Not contradictory, not opposite, but different which might translate in confusion for the user. Will the BERT algorithm update solve this matter? Let’s pursue our investigation to find out.
Fun Fact: The Google BERT Update was launched on October 25, the same day Kanye West launched its latest album, Jesus Is King.
By Google’s own estimates, BERT update will affect 10% of all queries. That’s a tremendous percentage, but it might not have caused a visible splash by SEO community standards. That’s most likely because the update focuses on “longer, more conversational queries”, whereas these longer tail queries are queries that (probably) SEOs don’t target as much in a heavy way.
If that last part sounds familiar, it might be because it’s not too far off from our recent discussions about search intent. The basic question is, then, what does the user really want to find out? There are quite a few examples out there illustrating the difference that BERT made.
Search Engine Journal provides an example of BERT understanding, using the phrase “how to catch a cow fishing,” which has nothing to do with the image that may be conjured in your head right now (or in the picture below) and everything to do with a very particular sense of the word “cow” in relation to fishing, referring to a large striped bass.
Google itself offers some examples of queries which would have been pretty clear in intent to a human conversation partner (e.g.: “2019 brazil traveler to usa needed a visa,” and “do estheticians stand a lot at work”), but were previous to the update entirely lost on Google, based on the results it displayed.
By applying the BERT models to both rankings and featured snippets in Search, Google pretends to be able to do a much better job, helping users find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.
Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in the query. And users can search in a way that feels natural for them.
In an article from 2018, Rani Horev predicted BERT’s importance. As he stated, BERT will improve search and is undoubtedly a breakthrough in the use of Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing. The fact that it’s approachable and allows fast fine-tuning will likely allow a wide range of practical applications in the future.
Yes, the BERT update affects SEO and allow me to explain why.
SEO – Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines. Therefore, any update that the search engines are making to their algorithm influences the search engine optimization process.
Now, the question that remains is what can you do to optimize for the BERT update?
If we listen to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, who helps people better understand search and helps Google better hear public feedback, the answer is pretty straightforward: nothing new. What Danny actually highlights is that there is nothing that you should do from today on that you shouldn’t have done before BERT. And that is: write content for users.
We hope that there is no doubt for anyone that Google has been focusing on content for a couple of years (here’s a case study on Panda 4 update, which targeted content big time and affected lots of important websites). And we don’t want to re-iterate the “content is king” nor to over-highlight the importance of writing both SEO and user-friendly content. Yet, let’s try to understand where SEO is standing now in the context of BERT.
We believe that two main aspects need to be taken into consideration when we ask ourselves how the latest Google Update influence SEO.
In the BERT training process, the model receives pairs of sentences as input and learns to predict if the second sentence in the pair is the subsequent sentence in the original document. So, the algorithm is trying to better understand the user’s needs, even to predict them if and when possible.
Google BERT update tries to (even) better understand the users’ search intent.
Search intent or keyword intent is the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? What are they trying to achieve through their search? Are they trying to figure out the answer to a question or do they want to reach a specific website?
With the increasing use of mobile and voice search, where people need fast and contextual answers to their questions, Google tries to become more and more able to determine the search intent of people. So, the whole Google SERP is now trying to best fit the search intent and not the exact searched keyword. Now, more than ever, there will be situations when the exact searched term will not even be included in the Google search results page. And this happens because Google has become better and better at determining the search intent of people.
Google has to figure out what exactly do people want, so it can offer them the search engine page results they need. And, from an SEO point of view, your job is to create content that is relevant to the Google users and matches their search intent.
Not to linger on this anymore, remember that search intent is more important than ever and here’s how to optimize for each type of search intent.
Google stated that BERT is about users’ natural language and understanding longer queries. What Google tries to highlight with the focus on featured snippets is that searcher intent is to find content that responds exactly to the this question really quick.
Featured Snippets (also known as answer boxes, knowledge graphs or Google direct answers). If you’re searching for something like “how many calories does an apple have”, you’ll get a direct answer, highlighted within a box, just like in the examples below. We did a really cool research on answer boxes a while ago; you should check it out.
Also, with the BERT update, Google focused on showing even more relevant featured snippets. To better understand what this improvement is all about, we are given the example the featured snippet for the query parking on a hill with no curb. Before, Google used to place too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately respond to this query. So they would return results for parking on a hill with a curb. This latest update seems to fix this matter, as the search engine better understands the query and the context.
But how should you optimize for the featured snippets or answer boxes? Well, here is where content steps in, so keep on reading.
Yes, Google stated that content is even more important, and therefore, one should focus their full attention on writing content relevant for the user.
By definition, content marketing implies creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. And Google’s featured snippet seems to endorse that. And since Google announced that it had leveraged its pre-trained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries, it’s clear that content marketing needs to comply with this biggest leap forward in the history of search.
As Google better understands natural language, focusing on longer tail keywords and on featured snippets, it’s clear that there are big opportunities for content writers to serve their readers with content written more “humanly”, that answers a searcher’s question as quick as possible and provides much value.
Leaving the theory aside, here are the steps you should take to write content that is relevant for your users but also content that will rank high so that your users will find it.
Every keyword research or content optimization process should start with a SERP analysis together with a competitor analysis. The Ranking Analysis from the Content Optimizer Tool gives you tons of insights related to the analyzed keyword. Quick and easy, you get to know the search volumes, what type of content ranks on that keyword, how difficult it is to rank on that query (by following keyword difficulty), as well as how popular that keyword is among searchers. Also, the tool lets you know the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top Google results to easily optimize your content.
