Live SEO Q&A September 2022: Mark & Jack answer your questions live on LinkedIn
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Show notes
Jack Chambers-Ward is once again joined by the inimitable Mark Williams-Cook for a live SEO Q&A!
That's right, live and unedited! This episode was recorded live and broadcast via Mark's LinkedIn page.
Questions answered include:
- How do you decide when it's best to canonicalise multiple variants of a page over simply making one page with a self-referring canonical?
- Is it necessary to keep URLs short or we can keep them as per our need (to cover the focus keyword)?
- I see comments on having a "Link Building Strategy". As a small business should we worry about this, or should we concentrate on good content that builds authority and attracts links?
- Is location tagging images still effective?
- Is HARO worth the effort or do you prefer any other alternative for link building?
Watch on Youtube here:
Watch on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6980164714207002624/
Transcript
Jack: Hello everyone, and welcome to the first live SEO Q&A of season two of Search with Candour. In a way, this is episode 38, I believe, of season two of Search with Candour. I am one of your hosts, of course, Jack Chambers-Ward, joined by the one and only, Mr. Mark Williams-Cook. How are you today, Mark?
Mark: Very well. Excited to be back doing more live streams. I think it's been over a year since I've done one.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: I think during COVID, I stopped doing them because I just figured everyone had enough of seeing people on video.
Jack: Yeah. It's nice to be able to do it in person. This is our first time doing it in person, my first doing it with Candour, which is nice. But I've done remote stuff like you've done before on some of my other podcasts. So, hopefully this is all working, you can all hear us, you can see us on LinkedIn and stuff. Fingers crossed, it's all working. I've only ever done it on YouTube before, so fingers crossed. Let us know in the chat if you can hear us and things like that. Please do let us know. We will be going through a bunch of questions and stuff like that, and we'll be cutting into a little bit of the recent SEO news, since we haven't had an SEO news catch up in a while with Mark and I. There's been a lot of cool guests recently on the show and I'll touch on a couple of those episodes later on as well.
But before we get to all of that, let's give a shout to our sponsor. The wonderful people over at SISTRIX. And SISTRIX are, if you didn't already know, the SEO's Toolbox. Search with Candour, we are supported by SISTRIX, and you can go to sistrix.com/swc and get some of their fantastic free tools, such as their SERP Snippet... I stumbled straight away. There we go. We're live, folks. Welcome to the live stream. Such as their SERP Snippet Generator, Hreflang Generator, and checking your visibility index, that is their patented visibility index, courtesy of SISTRIX, and of course, tracking those all important Google updates. That's sistrix.com/swc for all of the fantastic free tools, and of course, sistrix.com/trends for TrendWatch, and sistrix.com/blog. We've talked a lot about the visibility leader stuff, I covered that with Luce Rawlings last week. That is a very in depth, very long article. I highly reckon you go and check out. And for those of you who are listening to the podcast, that will of course, be linked in the share notes as well at search.withcandour.co.uk.
Mark: I'm really pleased you had to do that, because there is always with SISTRIX and SERP snippets, there's some real tongue twisters in there.
Jack: It's the SERP snippets generator that always gets me.
Mark: So, yeah, doing it live as well, and not just doing the podcast live, it's the added complexity of doing the live stream with the video, having live questions, having overlays. So, lots of extra complexity, and it just-
Jack: Exactly.
Mark: ... has to be perfect off the bat. And this segues us perfectly into something I did want to talk about before we dive into the Q&A, which is about complexity and updates. Specifically, the recent Google updates we've had. I saw in one of the pre-submitted questions, we've got a couple about Google updates and how to tackle them, what to do with them, and one interesting thing that we've seen in the recent updates, this is from a tweet from Lily Ray, who's @lilyraynyc on Twitter, as a result of whatever recent update, because we've had that little cluster of helpful content update, the core update, product reviews update, all clustered together, the Google search quality rater guidelines no longer rank on page one for the search term "Google search quality rater guidelines." And I just love the irony of that.
Jack: That is delicious irony on behalf of Google. We do see that sometimes a lot with these, the initial results of the update. We've seen a little bit of wobble here. I think we're seeing a lot more now, like you said, the kind of combined and accumulation of these updates. Everybody was very excited for the helpful content update, and then nothing really happened apart from some very spammy sites were filtered out. But then, it's all built together and we're seeing quite a lot of change. Again, SISTRIX have covered that on their blog. I know Lily Ray has covered it, Glen Gabe has covered it as well. Highly recommend you go and follow those people on Twitter, and check out their coverage. But I love it when stuff like that happens, when Google knock themselves off, not even the position one, page one for their own... It's a branded term, it has the word Google in it.
Mark: Around as well, search quality.
Jack: Oh my God. Ridiculous.
Mark: Well, it looks like everyone can hear us. Hello to everyone in chat. If you do want to post a question while we're going, feel free to drop it in on LinkedIn chat. Thank you to the dozen or so of you who submitted questions ahead of time. I don't think we've filtered any out. We're just going to go straight in.
Jack: We're going straight in.
Mark: We haven't discussed answers to these, we briefly scan-read them, but we are just going to go in and do-
Jack: We're about to disagree and have a big fight live on LinkedIn.
Mark: I can't even do this because everyone can see me.
Jack: I know. There's no cutting me off now.
Mark: Should we kick off?
