Over the last few years, SEOs have been talking about relationship building as a concept. We’re often reminded how link building is becoming digital PR. And with that, I’ve been pitched more and more by big brands looking for a collaboration of sorts, using a different spin. Note: This is not new by any stretch, but I’m writing about it because it seems to be a current trend.
These days, most clients and prospects I talk to believe they’ve run out of things to write about. One ceaseless option is to update (and improve upon) their existing assets and stale “evergreen” pieces. Yes—evergreen pieces do go stale. But this post is about new ideas in a modern age. The days of “one landing page per keyword” is SEO history. The emerging best practices for SEO content—in text form—is (again) long form, holistic copy. Searchmetrics has told us this for years. It’s not a 1:1—it’s not because Google inherently thinks long copy is better for them to serve. The correlation is likely related to Hummingbird, Google’s improvement in comprehension, and good old fashioned keywords and synonyms. Or maybe it has to do with the content’s improved power to convert (and lower the bounce). At the end of the day in 2014, the bigger net you cast, the more likely to capture Google’s attention and trust. At SMX East, Search Metrics’ Marcus Tober gave a great presentation providing more context. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t really need a study. I’ve been seeing it myself.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Many years ago, one of our clients bought a popular, content-rich website and redirected it to their current domain. SEO (and retaining the backlinks) were not on their radar at that time. Upon learning about the migration, we asked if they had redirected the site at a page-level or just redirected the site to their own homepage. The client had no idea how the redirection was done and they didn’t have a redirect list (list of the old, legacy URLs) to work from. We needed to invent a plan to gather up the data.
You put a robots.txt on your site expecting it to keep Google out of certain pages. But you worry – did you do it correctly? Is Google following it? Is the index as tight as it could be? Here’s a question for you. If you have a page blocked by robots.txt, will Google put it in the index? If you answered no, you’re incorrect. Google will indeed index a page blocked by robots.txt if it’s being linked by one of your pages (that do not have a rel=”nofollow”), or if it’s linked from another website. It doesn’t usually rank well because Google can’t see what’s on the page, but it does get PageRank passed through it.
Google gives you a few ways to “deindex” pages. That is, kick pages out of their index. The problem is, despite some serious speed improvements in crawling and indexation, they’re pretty slow to deindex and act upon canonical tags. This quick trick can help you isolate and remove pages en masse.
If a website is a mess of URLs and duplicate content, Google will throw their hands up in the air out of frustration. This is a bad spot to be in. You’ll find your traffic and rankings drop while your indexation becomes bloated. Your crawl rate (which we’ve found correlates with traffic) will be curbed. It could seem all very sudden, or it could be gradual. Every case is different – but it’s always a nightmare. Keeping track of website changes is critical with SEO. The other day I peaked into our own Google Webmaster Tools indexation report, and saw something pretty alarming in the “index status” report.
The folks at Mountain View made the conscious decision that keywords alone couldn’t deliver them the results they wanted to see (ahem, “their users wanted to see”). Google tried some different modeling but ultimately came around to semantic search (that is, using semantic technology to refine the query results). Now I said much of the industry has picked up on it. Not all. I still see a lot of pretending Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird never happened. That’s unfortunate for innocent clients around the world. But for most of us probably reading this, we’re students of a new lexicon. With words like “triples” and “entities” and “semiotics” and “topic modeling.”
Entity optimization as a big SEO play isn’t quite upon us yet. It’s a slow, growing Google addition. I know – it frustrates me too. So much potential, of which I believe will greatly improve search results in the future. Google isn’t nearly showing the fruits of everything it knows through entities, whether through cards or search results – at least not relative to the way they rank on keywords alone. But can knowledge cards help bring qualified traffic while considering searcher intent? SEOs always talk about searchers intent. Anyone who’s been doing SEO for a while knows that building for intent can be a challenge.
I remember a few years ago blowing the mind of a boss with a theory that Google would eventually rank (in part) based on their own internal understanding of your object. If Wikipedia could know so much about an object, why couldn’t Google? In the end, I was basically describing semantic search and entities, something that has already lived as a concept in the fringe of the mainstream.
For one reason or another, plenty of sites are in the doghouse. The dust has settled a bit. Google has gotten more specific about the penalties and warnings through their notifications, and much of the confusion is no longer… as confusing. We’re now in the aftermath – the grass is slowly growing again and the sky is starting to clear. A lot of companies that sold black hat link building work have vanished (and seem to have their phone off the hook). Some companies who sold black hat work are now even charging to remove the links they built for you (we know who you are!). But at the end of the day, if you were snared by Google for willingly – or maybe unknowingly – creating “unnatural links,” the only thing to do is get yourself out of the doghouse.
As a search engine junkie, I’m always pulling for the little guy with a unique idea. I love competition in the marketplace. Sadly, the dominance of Google (and others) forced many of these into the shadows. But if you are curious like me, I present Greenlane’s active list of search engines: Baidu – The leading…