Content Optimizer does most of the job for you. I know I’m biased and I don’t want to praise the tool too much, but the reality is that it does most of the job for you. Once you performed the ranking analysis, what you need to do is start writing a new piece of content or optimize the existing one and the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you need to use so your content will be relevant for the user’s search intent.
Remember, you need to write for humans. BERT seems to make Google understand even better the searcher’s queries, so you have no excuses.
And if you’re asking why do you need a tool to “write for humans” I’d tell you that a tool can give you lots of insights of what you’re users are actually interested in and you can write content that will answer their needs; and secondly, your users need to find your content first on the first Google page result to access it.
You don’t have to limit yourself to one targeted keyword; you need to discover other queries that your users might be interested in. Searchers have more than one question when it comes to products from your business. Take the opportunity and offer them relevant content for most of their questions. You can use the same Content Optimizer for this task. The tool has two sections that will automatically let you know what other questions are related to your search query:
The Keyword Explorer – this section is great for keyword analysis and for discovering new keyword opportunities. It also gives you the possibility of seeing only the question suggestions. Get inspired by the list of questions, check out the relevancy of the question, its volume, CPC (cost per click), and choose the one that is the most suitable and profitable.
The People Also Ask section – the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you should use in your content, what people are searching for, but it will also offer you a set of questions that relate to your original search query. You should consider answering these questions in your content or create new content starting from these questions.
Although BERT integration in Google Search is currently only available for English queries in the US, Google says it is planning to apply BERT to additional languages and locations. So the rest of the world won’t have to wait too long until BERT will be responsible for the searches in dozens of languages.
When applied to ranking and featured snippets in search, BERT models can process words in relation to all other words in a sentence rather than considering them one-by-one and in order. This enables a better “understanding” of context, which is particularly helpful when it comes to longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions strongly affect meaning. This brings huge opportunities to the search world and big challenges to SEOs and digital marketers.
And while the performance improvements are impressive, Google acknowledges that natural language understanding remains an ongoing challenge. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t adapt their marketing strategy or should re-think their marketing automation and SEO strategies to comply to today’s search marketing requirements. Yet, with search engines becoming more and more complex, there are no “complete guides” or “tips and tricks” lists to optimize for BERT or any other future updates (most likely). You need to keep yourself updated and have the user in mind no matter what you do.
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“How many links will this campaign receive?” “Can you guarantee X number of links?” These are questions that frequent the inboxes and client catchups of content marketers and digital PR professionals everywhere. The measurable KPI of links generated usually steals top spot at every stage of the campaign process from a client’s perspective, with content […]
The post Beyond link quantity: four ways content contributes to your brand appeared first on Builtvisible.
Use this 2020 B2B Content Marketing Research analysis to improve your results and guide you to deliver on your key priorities. Includes data, charts and actionable content marketing tips.
The post 2020 B2B Content Marketing Research: How To Improve Your Results appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
SEO still keeps a lot of secrets for a lot of beginners out there, but even advanced users need to be constantly up to date with what happens in the online marketing world. We’ve put a together a list of ten SEO facts you’ve probably never heard of before; however, even if you have, this is a friendly reminder.
There are a lot of SEO facts and stats out there, with more or less known matters. What we’ve tried to do is to put together a list of surprising SEO facts that make you look at the search engine market from a new perspective. This is not a collection of SEO statistics; this is a list of SEO facts that will help you improve your SEO and your overall online marketing strategy.
That is why we have prepared for you a series of ten shocking facts that we believe you never knew about, until today.
Will you be penalized for duplicate content? No. Is duplicate content hurting your site? Well, it depends. Allow us to elaborate more on this matter.
To start with, we will cite the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines from September 2019 :
The Lowest rating is appropriate if all or almost all of the MC (main content) on the page is copied with little or no time, effort, expertise, manual curation, or added value for users. Such pages should be rated Lowest, even if the page assigns credit for the content to another source.
Did you see duplicate content mentioned anywhere? No. It’s all about copied content. And Google has a different treatment for copied content than for duplicate content. Duplicate content won’t get you penalized, while copied content will. If you don’t believe us, take a look at the video below where Andrey Lipattsev from Google claimed that:
There is no Google duplicate content penalty.
Duplicate content is not always hurting SEO as most of the people think. Of course, duplicate content is not an optimal set-up for pages. Nevertheless, most of the time duplicate content is not manipulative. If you use canonical tags to let search engines know the preferred content, you should be safe. What we want to stress on is that there are many users who have never gazed over what Google says about the duplicate content.
It is not called a penalty if Google notices that your content is not unique.
As Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google Ireland describes in the video mentioned above, you can notice that:
Remember that if there is a website duplicating your content and you do not have any agreement, you can fill in a request to have it removed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Another thing that you can easily do is to use canonical tags. This is a simple way of telling the search engine that this is where the official version first appeared. You should keep count of the duplicate content issues, anytime you start shaping your content marketing strategies or you want to analyze your SEO rankings.
Is it possible to rank without links? The answer is yes.
Yandex, the biggest search engine in Russia is no longer taking into consideration links as a ranking factor. Before saying that what happens in Russia, stays in Russia, you need to know that Google might be heading in the same direction. The Russian commercial SERPs in Yandex and Google are some of the most spammed keywords, where black hat SEO techniques are used to quickly rank shady sites. Given the situation, Yandex said that their algorithm will be a “link-free” one. Will the other search engines follow?
Will Google remove links from their algorithm? It seems like Google wishes to rank websites based on facts instead of links. They even discussed on the idea of excluding backlinks from the Google algorithm.