Jack: Certainly. Yeah, yeah. Let's dive in with one of the pre-submitted, as you mentioned. Let's kick off with how to do topic cluster and keyword cluster at scale without paid tools. And this is actually one you suggested actually cutting out there, Mark, originally, because the answer is you can't do it without paid tool, the key there is at scale. And we talk about this a lot, when we talk about using tools, and how so many people rely on tools a bit too much. Sometimes, there is a real positive to being able to do a manual review of a website and actually go into search console and review first party data, and all that kind of stuff. But tools save you a lot of time doing a lot of that stuff. Take AlsoAsked for example. Hello, AlsoAsked.
Mark: Nice promo, expertly snuck in.
Jack: Yeah, yeah. Take AlsoAsked for example, you could manually go around and copy and paste all of the people AlsoAsked data from your SERPs, but why bother when they can do it a massive scale for you? Same with so many of these other tools. And for topic clustering and keyword clustering, for me, Keyword Insights is the answer. And I'm not just saying that because they sent me a lovely bag and a thank you note, shout out to Andy and Suganthan, thank you very much for sending me my first ever SEO Swag. But genuinely, I had Andy on the show quite a few weeks ago now. Again, I'll put a link for that in the show notes if you are listening on the podcast. And it was a really interesting discussion about how their machine learning tools work and how they understand kind of context of those keywords. How you can really build those clusters at scale and you can chuck in tens of thousands of keywords at once and it will boil it down into a few hundred clusters and really lay things out for you in terms of what should be your hub page, what should be your spoke, all that kind of stuff. For me, I know, since kind of speaking to Andy and kind of working with Keyword Insights a bit more, it's become a real key part of my content process and strategy there. I know you've used it quite a lot as well, Mark, you think that's kind of fair to say, right?
Mark: Yeah. So, I like to point out that I always refuse Swag from any other tools just so they're not crossing my palm with silvers, but I do agree with Jack. So, on ways you could do it for free, obviously there is... Well, it's not even free. You can use things like the G P T three model, but that is, you get some free tokens there but you will essentially have to pay for that. But what they've done at Keyword Insights is they're actually building their own models specific for the task, so you tend to get a lot better results. So, if you're doing it at scale and you want good results, I just can't see a good business case for doing all of that work yourself, unless you're going to do what the team there did and actually raise your own tool to do it. If you're not doing it at scale, then the human brain is perfectly kind of built for this task 'cause you kind of have your own learning model, it's sort of how the brain works. So, on a small scale you can just kind of use common sense along with obviously, some basic keyword research, but you can do the clustering part. But yeah, I don't think there's a good answer for how to do topic clustering with Keywords at a large scale without paying anything if you're not making the tool yourself from scratch, which I just can't see a good business call.
Jack: Again, you are kind of paying in time, and effort, and experience, and all that kind of stuff, even if it's not literally handing over dollars to another person. Cool. Onto our next question from the one, Mr. Brodie Clark. Hi Brodie, if you are joining us. We've covered Brody stuff quite a lot on the show. Shout out to Brody. Very good follow on Twitter. How much should site owners pay attention to the dates for when Google announces updates? And is this information actually helpful?
Mark: That's a toughie, isn't it, Jack?
Jack: Just Brodie coming in with the hard hitting questions here.
Mark: Yeah, so I've seen a lot of discussion about this recently. Someone had written an article of, Are We at Peak SEO?, I think it was called, which I guess is the opposite too, is the Is SEO Dead?, which we had for the last 20 years. So, what's interesting about this question is I do think there has been almost like a hard cutoff in how Google handles their algorithm updates. So historically, and by historically, I am talking to the SEOs that are watching, so maybe 10, 12, 15 years ago.
Jack: I see a few of you in the chat, shout out to the old school.
Mark: I think when Google did updates then to their algorithm, it was a lot more manual in terms of they've got their team working on various parts of the algorithm and they would focus on something, say like they did with Penguin on links and they would have a look at the problems they're having with quality and they would test out various different solutions to this different metrics. They want to wait differently, run some tests, and then apply that, obviously, and then we get the result. And at that time, when we had all these updates like, Big Daddy, Florida, we would get normally a little bit of information or it would be quite apparent what part of the algorithm, if that makes sense, it was impacting, like Panda was in content, Penguin was links, et cetera. Caffeine was about the infrastructure and rendering. Now, I think the way, and there's a little bit of imagineering going in here because I've never had a tour behind the scenes of what the Google engineers are working on.
But as far as I understand, I think there's a lot of machine learning stuff happening in the background, not necessarily on live SERP. So, I'm not saying that's how that works. I'm talking about the training of various models for different verticals and just using feedback loops from users, from policy rate guidelines to essentially assess if the algorithm's doing a good job, and if it's not, it can make some changes, and then again assess how close it's getting.
The issue I think with this and why they lump them as broad core updates, so for the ones that are core, is that I'm not sure any one person or even any one team necessarily knows what has happened behind the scenes there. They know what the goal is that they're training towards and that's the same goal Google's been telling us since the dawn of Google. I think it is still worth listening to answer the question and thinking about the dates for a couple of reasons. There are some things they will do specifically like the product reviews update. And what's come out of that, that's helpful and actionable. Well, Google released a list of 20 things-
Jack: Yeah-
Mark: ... We went through it on the podcast.
Jack: ... we talked about it on the show, didn't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark: So if you are doing product reviews, here's 20 things you should include. That's really important because that's firsthand, that this is what we're building the algorithm around, so you should be aiming to do this thing, so that should be in the hands of yours.
