Sometimes there is content that expires… such as job postings or non-repeating events that doesn’t make sense to keep indexed, especially if it leads to a poor user experience to leave it up. But for best practices purposes, what is the best way to handle this content? The question came up in the last Google […]
The post Google: How to Handle Expired Content on a Site appeared first on The SEM Post.
Posted by randfish
This week, we pay a special tribute to the late SEO pioneer Eric Ward. His link strategies formed the foundation of many of today's smartest approaches to links, and in this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers several that are as relevant today as they were when Eric first started talking about them.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are paying an honorary tribute to our friend, lost but not forgotten, Eric Ward.
Eric was one of the pioneers of the SEO industry. In fact, he was a link strategist and a creator of links for websites before search engines even valued links on the internet. He was the very first link marketer that Amazon.com hired. He had a testimonial from Jeff Bezos on his website, from Google's Matt Cutts from many years ago, and worked with hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations to improve their link strategies.
Beyond that, Eric was a remarkable contributor to the field of SEO through conferences and events, through webinars, through his blog and his Twitter account, and through countless conversations with SEOs like me. In fact, Eric was one of the first people who helped me to understand how link strategy worked, and I have many, many fond memories of him.
I'd also like to say that Eric and I had a number of phone calls and emails over the years about mental and emotional health. I know that's something that both of us have struggled with. I know that it's something that many of us in the entrepreneurial and technology worlds struggle with, and it's an issue that deserves more openness and more attention. I hope that we can do that and that I can do that here at Moz.
But, of course, this is Whiteboard Friday, and since we're honoring Eric, what I want to help today with is talking about some of his link strategies that stand the test of time. These are high level concepts, which we often dig into the very weeds and the details here on Whiteboard Friday, but I think it pays to pull back a little and think about links from a big-picture perspective.
For those of you who are active link builders and link strategists, much of this might be familiar. But I bet for your clients, for your teams, for your bosses, for the people that you work with, this sort of strategic level thinking sometimes goes ignored, and it means that you don't always get the credit that you should. So let's take some of the lessons. These are just a tiny handful of the plethora of value that Eric has provided over the decades that he had been in our field.
First off, Eric liked to talk about why people and organizations link, and I think there's actually some excellent tactical and strategic thinking in here.
A. Content is deserving of their recognition
First off, he talked about how the content that they would link to is actually deserving of their recognition, which I think makes intuitive sense, but is something that is often not considered in a link building list. When we create our lists, we sometimes ignore that.
B. They have a non-financial incentive to link
Which makes sense. If you're trying to get someone to link, they need to have a reason, an emotional reason, a business-driven reason, a partnership-driven reason. If it's financial, of course, the search engines will penalize it or eventually penalize it.
C. The right person made them aware that the citation should exist
This was the form of work that Eric concentrated on particularly early in his career, when he was a very tactical link strategist, and I think it makes great sense, but is so often ignored, that we don't find the right people in our organizations to make that connection, that we don't actually make the organizations that should link to us aware of why a link should happen and where it should exist, and that this work, while very manual, is also very powerful. It can drive direct traffic, and of course it drive rankings in search engines.
D.The content actually matters to their audience
That whoever you're reaching out to, this reason, this incentive needs to connect with their audience. Otherwise, Google is unlikely to count that link, and visitors are unlikely to click on that link. I actually think personally that the two might be related, that there's some form of browser level data, user and usage level data that Google is using here.
E. That content is new (or recently updated)
I found this fascinating that Eric pointed out that it is vastly easier, vastly easier to get content to earn links from its audience, from a target if it is new or recently updated. It's much more challenging to do that with older content, which is one of the reasons why a lot of the strategies or a lot of the tactical elements that he proposed, when working with his clients, centered around: How are we going update, redo, or make something new that is going to cause all of these things to be true?
I think if you can check off these five, you have got a great set to be able to go out and pitch people on why those links should exist.
A quote from Eric: "Identify and contact venues that would be inclined to care about the new content enough to write about it and/or to link to it." I think that really is PR. That's public relations, just in a digital marketing capacity and really a huge part of what successful outreach looks like.