We don’t have a version like that that is exposed to the public, but we have run experiments like that internally […] we’ve played around with the idea of turning off backlink relevance and, at least for now, backlink relevance still really helps in terms of making sure that we return the best, most relevant, most topical search results. – Matt Cutts, former Google representative
It seems like Google wishes to rank websites based on facts instead of links. This means that the trustworthiness of a domain might help it rise up rankings if Google measures quality by facts, instead of links, according to New Scientist.
There is a lot of mystery and buzz regarding the influence of shares, comments, likes, etc. on SEO in general. A question keeps popping out:
Are social signals a ranking factor?
The answer is not as simple as a “yes” or “no”. What we can tell you for sure as a result of an in-depth study published in a previous blog post on this matter is this:
The average Google + shares for the first rank are significantly higher.
There were some other correlations we’ve made between Facebook, Pinterest or LinkedIn and ranks; yet, the strongest correlation was between a high number of Google+ shares and better ranks.
Before overlooking Google+ within your social media marketing strategy, take a look at the screenshot above. It’s true that correlation doesn’t mean causality but such a high correlation cannot be easily ignored.
It seems that Google+ interactions affect Google search rankings. Therefore, Google+ provides engagement with your audience, but it also affects measurable outcomes beyond engagement, including higher search results ranking. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to know that organic listing doesn’t come up easily, regardless of the SEO tactics or social media strategy you’ve used. Yet, any little help that will improve your search traffic definitely helps.
Rich snippets have been a sneak preview on the SERP page since they first appeared in 2009. The question is: Do they have a direct impact on your ranks? Well, not really.
Rich snippets have the role of adding extra information to a search listing but, according to Google, they do not influence rankings. Google has stated several times that rich snippets have no direct impact on site rankings at the moment. You can even find answers on the Web Master Help Forum:
Q: Does using rich snippets affect my site’s ranking?
A: No.
Source: www.seopressor.com
So Google said it all. Apparently, rich snippets do not affect our rankings in a direct way. This does not mean that it cannot generate indirect SEO benefits though, like helping a page to be easily indexable or showing useful data for the reader. Rich snippets will help you in an indirect way to get more people to visit your website, and that in turn might further help you with your rankings; yet rich snippets have no direct impact on your ranks.
In order to completely understand this let’s take a look at the 10 most popular sites according to Ebizma. It seems that the top most popular sites in September 2019 are: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo!, Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Bing, eBay and MSN. No suprise here, I know. Yet, if we think of them for a moment we notice that only Wikipedia and YouTube are truly content-oriented websites. The other are “content gates” if we can say that but they are not offering direct content in a way a usual website does.
This leads to an important question:
Does usefulness matter more than content?
Eight of those sites give the core users something to do, not only to consume. As Carter Bowles from Northcutt claims, they do not stop at passive reading or video watching, but they give people tools and places that they can use to do something. These websites are popular because the action required from the core user does not stop at consuming content.
Google is a tool that gives users the chance of quickly searching the whole web in order to find something that they want. They are not popular due to content or fantastic link bait, but as a result of interaction. So, we might ask ourselves:
Is content still king?
We are not implying that content marketing is not working. Quality content is great because it provides an amazing way to grow. What we are stressing on is the fact that interaction seems to be working wonders. If we try to understand why these websites are popular, we will notice that up to a point, content marketing is also part of their strategy. But what facts prove to us is that the most outstanding sites out there place communities, tools and interactive platforms before content. Even more, those two content sites that are at the top of popularity, YouTube and Wikipedia, are still making use of interactive platforms.
You may know that Google is smart enough to recognize objects in images but what you might not know is that object recognition is now a ranking signal that can affect any business out there.
Not long ago we wrote an article about the way Google will read & rank images in the near future. Well, it seems like the future is now. It’s true that there have been lots of studies with complex equations and algorithms about image recognition since the ‘90s, so we can say that the subject has appealed to researchers ever since search engines appeared. What should be appealing for users is the idea of image optimization, and not in the classic way of adding title tags and alternate text.
Since the moment the big G made the Cloud Vision API public, a lot of people started raving about the technology. Without any doubt, Cloud Vision API can be used to analyze and determine what is inside an image. This quickly classifies images into thousands of categories (e.g., “sailboat”, “lion”, “Eiffel Tower”), detects individual objects and faces within images, and finds and reads printed words contained within images. You can build metadata on your image catalog, moderate offensive content, or enable new marketing scenarios through image sentiment analysis.
This feature allows search engines to detect what content is inside the images that you post on your websites and rank it accordingly.
Object Detection in Images adds an extra layer of ranking signals that cannot be easily altered.
However, this is really big for the SEO industry as the object recognition:
You might know by now that a lot of algorithms are used by Google in order to rank websites. You might be surprised to find out that to evaluate the quality of search results Google hired people who make around 40,000 precision evaluations. These search evaluators have to establish the quality of results for various searches. The guidelines that they use to rate the results are explained in a rather dense document that can be found here.
Although the document seems to address more those who wish to become evaluators, a gaze through the guidelines can help developers and marketers as well, because they help you understand how quality is perceived by Google.
Source: www.seobythesea.com
Google uses search evaluators from different countries and with different languages. This means that Google is trying to understand content written in more languages.
Following this, we might think that the engine will be able to apply penalties to content coming in not so common languages as well. For the moment, by Google’s estimates, the Penguin algorithm affects approximately 3.1% of search queries in English, about 3% of queries in languages like German, Chinese, and Arabic. These trained experts might be able to catch spam in more languages and therefore affect the overall ranks.