Jack: Yeah, exactly. And how we said that on the show before, and how often do you get that information? How often do you literally get basically a checklist from Google saying, "This is what you should be doing for this specific thing. If you're an e-commerce business and you have product reviews, this is what you should be doing, no if/ands/or/buts, basically.
Mark: In terms of the core updates, I think they're less helpful in terms of what's happening because it's just basically make good content, be helpful to users, and it's cool.
Jack: Don't do spammy, dodgy stuff.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's useful knowing the dates because if you can correlate traffic drops, traffic increases, then at least you have a chance of figuring out what is going on. So, it could be that, yeah, we did have a load of paid links that we sat on and didn't do anything about or... I was having a conversation yesterday, someone was asking me, "Is it worth hiring specialists writers to write about this topic or should we just get generalists?" And my question was, "How are generalists going to write with expertise about that subject that they're not?" "But will it be good enough for ranking? And I was, "Well, maybe, it might be good enough to rank if"-
Jack: If other people are also doing that then yeah, maybe. Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. Or may algorithms not good enough at the moment. But the point I was mentioned is if you know that the algorithm is aiming for expertise and you know are publishing stuff without expertise, in the long term, that's not going to work out well for you because one of these core updates you'll get caught-
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: ... and you are building on a false foundation of, "Oh, hey, we're ranking, we're doing a good job." Then there's a core update that finally, they close that tech gap. Work out, "Oh, actually it's not that good." And then, you're suddenly like, "Oh, hang on a minute, what did we do wrong? We did everything right."
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: But deep down, you know…
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: ... so, short answer, yes with some caveats, but definitely, I think you need to be honest with yourself about the strategy tactics you're employing.
Jack: Yeah. And I think funny enough, to SISTRIX once again, what they do with the visibility index, they actually have little flags and tags each time there's an update and you can really, really see how much affects the overall visibility of a site as you go through and look at that data. I know it's been invaluable for us and some of our clients looking at that from kind of a bigger picture kind of thing. It might be affecting a particular part of the site and you can then filter down to that particular directory or whatever it is. But SISTRIX does a really good job and I know Steve and the team are hot on it. As soon as it's announced this is rolling out right now, they're straight in there with the tags, straight in there in SISTRIX. So yeah, if you are using SISTRIX, they highly recommend that if you do want to tag and keep track of all that kind of stuff. And it's a brilliant way of presenting it to clients as well. You can literally see, we've had eight updates over the last 12 months, this one did was positive for us, this one was negative, we're still positive, all that kind of stuff, and yeah.
Mark: Should we jump in with a live question? So, we have got a question in chat, which is I want to ask some experts like you. Flattery will get you everywhere. What is the biggest SEO mistake people are still making?
Jack: Ooh, I know it's the one I've harped on a few times, but disavowing links drives me mental. And I know it's the thing I've talked about in the show, it's the thing I rant about, and yeah, people disavowing links for the sake of disavowing links drives me crazy. And the fact that in previous places I've worked out, this was regular practice, basically every month you would review the disavow file, you would basically review the backlink profile and see ifs anything new to add to the disavow file and stuff. And from my experience, I've almost only had a positive experience from the other way around where I went into a disavow file and actually found something that probably shouldn't have been disavowed and took it out, whether that actually eventually pulled back through or whatever, I guess, I wasn't paying attention to that account long enough. But yeah, I see people spend so much time, the kind of typical agency tick box kind of stuff I see in a lot of agencies and I think it's a complete waste of time at this point. I think talking about Google updates and the spam updates we've had earlier this year as well, they're getting better, and better, and better at just filtering this stuff out anyway, so why bother wasting your time spending an hour going through all the different backlinks and all that kind of stuff, when you could be spending that doing something far more productive that'll get you better results. How about you, Mark? Is there anything that stands out to you?
Mark: So many to choose from. I guess I see lots of Shopify sites going live now for businesses moving into e-com. One of the common mistakes I see on Shopify is when people are putting products into multiple categories or collections that they call them on Shopify, and that's normally with their theme generating a different URL for the same product because it's including all the categories it's in. So if you had a wooden chair, it might be in or slash kitchen furniture for slash wooden chair, but then it's also in the wooden furniture collection, so there's another different URL. And in general, filtered and faceted navigation on e-com. So, not thinking about which pages are actually valuable to index and I've seen sites with maybe a hundred products and then you start looking at search console and there's like 50,000 pages.. So, yeah, I think the two. And that's people that are doing SEO. If it's just in general people then pretty much any... People don't even, honestly, if you look, not bother with title tags but-
Jack: Oh yeah, yeah-
Mark: ... I'm assuming you mean SEO.
Jack: ... Yeah, Specific SEO mistakes. Let's dive into another live question here. Switching over to thinking about what's on the SERP, specifically for you, Mark. So, I'm dipping out this one, that's lucky for me. Can you please answer my question, which is our video snippets are dipping out since June, any explanation there?
Mark: No.
Jack: Excellent.
Mark: I'm very sorry without kind of delving into your site, I probably can't answer that. I'm not entirely sure what you mean, what you're defining as video snippets there. Obviously, Google did just recently changed what they're doing in search console with their video detection, so they are definitely having some false positives there. And Google's spoken about that in terms of they would rather give you a false positive than not detect the video. But there's all kinds of reasons that you could be seeing a drop in video snippets from things competitors have done to site errors to other people using schema.