Next up, great execution is a result of strategy and planning. I know. Who knew? What's true in every other part of the business world and every other part of the world of things that get accomplished is also true in link building? Yes, it is.
A. Strategy flows from understanding your topic and online space
Eric liked to say that strategy flows from a deep understanding of the topic and the space, which is why a lot of these services that you might find online, that are very inexpensive or very scalable, don't work very well in links, because they don't have that deep topic and deep space understanding. When you have a deep understanding of the topic and the space, you can better target your link earning abilities.
B. A blueprint of how to earn links from various types of targets dramatically increases the odds of success.
So two interesting things in here. If you have a blueprint, that means you have a structure for how you're going to target and how you're going to outreach. If you consider various types of targets, and Eric mentions a number of these on his website. I'm planning to link to link to a bunch of resources in this Whiteboard Friday from Eric around this. If you choose those various types of targets, you will over time discover which ones are consistently high performing for you and have the best opportunity to earn you the links that will make a difference in your campaigns.
Eric would say what we do, and he's using "we" here to refer to link strategists rather than just link builders, "What we do is to help content find the audience it was intended for and the audience find the content." I love that. It has a beautiful simplicity to it, but also a deep strategy that unfortunately a lot of link building campaigns don't pay attention to.
Eric was extremely passionate, if you ever spent time with him or listened to one of his webinars or interviews, he was very passionate about this idea that...
A. Links that would exist, even if Google and Bing did not, are almost always the ones that provide the most value. That's both in traffic and in rankings.
Eric had this wonderful nomenclature. He was known as Link Moses, and Link Moses had these commandments about link building. He said, "The link schemer may eat today, but the link earner eateth from a bountiful table for a lifetime." I think that's a beautiful sentiment.
Folks, if Eric has provided you with value, and I can assure you that if you are in the link world, almost all of us, who have anything worthwhile to share, have earned our ideas from people who have learned from Eric or from Eric himself. His family is grieving, and it would be wonderful if we could help show them support. Geraldine and I, my wife and I have done so, and I'd encourage you to do so as well.
Danny Sullivan, who's now with Google, but of course who was behind Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies and then Third Door Media, has set up a donation page that will go directly to his family at bit.ly/ericward2017. I think it would be wonderful if the Moz community and all of us who have benefitted so much from Eric's help over the years paid him that respect.
Thanks very much. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Posted by hayleysherman
You may have heard by now that Moz launched a new feature within Keyword Explorer last week. We heard your requests, and we're super-excited for you to check out the new addition. The tool has been expanded to allow you to search by URL: an easy way to understand what keywords an exact URL, subdomain, or entire domain is ranking for.
As Rand pointed out, this feature of Keyword Explorer is multifunctional and can solve a lot of different problems. For this blog post, I'll cover a workflow for identifying low-hanging fruit when it comes to your competitors' keywords.
The question of "How do I utilize competitive data to my advantage?" is one we hear a lot as SEOs. How do we know what a competitor is ranking for, and how can we use that to help direct our own strategy? Many great SEO tools out there tap into what can be described as a keyword universe — a database of keywords the tool maintains that a given site can rank for. In this universe of keywords, you can search to see how your site performs. You can also search any other site to see how it performs, which is where the competitive data comes into play. Our new feature does just that.
If you want to follow along, hop into Keyword Explorer! The search bar will allow you to:
Follow along in Keyword Explorer
For this example, I'll use local Seattle doughnut shop Top Pot Doughnuts. Since we know the doughnut game can be a competitive one, Top Pot might want to get an idea of the keywords that a few other Seattle shops are ranking for. The competitors I've used are in a similar geographical area and sell similarly delicious products.
Start by entering the URL into Keyword Explorer. To keep it broad, I'd recommend beginning with the "root domain" function. You'll be pulled into a Site Overview for your domain — including the number of ranking keywords each site has, the top positions the keywords sit in, as well as the Page Authority and Domain Authority of the site you searched for. You'll see a sneak peek of the top ranking keywords beneath that.
Drop two competitors into the two boxes up at the top, and click "Compare sites." The tables will populate with data on the two competitors' sites, and the top ranking keywords for all three.