All that YouTube has achieved in the last years made it the world’s second largest search engine and also the go-to choice for online video marketing and advertising. Let’s think of it for a moment. Everybody likes videos, right? They are instantly more attractive than text for lots of people and it seems that the big G holds a special place for Youtube in its heart. We should also take into account that, after all, it is owned by Google.
According to a study conducted by Tubular Insights, videos have a 41% higher CTR than text.
According to a study made by Aimclear, it seems that the platform we choose to upload our videos impacts the ability to rank. What platform is preferred? You guessed. YouTube dominates Google’s SERP, but there are other platforms that have some influence as well, as you can see in the image bellow:
Source: www.aimclearblog.com
But what about having videos on homepages? Will they help us rank better in the organic search results? The same study from Aimclear mentioned above says that nearly 100% of the videos returned in universal SERPs also ranked on the first page on their native platform. It’s true that a high ranking on YouTube results doesn’t guarantees a universal search placement; yet it seems to be a prerequisite. Also, direct or indirect, videos are an effective SEO tactic and digital strategy that will boost your rankings. Aside from keeping your visitors engaged, it will give them something they can easily share.
A video can help by keeping your visitors more on your website and this will be seen as a ranking factor by the search engines. We should also consider the possibility of visitors sharing the page containing the video on social media and this will increase the possibility of receiving inbound links from users that notice it. This will certainly add value to your SEO.
No, we are not talking about time traveling and time machines, but about the physical time it takes for someone to get from a location to an event/place/business he/she is interested in, and as a consequence, about local search and local optimization.
The amount of travel time someone goes through in order to reach a place is a ranking factor.
Travel time is a recently granted patent from Google that seems to be connected with the local SEO and is defined as the “time investment a person may be willing to make to visit a specific location.” Therefore, proximity comes first not just in our day to day lives but in SERPs as well. Sites that are not as optimized as yours will rank ahead of you if they are closer to the user. Therefore, if you have a local business you should be highly interested of this search market feature if you are interested in a high close rate as well.
Just look at the image below. The “plumbers” search listed a few businesses relevant for this search. Yet, why are these websites listed first?
Source: moz.com
Do they have quality content? Well, some of them don’t even have a website, as we found out from a research conducted by Darren Shaw. Not to mention that some of them have 0 links and 0 reviews. Therefore, why are they ranking in top 3? You’ve guessed it: proximity. They are in top Google searches results because they offer local information, meaning relevant content to potential customers.
It seems like Google also wants to know if a person visits a place after seeing it in Google Maps, either by following a recommendation or after seeing it in the search results. As Bill Slawski mentioned, the term ”time investment” used in this Google patent refers to the actual time that it takes to visit a place that was seen in the search results.
According to another patent granted for Google, it seems that the search engine will soon rank events depending on popularity instead of considering the number of inbound links pointed at the event’s pages. The idea behind this patent is that because many events can happen in the same region or around the same time, people that are interested in them might consider it difficult to choose the event to attend.
This will help users choose the most interesting event when multiple events take place at the same time.
The big G will be receiving data about the events that take place during a certain time period along with the computing signal scores for those events.
Other signals for ranking events according to the patent might be:
Source: www.seobythesea.com
Above we’ve exposed some of the facts from the search engine optimization market we believe will help you out with your organic search and your overall digital marketing strategy. The search engine market is an ever transforming platform where effective SEO still pays the bills and keeps on driving traffic. Even if you invest in paid search or in link building, what we want at the end of the day is to have all of the internet users, if possible, generating organic clicks on our site. Increasing sales is what we all aim to. And as 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, being aware of the Google SEO statistics that can influence your website’s performance (regardless if they are SEO facts 2017 or older SEO statistics from 2016 )it’s of paramount importance.
There is no single most effective SEO statistic, tip or fact, a lead generation formula that will drive to guaranteed marketing success. Yet, the SEO facts we’ve debated along this article might help you with your onpage SEO, your integrated marketing or content strategies. Conversion rates don’t come easily and some SEO tips, paid ads or marketing stats won’t bring million users all of the sudden. But being aware of the SEO stats and facts and shaping your online marketing according to it, will definitely improve your global web presence. Stay up to date to the marketing trends, be concerned of content creation, check out where your users click on, invest in inbound marketing and the organic results will eventually follow.
We look forward to seeing how Google’s search engine will evolve with all the new technology and we also look forward to hearing from you.
The post 10 Shocking SEO Facts You Never Knew About appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Each and every day that passes, another fact about SEO is revealed, another important tip is told, another story is learnt just by opening our email, twitter account, or our smartphone. We have the information at hand. Lots and lots of news from the internet marketing world go by our ears and our eyes. Make sure to listen to the right one.
And, speaking of important stuff, we’ve searched and scooped through the Webmaster Central Hangouts to reveal the most intriguing facts about SEO Google has ever said.
Google Webmaster Central Hangout is an important source of information you should always keep an eye on. It is available for everyone, you can send questions or address them live directly to experts, and find insights straight from Google.
You can check Google’s working hours directly on their website and listen to all recorded videos, starting with 2012, regarding all kinds of topics, offpage SEO and onpage SEO facts included. Yet, we thought you wouldn’t want to listen to all the recorded hangouts, therefore we’ve made a summary for you as we’ve curated the most interesting of them all and tackled the following:
Does Panda take site architecture into account when creating a Panda score? was one of the questions answered on a Google Webmaster Central Hangout.