Jack: We recently touched on it when I had Annie-Mai on the show who I know is watching in the chat. Hi, Annie-Mai, hello. We talked about TikTok suddenly being included in SERP as well. So, if you are doing things that are specifically, you are aiming for a snippet and to get your video featured and you're hosting it on Vimeo, or YouTube, or whatever. Then now, including TikTok, in those short answer kind of things, competing with the shorts and things like that that YouTube are doing. So, you've got more competition there from other video platforms there as well.
As you said, Mark, there are a million different moving factors that could be affecting that, but without diving into the site, I don't think we can give a fully concrete answer to be fair. Next up, "How much waiting do you put on the core pillars of SEO and what do you think they are currently?" from a site in Forbes, e.g. content, length, and technical? In general, I think those would be the three kind of main categories that you would divide the three core pillars of SEO into. Would you agree with that, Mark?
Mark: Yes.
Jack: Yeah. Okay, good.
Mark: Thank God for being so far.
Jack: No punch up so far, ladies, the gentleman, but no promises. We've still got time. But yeah, I think it's interesting, we talk about this with clients a lot. I know I have done in a kind of how far does one of these things get you? And I know you and I have talked about this, Mark, in the studio, when we're talking about onboarding a new client and stuff and their website is an absolute technical mess, and you fix all of that stuff and you're like, "Cool, what's next?" 'cause all the technical stuff is fixed, and I think a lot of people will leave the kind of technical stuff ticking over, and over, and over for so long. Again, not necessarily because they want to but there might be lack of resources, or lack of staff, or developer time, or whatever it is. But I think a lot of the technical stuff can only get you so far, if that makes sense. And I think that's less so like, "Would I put the weight on it?" But that's kind of where I lean first is when I first look at a site, I look at it from a technical point of view before I even diving into the content. I would then maybe look at links and then maybe look at content third, and that's kind of my process when I look we're onboarding a new client or auditing a site, that's kind of my process going through. I would think technical side of things first. What is fundamentally broken? Why aren't they performing? Why are they coming to us as SEO consultants, and experts, and as an agency?
And then, looking at are there any, again, weird links, unusual links, fantastic links they've not noticed, some opportunities there, and then thinking about the content, whether they've not done content at all, and you can then start building the strategy from there, or you can audit the existing content and find out what is performing, what is working. So, yeah. Not necessarily weighted, but that's kind of my order that I would do it for a client. Would you agree with that, Mark? Were we about to have a big fight?
Mark: I don't think we need a big fight. No, I look at it slightly differently, in terms of, I look at technical work as an amplifier of the other two. So, unless your technical is really bad to the point where search engines can't crawl or index your site-
Jack: They often are.
Mark: Yeah. Assuming we've passed that threshold, then what you're essentially doing is amplifying the impact of your content and links by having good technical SEO. So again, part of the answer I guess is that classic, it depends, because if you have a million page website and you have a one technical fix that scales across a million pages, you could well see some decent traffic uplift. If you have a 10 page website, it's unlikely there are many technical things you can do outside of crawling an indexing that are massively going to impact your site, so the focus would need to be on content. Content and links to me are intrinsically linked.
Jack: Unintended.
Mark: So content, when we plan content, we normally plan how we're going to get links from that content as well in general, or it's at least part of the content strategy because you won't rank in competitive fields for competitive terms without links, you just won't, so they are vital. It's a bit like how what's more important in a car, wheels or fuel? It's like you're not going anywhere with them, but as long as the wheels are roughly round, then I'd rather have some fuel. So it is a balancing act.
Jack: Have you not seen the Flintstones, Mark? You don't always need fuel, you can have wheels and just run with your legs.
Mark: That's a type of fuel, like a PBN leg thing.
Jack: That's true, that's true.
Mark: So yeah, technical is more of an amplifier, but content and links, yeah. You can't rank content that doesn't exist then you can't rank content that exists that's competitive without links.
Jack: Nice. Speaking of revamping website's links, how to do a proper revamp of a website without compromising on the ranking? An excellent question.
Mark: I would prefer if you didn't, 'cause it gives us great things to talk about on the podcast. We love a good autopsy
Jack: Don't we-
Mark: ... of a migration on the podcast.
Jack: ... Don't we just? It is a topic that comes up quite a lot, isn't it? Because I think migrations have so many moving parts to them, like a butterfly effect kind of thing. A little thing can suddenly explode into a massive problem overnight without even somebody realising. And maybe you have developers who are less SEO savvy and SEOs who are not as technical kind of butting heads and coming at it from different directions of, "Oh, no we need to do this." But the SEO was like, "Right. But we need to do this because of the UX and the design," "Oh, we need to do this because of how the JavaScript is running on the site." And those could be three different things, pulling the site in three different directions. But yeah, I think managing migrations is something we've covered a few times on the show and is the kind of thing that keeps us employed as an SEO agency. But yeah, I think it's an interesting thing 'cause we talked even about moving from CMS to CMS a little while ago as well and how different sites can be seemingly to the user, but actually from a Google perspective they basically remain the same from a structural perspective. So yeah, Mark, what are your thoughts on this point?
Mark: Yeah, so without going into a technical step by step, what's included in a migration, some things that I think are important to not compromise rankings is firstly, to communicate to all the stakeholders the importance of SEO in that process. Because most people outside of SEO don't get that when you change the website you are gambling with your rankings. So, you can do that by making them aware of the value of traffic and giving them some kind of forecasts for what happens if we keep gain/lose traffic. Analogies always help. One analogy I like to give is it's a little bit like moving house, the different kind of processes. So, when you're auditing what it is, you're migrating, it's kind of like you're going around the house deciding what to pack up and you want to keep the sofa so that's got to move, but-
Jack: Which room is the sofa going to fit in then?