Click through to the full report of Top Ranking Keywords. You'll see a Venn diagram and two columns added in with competitors' data. Click on any of the overlapping areas in the Venn Diagram to see the keywords that you and one or both competitors have in common.
We've now entered into an ideal spot in that keyword universe we talked about earlier — a list of keywords that your site is ranking for that your competitors are also ranking for. This is the intersection point where you can find perfect keyword opportunities. Where is the competitor doing well that you are not?
(Side note: You're not starting from scratch here, because you're already ranking for these keywords. This means there's a great opportunity for improvement in an area where you likely have some content or some authority.)
A great next step is to click on the header to sort by one of your competitor's highest rankings. Identify the keywords that each competitor is ranking best for — those might be an area for you to focus on. Are these keywords applicable to what you do? If the answer is yes, there are a couple good courses of action: Add them straight into a Moz Pro campaign to start tracking your ranking progress, or add them into a Keyword Explorer list for further investigation.
If you do add these into a Keyword List, you might want to pop into the list and sort by metrics like Difficulty or Organic CTR. This will help you determine how to prioritize the new keywords.
Once you've discovered these competitive keywords, push them into a Moz Pro campaign! That way, you can measure a baseline for keyword performance and get ready to track your improvements against it over time. You can either add them to a campaign manually in the Add & Manage Keywords section, or add them to a campaign directly from Keyword Explorer.
Stay organized by labeling your keywords. You may want to label them by product, service, or even by the name of the competitor that was ranking for them back in Keyword Explorer. Once a label (or multiple labels) are in place, you can filter by those labels within the campaign to see which keywords are seeing movement, and which ones you may still need to spend more time on.
Jump into the SERP features section of your campaign, and filter by label to view the new keywords you've added in. Do any of the new keywords have a featured snippet opportunity? Use that knowledge to dictate how you structure the content for those topics. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Not to worry. Here's a great glossary of SERP features, what they mean, and how to become featured.)
And there you have it! We hope Keyword Explorer's new addition will help you through the journey of keyword research, from start to finish. Let us know how this flow is working for you.
Start exploring Keywords by Site
Can't get enough keyword research in your life? Check out our workshops through Moz Training for a deeper dive into best practices and strategies.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Are you still optimizing for “keyword strings”? You are not alone!
The problem is, the industry is moving on, so don’t fall behind and learn to implement a smarter approach to keyword research: Keyword clustering.
Single-keyword SEO has been a staple for a long time. Remember how we used to have a separate page for every tiny variation of a keyword? At that time we’d optimize for [restaurants in Italy] and [Italy restaurants] using two different pages, one for each keyword string. It is how we all probably got our start and saw (and still see) our traffic flourish and ranking climb.
It was a fun time, but deep down I am glad it has passed.
Google’s search algorithm has outgrown that method of optimization. Sure, it may still work. In fact, most of the newest and most popular WordPress SEO plugins are still based on that “single-string” method, so most bloggers rely on it. But the more sophisticated algorithms expanded beyond the scope of a single-topic focus.
Even keyword research that finds the perfect sweet spot between popularity and saturation is no longer a guarantee for success. In-depth content covering a variety of related concepts and entities is winning more and more often these days.
More and more we are seeing the use of keyword clustering from sites that are making it beyond the scope of mediocre search results and traffic margins. In other words, the big guys are bringing out the big guns, and we should be following in their footsteps.
OK, so this isn’t really new. I for one described a tactic of keyword grouping back in 2007. Back then, however, I didn’t know the term “keyword clustering”, and used Excel instead of much easier tools.
A better way of explaining it would be that it is gaining traction with more people (and growing buzz terms around itself).
So what is it?
Simply put, it’s keyword grouping categorized by (1) a common secondary keyword modifier which is how most tools approach it or (2) Google’s search engine results similarity (which is something I’ll describe below).
At the heart of it, keyword clustering is what it sounds like: you are taking relevant keywords and clustering them together into groups. Those groups work together to give your website a more thoroughly categorized theme, which in turn helps to establish its purpose and attract those crawlers that tell Google that page is one they should bump up the list.