Google Panda is an algorithm that looks out to the overall quality of the website and its content. In a previous blog post, we detailed how this Google update (the Panda algorithm) can affect websites and how it could actually be a topical authority.
From a Google point of view, Google Panda is more of a general quality evaluation and it takes into account everything. The site architecture is included. If somehow it affects the quality of the site overall, you might get a Google Panda penalty for bad site architecture.
Panda penalizes websites for “low-quality sites” or “thin content sites” and aims to return results with higher-quality sites near the top of search results. Let’s say, for example, that your website has issues that affect the quality of the site, such as a bad structure – then you should take some time to improve that.
If you are in the position of making a website redesign, creating a new site from scratch or doing something similar that might affect the architecture of your website, you should take into consideration what John Mueller said.
Follow the full conversation in the next Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout with John from February 24, 2017 at 9:06:
Recently, another intriguing question was addressed at a Google Webmaster Central Hangout:
How much emphasis does mobile PageSpeed have as a ranking factor?
John Mueller made a full disclosure about this in the next video from March 2017 (at 46:44), saying that for the moment Google doesn’t use it at all. So you’ve all found the truth, my friends, said directly by Googlers:
Mobile PageSpeed is not an index ranking factor.
As plain and simple as that.
Having a mobile Page Speed improves user experience and it is a critical web redesign consideration, but until now it hasn’t been used as an index ranking factor to generate mobile searches.
From an SEO point of view, for the moment, Google doesn’t take it into account at all, but keeping count of mobile PageSpeed is an important SEO task you should not overlook. This way you can offer a nice experience to your users. If they are pleased, they might come back and increase your conversion rates. Invest to gain.
Another intriguing fact about SEO revealed on Google Webmaster Central Hangout is that the Search Console doesn’t count Knowledge Graph sidebar clicks or impressions.
John Mueller said that:
If you look for your company’s name and it appears on the sidebar with a link that goes to your website, it isn’t counted. On the other hand, he said that sitelinks should be counted.
You can listen to his full explanation from the Google Webmaster Hangout in the next video from February 2016 at 30:15:
Another thrilling fact about SEO revealed in a Google Webmaster Hangout was about blog pages canonicalization to the root of the blog. List to what John says on February 2017 at 16:28:
Somebody asked if it’s a correct procedure to set up blog subpages with a canonical URL pointed to the blog’s main page as a preferred version since the subpages aren’t a true copy of the blog’s main page.
Setting up blog subpages with a canonical blog pointed to the blog’s main page it isn’t a correct set up because those pages are not an equivalent, from Google’s point of view.
And even if Google sees the canonical tag, it ignores it because it thinks it’s a webmaster’s mistake.
This method has been overly used by lots and lots of websites, but that doesn’t make it a good thing. Small or big companies make mistakes all the time.
Another exciting SEO fact was unveiled after a Googler asked the next question:
Can you assign both x-default and en hreflang to the same page?
John Mueller gave a short and comprehensive explanation to this:
Yes, you can apply x-default, and en hreflang to the same page.
Also, it is possible to say to Google this is English for UK, and it is a default page. The x-default hreflang attribute doesn’t have to be a different page. Another thing you could do is to set multiple hreflang tags going to the page. For example, you can have one for UK English, Australian English, American English, and the UK English is the default one you want to use for a website.
You can take a look at the full disclosure from February 2017, starting with 21:06:
The idea that Google can crawl only 100 URLs is a myth.
That is one of the most interesting pieces of information among the facts about SEO exposed on Google Webmaster Central Hangout. Somebody asked if there is a limit to the number of URLs that Googlebot can crawl. John Mueller answered that there is no limit. See the video below from April 2017 (47:58):
Up until now, we knew that Google could crawl a hundred pages from every website. There is no such thing. He also explained that they analyze the crawl budget. This means they try to see what and how much Google can and wants to crawl regarding the website itself.
The crawl budget topic was explained on the Google Webmaster Central Blog along with the factor that impacts this topic:
Google’s effort to stop fake news and offer qualitative results never ends. They are rolling an on-going process of improving search value.
Paul Haahr, ranking engineer at Google, even said: “they’re explicitly avoiding the term ‘fake news,’ because it is too vague”.
Google is continuously trying to offer qualitative results and for that, they have worked with over 100,000 people to evaluate search results.
The people involved go under the name of Google search quality raters due to the fact that they conduct real studies and they are actually searching on Google to rate the quality of the pages that appear in SERP, without altering the results directly. These raters use a set of guidelines that have an entire section about the “Upsetting-Offensive” content flag that they can use.
A content could be flagged under the next circumstances:
Another intriguing fact that Google exposed on Google Webmaster Central Hangout is the confirmation the following:
You should still use the disavow file even though Google Penguin is real time now.
John Mueller explains that if you know your website was using shady unnatural ways to generate backlinks that didn’t respect Google’s guidelines, then you need to disavow those links that could harm your website. You need to evaluate your backlink profile to see where you stand.
The intriguing question somebody asked him was “Now that Penguin runs real time would it be correct to think that if we found a few bad links on our site and disavow them, we might see a ranking improvement relatively quickly? Also, does Penguin now just devalue those low-quality links, as opposed to punish you for them?”
John Mueller declares that Google looks at the web spam on the whole website to see what decision they have to take. If you have damaging links and use the disavow file, Google will find out that you don’t want those links to be associated with you.
Google Penguin is a webspam algorithm and it doesn’t focus only on links. It decreases search rankings for those sites that violate Google’s Webmaster guidelines.