Mark: Yeah. And it is like we've got to move these vases, they're fragile so they need to be packed separately, then you talk-
Jack: But they've got a high value.
Mark: They have high value. And then, it's talking about the timelines of when it's going to move. And then, part of the migration plan is, Jack touched on there, is where are you going to put these things in the new house? So at the moment we're helping a client who originally, to use that analogy, their plan was they were essentially moving a mansion into a one bedroom first floor apartment, and that they wanted to migrate a few thousand page site into a couple of pages, and we were trying to use that analogy to let them know, "Well, look, there's nowhere to put the sofa-
Jack: It's not going to fit everything in.
Mark: ... and people like the sofa. So, making stakeholders aware is one thing, giving everyone realistic timelines, having a way to benchmark, before and after, so things like rankings and traffic, and making sure everyone is aware again, of their responsibilities. And lastly, I'd say, we'd sometimes just talk about migrations as one thing. I would think about what kind of migration you're doing. So, Jack mentioned there, you could change content management system. That's one migration that could affect, impact the SEO, because your front end is probably changing how things are laid out for Google. If you're moving server, that could potentially impact ranking. If you are changing URL structure, that's another type of migration. If you're moving the domain, that's another type of migration. So, there's actually four or five different types of migration, and you need to work out how many of those you are doing and how they might impact you.
And lastly, migration's primarily around mitigation of loss. But the other thing you can use migration for is opportunities. So, when your site is not doing something that you know will be beneficial, and you build that into new platform to increase your chances of, even if you do lose a little bit of traffic, you're mitigating that by increasing traffic elsewhere. And lastly, any metrics that you do know impact ranking. So, take Core Web Vitals for example, ideally, you want to be moving to the same or at least better ideally, than what you're currently on. Otherwise, obviously, it's something objectively that could negatively impact.
Jack: Well, speaking of Core Web Vitals leads onto a nice little live question here from Sally Raymer. Do we have any experience on creating clear metrics outside of Core Web Vitals for managing display ads on organic landing pages? I don't know. Okay, in short, I'll leave this to you, Mark.
Mark: So, yeah, I'm taking this as an SEO question in terms of, I think we're looking at maybe our display ads impacting ranking of landing pages. Is that how you are interpreting?
Jack: I was seeing it as a PPC thing, that's why.
Mark: Oh, okay.
Jack: Which is why I was assuming I didn't know!
Mark: Well, managing display ads. Sally, if you're in chat, if you want to kind of explain a little bit more what you're asking for. Because I don't want to go off and give you an answer that is something different from what you're expecting. I was taking that as an SEO type question in terms of, obviously, we know there's various ranking things about not showing too many ads and about ads tend to impact the user experience, which is why I think we may be touching on Core Web Vitals here.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: I mean the thing I'll say about Core Web Vitals is, and why I think people underestimate them, there are actually three very interesting metrics. Because you can apply them universally to any website and there is a definite, if this number is smaller, it is good, and if it is bigger, it is bad. So, there's very few metrics and I can't actually think of any that apply in this way. So, the classic one that comes up is sometimes people use things like bounce rate as a metric for a page quality. And as we've talked about many, many times in podcast, it sucks as a metric because if I Google a query, I land on your page, I spent 10 minutes reading it, the perfect answer and I leave, that's a 100% bounce rate. But arguably the perfect user experience because you've given them the answer that they want immediately. So, Sally said, "Yes, exactly."
Jack: It's an SEO question, so you've nailed it Mark.
Mark: Okay, so assuming we're talking then about display ads performance and Google ranking. So, there's a few guidelines, I think it was 2014, '15, they first talked about having a negative impact on rankings if essentially you are blocking the user experience with ads, so there's a few things there. First thing, in terms of metrics, I would stick to Core Web Vitals because they are a really good way of seeing how ads are impact user experience, especially things like first input delay, ads tend to mess with those. And we know those things are objective metrics used in rankings arguably. How much? We don't know. In how many episodes ago, four or five episodes ago we talked about the ad standards.
Jack: Oh, yes, we did. Yeah, yeah.
Mark: So we will find a link and put it in the show notes or I don't know if you could find it while we're doing this, then again or essentially, this was around Google Ads, and I'm talking about the type of ads that were most hated and, I won't say loved, most tolerated by users. So, there's some pretty clear guidelines to Google about things like interstitials popups, that they have to be easy to close, they shouldn't be blocking content. So, it's the Coalition for Better Ads-
Jack: Yup.
Mark: ... URL is betterads.org/standards and there's full details there. At first, we were quite skeptical of it when we were looking at it, like who is this? Who do they think they are? Turns out it's pretty official and endorsed by Google and a bunch of other people. So, yeah, highly recommend you go and check that out for more specific ad recommendations and stuff like that. Yeah, so that's what I would be using essentially if I needed any more kind of steering outside of Core Web Vitals and outside what Google's published in terms of basically Google's just doesn't want you to get in the way of the answer that people are looking for, but if you want to take that to a next level, Coalition for Better Ads, check it out. They've got some really granular guidance on placement types of ads that will result in a positive user experience.