Let’s say your core term is healthy diet plan, which is pretty tough to compete for. So you run it through keyword research tools and come up with the list of hundreds of “long tail” “keyword strings” that make your head spin:
How on earth are you going to optimize your content for all of these phrases?
Don’t worry, figuring this list out doesn’t have to be a manual process. There are some keyword grouping tools out there that make it much easier to get through.
I personally use Serpstat because it provides one of the best SEO tools in the market in my opinion. [Disclaimer: Because I blog on them so much, Serpstat reps approached me and gave me free access to their PRO tools]. However, other providers such as Wordstream and Spyfu offer keyword grouping tools, so choose the option which fits best with your existing tools and workflow.
With Serpstat, you can copy-paste the keywords into their clustering tool and it groups the list for you:
It is a keyword clustering automated system that does a lot of the work for you. But unlike most other tools, it doesn’t bog you down with centralized terms that impact your clusters.
Instead of simply grouping the keywords by the centralized term (like most clustering tools do, and like I did in my Moz article from 2007 referenced above), Serpstat also uses their own “connection strength” metric which looks at how many identical URLs those multiple search queries trigger.
You can choose between soft and hard clustering to determine how closely related terms should be within one group – a very unique approach to clustering keywords. To get into more detail about how the tool works, read this article describing their method.
Let’s make it clear: No, you don’t need to take one of these groups and fill your content with all the keywords from within it.
What you can do instead: Look at those keywords and take main concepts to cover in your content. Each group can become your separate guide, or it can be a subheading within a more comprehensive article.
Keyword clustering isn’t the optimization technique, nor does it bring anything fundamentally new into a SEO strategy. You still need to create high-quality well-researched content targeting users’ demand.
What keyword clustering does is help you make sense of your keyword strings and turn them into meaningful concepts.
Any time you cluster your keywords, you are improving your SEO, period. Instead of trying to compete with a single phrase, you will be targeting keywords page by page based on a collection of phrases for each theme.
How this helps you is pretty obvious: better ranking and more traffic. Specifically, it is better ranking and more traffic against competitors who are almost certainly already using this method of SEO, which is one of the reasons they are doing better than you are.
This also diversifies your tactics. Where once consistency in a single model was key, things have changed. That more sophisticated algorithm mentioned above means better, more complex strategies are needed to keep up.
My favorite way to put it: Grouping keywords helps you get a better grasp of your niche. It forces you to cover more concepts and answer more questions within one page than you’d think of without going through the process, so the most important benefit of keyword clustering is that it makes your content (and hence) your site better, more useful, more trustworthy and more comprehensive.
Know a tool that should go on this list? Let us know in the comments!
When should you remove content versus improving it when it is low quality content on your site and you are concerned about the impact that spam or low quality content could have on your site overall? There are two approaches, either removing it or improving it. The question is about low quality content and the […]
The post Google: When to Remove & When to Improve Low Quality Content appeared first on The SEM Post.
We have often seen when adding a new page to Google’s index via Fetch and Submit that sometimes those pages rank very well initially, but then rankings drop and they never rank that well again. It came up in a recent Google Webmaster Office Hours because someone was seeing their pages initially rank well but […]
The post Initial Google Rankings of Brand New Pages Will Adjust Over Time appeared first on The SEM Post.
Posted by Trevor-Klein
It's been a couple of years since we last asked you all about what you enjoy most (and least) about the Moz Blog, and to say our company and our industry had changed in those couple of years would be an enormous understatement.
We saw SERPs continue to add new features and far more featured snippets, as well as shifting massively toward HTTPS results.
Here at Moz, we launched Keyword Explorer, rebuilt our Site Crawl, and made a strategic shift to refocus on our core strength of SEO. We added features to Moz Local, too, emphasizing the importance of local SEO to all businesses with a physical presence.
You get the idea.
With so much having changed, we wanted to be sure we're still living up to the high standards we set for this blog, and that we're still providing as valuable an experience as we can for you all. That's where you come in today.
If you've got time, please consider going through the survey below, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.
We'll publish the results along with our takeaways in a few weeks, and will use them to guide our work going forward. From all of us at Moz, thanks in advance for your time!
(If the embedded survey isn't showing up properly below, click here to take it in a new tab.)
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