On the final base, disavowing unnatural links helps Google Penguin and it is a recommended practice. One of the facts about SEO backed up by John Mueller and Gary Illyes:
You can follow the discussion from October 2016 on the following Google Webmaster Hangout with John Mueller about this topic at 23:20:
Take into consideration all variations when you want to use the URL removal tool, including the www/ non-www and http/ https. This is not a fix for canonicalization.
If you’re trying to take out the HTTP version after a site move, then both HTTP and HTTPs version will be removed and it is something you definitely don’t want.
It is recommended to use the URL removal only for urgent issues, not for site maintenance.
For example, if you want to remove a page from your website, you don’t have to use the URL removal tool because over time it will disappear automatically as Google will recrawl and reindex those pages.
Listen to John Mueller’s entire dialogue from December 2016 in a Search Console Google Webmaster Central Hangout at 17:18.
A compelling question has been quite recently asked at a Google Webmaster Hangout about the limit for keyword density in content. John Mueller gave a straightforward answer regarding this topic:
We expect content to be written naturally, so focusing on keyword density is not a good use of your time. Focusing too much on keyword density makes it look like your content is unnatural.
Also, if you stuff your content with keywords, it makes it harder for users to read and understand what your content is about. On top of that, search engines will recognize that instantly and ignore all the keywords on that page.
Instead of concentrating on the limit of keyword density in content, you should aim your attention at making your content easy to read.
Use the next trick, for a change. Try and give somebody a phone call to read the content out loud. If they understand what you said in the first 2 minutes, then you’re safe, your content could pass as natural.
Content duplication has been a long-debated topic.
Let’s break an SEO myth: duplicate content will bring you a Google penalty. It’s not true. It doesn’t exist. We debated this issue in a previous article as well.
Back in 2013, Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s Webspam team, said that:
In the worst-case scenario (with spam free content), Google may just ignore duplicate content. I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing. – Matt Cutts
Google tries to offer relevant results for every search query. That is why, in most cases, the results that appear in SERP are filtered, so the information isn’t shown more than once. It is not helpful for users to see two pieces of the same data on the first page.
In 2014, during a Google Webmaster Central hangout John Mueller said that Google doesn’t have a duplicate content penalty.
We won’t demote a site for having a lot of duplicate content – John Mueller
It was confirmed on June 2016, when Andrey Lipattsev, senior Google search quality strategist, repeated and said content duplication penalty doesn’t exist.
But you could get a penalty if you manipulate Google’s guidelines and create content in an automated way, content that is scraped from multiple locations and that doesn’t serve another purpose than generating traffic.
The submitted question on this topic was the following:
Is is better to use the Data Highlighter from Search Console or it is better to add up markup from the web page? What’s the best practice?
John Mueller says it’s a great option to use and try out structured data. There are sites with content that needs to have structured data and Data Highlighter is an easy way to test it out.
Structured data implementation on your page and not through the Data Highlighter is something that needs a lot of attention. Yet, it is the recommended procedure if you think of the long-term perspective. Markup data is available for everyone. You can see if it’s implemented correctly and, more importantly, you don’t have to worry about it.
If you marked your content for each element, then when you change your layout, for example, your data will be shown properly. As for Data Highlighter, it has to learn that change.
You can listen to the whole explanation in the next Google Webmaster Hangout from April 2017 (starting with 46.04):
Another important fact we’ve figured out from Google Webmaster Central Hangout is about the impact of the URL of an image in Google. Can it help Google understand better what an image is about?
And here is what Google had to say about this:
We do look at the URL for images specifically and we try to use that for ranking, but if the URL is irrelevant for that query and nobody is searching for that term, it doesn’t help Google.
The main point is that Google looks at the URL when ranking images. It is an important step because Google aims to deliver qualitative results. The correlation between the domain name and the query is highly significant. It is an effective SEO tactic you could apply.
SEO Friendly URLs can ultimately lead to higher perceived relevance, leading back to an edge from a SEO perspective. And we know this for a fact, from a study conducted by us on 34k keywords. Here is what John had to say about this on February 2017, at 40:17:
Let’s say that the title name of a URL is 123 and the image is about flowers. In this situation, the URL won’t disappear because of its irrelevant file name but there might be a problem here on how and for what query that image will show.
Even though Google is becoming smarter and smarter at object recognition, we still need to help it by offering descriptive information about that image (follow the guidelines from point 20 on this matter).
SEO Friendly URLs are a must when we talk about content, images or any other types of information on your website. It is important to offer a higher importance when naming your files; an SEO fact also backed up by Matt Cutts.
Another interesting fact about SEO that Google debated on Google Webmaster Central Hangouts was whether low-quality pages influence Domain Authority.
The exact question addressed to Google’s representatives was “Can low-quality pages on the site affect the overall authority?”
In general, when the Google algorithm looks at a website, it also takes into consideration individual pages.
You can find more on this subject in the following Google Webmaster Hangout from March 2017 at 10:05:
Let’s say you have a small website. If you have bad quality links on a website, then it could affect the domain authority. On the contrary, if you have a large site and only a sprinkle of bad pages, then the damage is not so big. Google understands that, in a bigger picture, those pages aren’t the main issue.
The main pain point is that low-quality pages affect the way Google views the website overall and this is something you should fix either way.
Find a solution for that pages. You could either remove them or try to improve their quality.
Among the most interesting facts about SEO that Google exposed on Google Webmaster Hangout is the way Google fought spammers in searches. Webspam is a persistent problem in our days. It fired an alarm signal when they saw the data in the most recent SEO statistics report, published afterward on the blog.