Jack: Awesome. Moving on to, yeah, link building. Is HARO worth the effort or you do prefer any other alternative for link building? And this is actually something I touched on recently when I had Jenny Abouobaia on the show. We're talking about digital PR, how it can benefit your SEO, and all that kind of stuff. And we were kind of getting to the point and kind of agreeing that HARP is kind of oversaturated at this point. And we have a little catch up in the studio pretty much every morning, any of us who are in the studio who have the HARO subscription will be like, "Oh, no. Here's another weird one. What on earth is this?" And we'll screenshot it, share it in the group Slack and all that kind of stuff. Seemingly, I already have the answer and I was just trying to justify their own answer.
One of them a little while ago was what is the one app that is draining your iPhone battery? I was like, "Maybe there isn't one. Maybe it's more complicated than that.? You're writing the headline and the answer before you've even got the expert commentary. I can imagine bunch of people can be like, "It's not as simple as that and that's not a sexy quote that you want for a HARO kind of thing." And I think HARO is just full of nonsense and rubbish. Some of it's good, we've had some success for clients and stuff through HARO and things like that. We also talked about Terkel, which is another similar one. Jenny brought up, helpab2bwriter.com I think it is, which is another option if you're focusing on B2B businesses and stuff like that, that is an option there as well. So, I think there are quite a few alternatives around now.
I know people have been using Unlocked and a few other versions as well. Again, neither of us in the digital PR team, but I know some of the other guys in the PR team here at Candour are using a few different alternatives as well. So, I think it's worth branching out, if you're just using HARO, it's definitely worth looking at other stuff, especially if you can find niche specific stuff for you and your clients. I know, again, Jenny and I talked about that and how useful that can be in terms of finding the right audience that actually might convert for you and things like that rather than going out to an incredibly broad thing, you can find a niche specific thing that can work really well for you as well. What are your thoughts on this, Mark? When was the last time you looked at a HARO?
Mark: So yeah, with HARO, I I think you, ideally, need to set up some kind of inbox filtering to highlight ones that are worthwhile.
Jack: I love that. A couple of weeks into it. Yeah.
Mark: Yeah, it's quite time consuming. That said, I've had quite a few nice links from HARO. Yeah, some of the things are really weird, but I found people like reading articles about things that are really weird.
Jack: Good point. Yeah.
Mark: So, yeah. I think HARO is still worth the effort but I wouldn't just do HARO.
Jack: Yes.
Mark: So, when you're asking that, "Do you prefer any other alternative successful link building?" To me you need to spread be, you need to not put all your chips on HARO, you need to be doing different things to earn links. So, certainly, if I was allowed one link building method, it wouldn't be HARO but it's certainly part of the mix.
Jack: It's also free, which helps.
Mark: Yeah, exactly. If you come got anything else, sometimes, just a really great opportunity lands in your inbox and you reply in 30 minutes and then you've got a decent link, can't ask so much more than that.
Jack: Yup, yup. Moving on next, another pre-entered question, is location tagging images still effective? From Matthew Dorrington.
Mark: This is excellent question.
Jack: Yes.
Mark: I'm pleased was pre-submitted because I had to actually go off and do some research on this. So, for those that don't know, if you take a photo on most decent digital cameras or even on your phone, you'll have active information metadata attached to that image, which will tell you all sorts of things. Sometimes, the location the image was taken, details about the hardware that was used, and you can add other data as well like license information, things like this. And the last thing I knew about this, I realised when I was asked this question, was from literally 10 years ago-
Jack: Wow.
Mark: ... when Matt Cutts mentioned it in passing, and it had stuck in my head, and he said that they reserved the right to use that information in ranking. And I asked interesting on Twitter because I've got lots of lovely SEOs that helped me out when I don't know things, and there was tumbleweeds. Jack: Yeah.
Mark: So, very kindly John Mueller stepped in and said, "I'm pretty sure it's only the licensable information that's used. If we used other metadata it would be trivial to show it and then someone would've done a blog post proving it." And after this I had about three or four people replying the thread all explaining they'd done various tests of adding additional metadata to pictures and everyone had said they had no impact, no result.
Jack: There you go.
Mark: So, it doesn't look like it, no. Saying that, talking about complexity, there is a blog post on cogdogblog.com, amazing tongue twister, which is titled, Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons and Hardly Anyone Noticed/Cares. Oh, my goodness, he's right. If you go to Google Image search and do a super broad search for just something, like dog, have a look at images and then you've got the tools menu where you can sort by usage rights and if you select Creative Commons, according to Google, on the entire internet there is three images of dogs under Creative Commons.
Jack: We know that's not true. It's not.
Mark: We know it's probably at least four or five. So, it's completely broken. And I just found that quite funny that obviously Google said, "Well, we probably used the license information." But in the one case, then when we went on to test that, it appears to be completely broken, so no. And the other thing as well, for those that don't know, basically, any type of image compression, so the plugins that do it, the websites that compress your images, one of the first things they do to save on file size is actually strip out all of that metadata because attaching that metadata does make the image heavier because it's contained in that PNG, jpeg, whatever file.
Jack: Lovely. Onto a live question here from Rafael Thomas. Redirecting a product to the category 30 days after the product being a 404 would be good or bad in your opinion and why? What do you think, Mark?
Mark: So, we made a flow chart about this and it does... I hate saying it depends.
Jack: Oh, no. And what everybody try, if you're gonna-
Mark: In general, I will talk to the eCommerce client about things such as how often their products are being discontinued. So, if a product is out of stock, obviously, you would not want it to 404, you would ideally like it to say it's out of stock and ideally, enter your e-mail, you'll be alerted when it comes back. If products are going discontinued, so you are never going to have them again, my general process without knowing the specifics in your case would be firstly, to update that page to say the product is discontinued and link to, if you have them, any other alternatives, if it's a new model or something like that. So again, you're giving the user a decent experience.
Jack: With enough, Amazon do this incredibly well. I don't know if you've ever noticed that viewers out there, you click on a thing and it's like, "Oh, there is a newer model available by the way, and it's available for this price. You're like, "Right. Okay. Yeah." Right away.
Mark: And then, yeah, my decision would be based on the search term. So, if the new model, for instance, of the thing has a big overlap in search terms, I would then, after a while, 301 it, because the intent is the same. If, for instance, the new version, whatever it is of that product, has a different search term and I thought there would be ongoing searches for the old term, I would probably just leave that page as discontinued and link to the new one. So, you're explaining to the user, so you know what they're looking for, but you're giving them information and pointing them in the right way.
Only if two other conditions are met, which is there's absolutely no other close alternative product. And if that product has incoming links, would I 301 it to the category page? If there are no similar products i.e. you cannot serve that intent, and there's no links to that page, I would probably 410, so 404 or 410 it. Because otherwise. You are kind of adding to your technical debt. If you're discontinuing lots of products because you're going to be managing potentially tens, hundreds, thousands of redirects over time, but for very little traffic. So, if I'm not getting a lot of traffic, there's no links, which those two things would normally correlate. It's unlikely you'll be getting lots of traffic if nobody's linking to it, then I would just let the page die.
Jack: Fair, fair. Yeah. Moving on to another live question here for Mohammad Asad, is it better to have multiple Google Analytics properties for multiple languages or just one. For example, example.co.uk, for example, and example.com.au? What'd you think, Mark?
Mark: So. In that instance, definitely I would have properties, Yeah, different properties would because otherwise if you try and stretch the same property out you are going to have, you're going to deal with cross domain tracking stuff and adding in exceptions, you're going to possibly break sessions-
Jack: More hassle than it's worth.
Mark: ... It's more hassle than it's worth. So in that case, yes, separate.
Jack: Nice. Nice and quick. Straight away. Onto another pre-submitted one here. "Thinking more back to link building but also kind of business as well, I see comments on having a link building strategy. As a small business, should we worry about this or should we concentrate on good content that builds authority and attract links?" From Anthony Dibel. You should always concentrate on good content. That's what we've learned from Google, right? Exactly, Exactly. Helpful content everybody. That's what we need to focus on. But yeah, I think it's an interesting one for particularly people who are on small budgets and small businesses who are first starting out with branching out into SEO and thinking how can we get the most benefit for the money that we're spending from this sort of thing. I think, I hate say it, and I'm going to say the thing, it depends. It depends on your industry, and your niche, and things like that.
Certain industries are going to lend themselves to attracting a lot of links through content. We were just talking to a client the other day about harnessing the power of Google Discover for example, something I've not really done with a client before, but we think their niche and their specific industry is going to work really, really well for that kind of stuff. And we've seen some impressions, so there's some intent there from the users from a search console perspective. So, we know the opportunity is there. So, I think it's understanding where your users are and kind of where they're coming from. But also, like you said, Mark, you can't go far without building links. So, you're going to have to do a bit of both. And in the ideal world, you build good content that builds authority and attract links, all sourcing, and all dancing, that's ticking all the boxes, right? That's a lovely, lovely thing to have.
Mark: That's the pipe dream.
Jack: Exactly.
Mark: That doesn't happen. Anthony, you shouldn't worry about it cause it's just SEO, it's not worth worrying about. But the phrase build content that attracts links naturally, in my experience, they're unicorns. It very rarely happens that you just... Unless, you are an already popular site. If you write good content and you're kind of an unknown site, generally, your content will be unknown regardless of how good it is.
Jack: Wow. Just destroying everyone's dreams.
Mark: Yeah. So you need to pair it up. So, to give you a specific answer, if you're building content and you're not going to worry about link building, I would focus very sharply on zero volume, long-tail stuff that you can rank for basically, without links. If you want to rank for stuff with search volume, you need to work out a strategy for how you're going to build links and do that because just building the content and publishing it isn't going to work in terms of ranking. So, little bit of reality check, it's what Google wants you to believe but it just doesn't work like that. And I've seen people invest lots of money on content, spend no money promoting it, even on paid social outreach and it just doesn't go anywhere, so yeah. Sorry for that.
Jack: Nice. Also, thinking about content and things like that, how do you decide when it's best to canonicalise multiple variants of a page over simply making one page with a self-referred canonical? And we did actually touch on this recently because again we had guidance from Google talking about how to handle similar products when you have different sizes, and different colours, and all that kind of stuff. And for me, it comes back to, as you were saying, Mark, search intent and are they covering the same kind of queries? Do you get specific users who are searching for extra large green t-shirts and landing on your page or they're looking for green and you can just have a canonicalised, like pick one of the hero pages essentially, and pick a size, and canonicalise all of the other sizes and all the other options, if you do have other options for sizes.
Same thing goes for colour. If people are searching for different colours specifically, then I would say have different URLs for those colours. If your people are coming to your site through a red t-shirt or a blue t-shirt but nobody's searching green or they're only searching blue and nothing else, make blue your hero page for that product and then canonicalise everything else to that page. I know I've done this with one of our clients talking about they have multiple size packs so you can multi-buy, so you have a single item, you have a pack of six, or a pack of 12 and then a multi-pack, like bulk buy of like 50.