In 2016, there was a 32% increase of hacked sites compared to 2015.
But now, with the help of users, the problem of spam Google search results is being stopped. Last year, Google started working with users, besides webmasters, to improve the quality of SERP, to clean it of spammy websites and to make it a safe web environment.
The Webmaster Central stuff managed to work with over 150,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers against webspam. Also, users tackled webspam by helping Googlers.
Approximately 180,000 spam reports were submitted by users around the world, as we spotted on Google Webmaster Central Blog.
Besides making Google Penguin live and improving the algorithm to take actions against webspam, the webmasters from the spam department at Google performed manual reviews on sites’ structured data markup and took manual action on more than 10,000 sites that did not meet the quality guidelines and followed black hat SEO techniques.
Nowadays, we take our smartphone everywhere. It’s like it’s attached to our hand because we have a lot of information on the phone. We are logged into email, we have easily access to our accounts, to our contacts and we can easily find everything we want with a quick search on Google even if we walk or ride.
Google Assistant makes it easier to search and find what we want by offering us the possibility to make voice searches and personalize our content on Android, even when we’re offline.
We’ve debated the voice search topic leisurely on a previous blog post I invite you to browse.
With this feature you can take lots of actions on your phone and on Google search:
On a more complex level, you could ask the Google Assistant questions such as “what do I have to do today?”, “How long will it take to go from Princeton to New York?”, “Book a table at East Restaurant”.
You can see the personalized touch on your phone if you search in Apps for a person, task, event and so on. You’ll find the results for that specific query from all your installed apps (as you can see in the picture above).
PASO comes from Personal Assistant Search Optimization. PASO might be the future of SEO because mobiles undergo a continuous development, now with the Google Assistant and the AMP feature for mobile optimization.
Google is trying to simplify the search process and to make it as easy as possible to get the information you want with fewer taps on your mobile device.
An important aspect why PASO might be the future is due to the fact that it offers personalized information for each user. It is an important aspect to keep in mind for getting improved search engine rankings.
Google Assistant is the quickest and easiest way to get your hands on the information. It doesn’t matter if you ask for a receipt, for explanations/definitions, for directions. See the example below:
You ask and Google Assistant gives you the information in a heartbeat. It is more likely that the personal assistant result has a higher CTR, because it is tailored to your answer and it’s the only one you see comparing with the results from search engines. And besides that, it offers you suggestions related to your previous search.
If you want to get featured on Google Assistant you need to make sure you answer a question and your piece of content is optimized for humans.
You should follow the same steps as optimizing your content for ranking number zero. One way would be to ask the question and then answer it. This way you take a shot to get displayed in the answer box.
The Google Search Console helps webmasters manage the way their websites appear in SERP and Google Analytics helps users to integrate services like Webmaster, Adwords, and other tools to see results based on the source (paid search, organic search result).
Along the years, users could link Google Webmaster tools with Analytics, but they could see the results separately, in different sections. The Search Console results appeared in Google Analytics under the Acquisition section, as you can see in the next screenshot (this option is still available):
In the old version, you could only see how users came on the website and not what they did once they got there. Now, with the next improvement, webmasters can see all the metrics in one place and make decisions based on the data combined with those two tools.
You have access to the Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions data in one place. Due to this update, you could have many more possibilities to use the search data, as mentioned on the on Google Webmaster Central Blog:
The question that popped out in another Google Webmaster Central Hangout was:
Google is getting better and better at object recognition. Does this means that we no longer need to optimize our images description with descriptive files names, alt tags, title tags, etc.?
Having optimized images is a good indication for getting improved search engine rankings.
At this moment, we still need to optimize our images in order to rank as high as possible.
We won’t have to do that, maybe in the future. For the time being, having a relevant file name, alt description, title tag, caption on the image will help Google understand. Also, the text around the image helps Google understand what that page is about and what it needs to rank for.
Maybe in the future, 5-10 years from now, if things go very well, all that information won’t be necessary, but for now optimizing images helps object recognition to offer better results.
You can listen to the whole conversation on intriguing facts about SEO in the next video from February 2017, at 13:07:
Do you know if Google Site Search is going to shut down and transfer to Custom Search? What’s the impact?
It’s about that special site search you can set up and search within your website. You can see how it looks like in the example below:
The Custom Search is quite similar as you can see in the next screenshot:
Google Site Search will combine with Custom Search because they do almost similar things. Site Search is used for one website and Custom Search can be used on different sites or just one.
You can also listen to what John Mueller from Google says about this change on February 2017, even though he isn’t directly working on this project (32:32):
Another interesting SEO fact debated on Google Webmaster Central Hangout was about how relevant HTTPs is as a ranking factor for sites with information only.
The official response from Google is that:
HTTPs is relevant for any types of website. It doesn’t matter if the site has information only; it is still relevant. HTTPs doesn’t apply only for encrypting information like credits cards and passwords, but it also ensures that the information users see is what the owner of the website is providing.
An overly used technique to hack takes place in hotels, airports, cafes or, in general, other public spaces that offer free wi-fi access. They can take a look at the HTTP pages and add a tracking information or ads on those pages because the owner of the website failed to increase the security system. I bet that nobody wants spammy ads on their website, even if it’s informational only.
HTTPs helps users to see the content that was meant to be shown.
More on this matter you can find in the video below (56:30) registered on February 2017:
In July 2019, John Mueller recommended keeping URLs under a thousand characters. While you might think that’s not much, consider the fact that sub-folders can greatly expand the length of a URL. Moreover, studies showed that shorter URLs carry lots of SEO advantages. A concise URL can help you have a higher position in the search results hierarchy. Plus, it will come in handy for users that are casual and don’t bother remembering the name.
The URLs should be short enough to be easily recognized.
You can review the full answer in the next recording of the Webmaster Central Hangouts:
John Mueller said that you can have as many H1 tags as you want on a single page. If you have ever thought that adding a single h1 tag on a single page is the recommended way to proceed, well you should know that you can heave multiples headings. Don’t worry about that matter.
As many as you want.
—
John
If you look at the following video, you can find out the explanation, too.
With HTML5, it is not a problem to have multiple H1’s. It is common to have them in different parts of the page, in your website’s template, theme or other sections. Whether you have HTML5 or not, it is completely fine to use multiple heading tags of the same type on a page.
On the other side, having no h1 tag on a page is a problem and it should be fixed. That means you have pages without the main heading, and both Google and the user wouldn’t know what it’s about.
Did you know?
The Site Audit from cognitiveSEO automatically classifies the headings and shows you all the related issues .
Add the website to audit and the tool will extract information regarding indexability, content (title, headings, duplicate pages, thin content canonical pages, mixed content, images), architecture, mobile and performance. In the Content section you‘ll get a list with all the headings types and graphs with information from you site.
A well-structured architecture can change the faith of your website drastically. Web crawlers, like Googlebot, crawl the website architecture. The goal is to index the content and return it in the search results.
Sometimes, crawlers can’t discover your pages and you need to help them. Google admits that sometimes it doesn’t seem to be finding all the pages on your site. It can happen because it can’t crawl them, or it can’t understand them properly to index those pages.
To help Google index and crawl it, make sure you have a sitemap and new content is linked high up in the site architecture. Anything that you want to push a little bit in the search results, it will definitely help Google if you add it higher in the site architecture.
John Mueller recommends that it is the correct way to do it.
| What also makes a big difference for us, especially if your Homepage is really important for your website, is that newer content is linked pretty high within the structure of your website, so maybe even on your Homepage. | |
 |
John mueller |
| Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google | |
You can find the full script below:
The question that popped into one of the latest Google Webmasters Tools discussed the need for affiliate links and the correct way to mark them. Google considers affiliate links to have a commercial background since you’re trying to make some money pointing to a distributor or somebody that you trust.
John Mueller confirms it:
| From our point of view, it is perfectly fine to have affiliate links. That’s a way of monetizing your website. We except that these links are marked appropriately so that we understand that those are affiliate links. | |
|
John Mueller |
| Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google | |
An option would be to use the rel =”nofollow” or use the newest rel=“sponsored”. The sponsored rel link attribute was introduced a few days ago to mark links that were created as part of advertising, sponsorships or similar agreements.
The additional attributes (rel=“sponsored” and rel=“ugc” – for user-generated content) are meant to help Google understand the nature of links:
| Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at. Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement. | |
Follow the whole explanation from John in the next video:
As of March 2020, Google will treat all link attributes, be them sponsored, user-generated and nofollow as a hint for ranking purposes. For crawling and indexing purposes all those links will become hints. That means Google might count a link as credit, consider it as part of spam analysis or for other ranking purposes.
The company is making the change to better identify link schemes while still considering the link attribute signals.
| For example, if we see that a website is engaging in large scale link selling, then that’s something where we might take manual action, but for the most part, our algorithms just recognize that these are links we don’t want to count then we don’t count them. | |
|
John mueller |
| Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google | |
Somebody from the Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts said that YouTube should be removed from search results:
Please remove YouTube form Google search results. Let websites compete with websites. It’s not fair when I write a 4,000-word article covering every aspect of a topic and then get over ranked by a 500-word article just because this website has more authority.
The fact that Google offers different types of content for a search query means diversity. There are different ways of finding relevant content to each individual user. The number of words on a page doesn’t necessarily reflect relevancy for a search query.
| John says that the number of words of a page is not a factor they use for ranking. It doesn’t matter if you have 4,000 words on a single webpage and somebody else has 500 words, your page won’t be automatically more relevant than another page. | |
|
john mueller |
| Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google | |
Rather than focusing on the number of words, consider the quality of your content. Instead of writing an extra article, make sure that all the content on your site is of the highest quality possible.
Take into account these SEO facts, as they will be helpful in planning your search engine optimization strategy, content marketing strategy or in any decision you take for your business and your website regarding the online marketing area. It’s a win win relationship: you will be updated with the SEO news and (hopefully) you will do things respecting the Google recommendations. And you can stay connected really easy: check the Google webmaster central office hours and see what’s going on.
Of course, keeping track off ALL the hangouts can be a burden. This is why, the previous 21 SEO stats are important for each webmaster and shouldn’t be ignored. On the long run, don’t lose focus on your plan and stick to your goals. These videos can help everyone, both rookies and SEO experts alike. They are quite a juicy resource, from keyword research, content creation, link building to other effective SEO strategies and SEO tactics.
Having organic clicks from organic searches is still an important advantage in the lead generation path. These intriguing facts about SEO can be applied in the social media marketing strategy and in the whole inbound marketing process as well as in any other strategies, as long as you have an online presence.
Furthermore, other domains can positively influence your SEO efforts, if you’ve done your job right. If you follow the previous tips for boosting SEO you could have a good chance to succeed.
The post 21 Intriguing SEO Facts Exposed by Google on Webmaster Central & Hangouts appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