And basically, we're saying, which one of these is the best seller? And then, from a commercial perspective, and then which one are people landing on the site from our perspective. So I had dived into the search data, they looked at their sales data and we kind of collaborated and were like, "Okay, this is where this is clearly the best selling product. Oh, it also happens to be the people that the page people are landing on from an organic perspective. Let's make that canonical for these different bulk sizes and things like that." And yeah, it seems to be working well. So, would you agree there, Mark, you think it covers that?
Mark: No, I think you've covered that really well. Should we try and get through a few more of these?
Jack: Indeed, indeed. We've got a few coming in, flooding in from the chat here as well. Let's have a look at, speaking of canonicalsing and no indexing and stuff, adding a nofollow or noindex on blocked pages is fine?
Mark: Yes.
Jack: There we go. Nice and quick.
Mark: If a page is noindex, all the links on it will eventually be counted as nofollow anyway by Google. If it's blocked, doesn't matter anyway, because search engines aren't going to look. So yeah, go ahead. I don't see why you'd want to, but if you'd want to, yeah, cool.
Jack: Hopefully, another quick one here. Is schema still a ranking factor?
Mark: No.
Jack: No.
Mark: So, to expand on that slightly, Google has said schema is not a direct ranking factor. However, it still falls under SEO for me because certain types of schema can give you rich results which will improve your clickthrough rate or decrease it, depending on your how the cookie crumbles. But Google has said they use all available schema including the stuff that they don't generate rich snippets for to better understand the page. So, if it's a question of should we bother including schema, my advice would always be, yes, definitely, because you are doing your job as an SEO, which is helping search engines understand your website, your content, your structure, your authors, your media types, the links between them all, which is going to, I think, help you even more when we transition beyond 10 Blue Links that we're still kind of at with some bells and whistles.
Jack: And we talked about the power of schema as well, like product schema. If you don't have product schema, you're not going to get your items included from the merchant center into the Google Shopping feed and things like that, which you can now do with organic results, by the way, for those of you haven't put up on the news we talked about a few months ago. You're now getting organic results in that shopping feed alongside the paid results as well. So, yeah, schema is very powerful but is definitely not a ranking factor. Onto next, another live one here from Ben Kingsbury, which aspects of SEO would you prioritise for a website that has rather specific audiences than often very low search volume on relevant search queries? This sounds like a job for alsoasked.com, mark Williams-Cook.
Mark: Yeah, so I'm going again interpret it when you said specific audiences and low search volumes is it's just maybe not an unknown solution. Because there's two possibilities here. So, if we deal with startups who kind of invent a new product or a new solution, the audience is small because they don't know that solution exists, so the search volume doesn't exist. So generally, from a search strategy point of view, there is a different strategy we take in terms of deciding the thing that we want to create demand for, and setting up the site to rank for that, and then using other online digital marketing strategies to generate demand. So, you are the Google of whatever that industry is.
If we're just talking about, it's a really small search volume specific area, then have a look at the brightonSEO talk I did called Effective zero-volume keyword research, because it goes into depth about zero volume keyword strategies, how even if you think a term only has 50 searches a month, there's probably a hundred related questions to that and there's five ways to ask all of those different questions and they each have five searches a month, it actually stacks up to quite a lot of search volume. You can find that on YouTube by the way, folks that is available for free. Yeah. So, if you just do a search for effective zero volume keyword research, you should find it. Hopefully, it should be the first result, if Google's updates of working.
Jack: You've got your YouTube SEO source, Mark.
Mark: Very helpful content. But that's where I start with that, zero volume, low volume stuff, and of course, without knowing the niche can't give you much advice about link building, but links are away from the previous question from Anthony Dibel, actually, when he said, "Building content to make yourself authoritative, links is another way to do that. That's how search engines think you are in authority, not just the content's good, but you have links."
Jack: Absolutely. And interesting one here, we won't answer this because we've already got an answer from it from the one and only, Steve from SISTRIX, but let's read the question first. What do SEOs need to be aware of when website servers are being swapped? And apologies, this had already been answered. It happen, Richard, don't worry. But it has been answered by the one and only Steve Paine from SISTRIX, former guest of the show, fantastic Steve. Google is very forgiving, according to Steve, as long as the site looks the same when it comes back, you should have no problems. Steve's seen a lot of data folks by the way. So, if he's seen it in the data and experienced it himself with a three day server outage, you can trust Steve's answer right there. So, there you go. Thank you Steve for doing our job for us and answering that question. That was lovely. Speaking of keeping things, talking about keeping URL short, is it necessary to keep URL short or can we keep them as our need, to cover a focus keyword, for example? What is the best SEO practice for creating a slug for any page? I've seen this discussed, not necessarily a lot recently, but a lot over the last couple of years. A lot of people insisted you must have the keyword in the URL. A lot of people saying keep it as short as possible. I've seen kind of balancing strategies of making sure you have a clear site structure. So, if you're thinking like slash, blog, slash, news, slash, your headline or whatever it is, or just getting rid of those directories, getting rid of those sub folders and just having it straight to domain, slash, the title of the thing. There's a few different conflicting things there I think. Do you have a definitive answer to this, Mark, do you think?
Mark: I have strong opinions.
Jack: Okay, good. Let's launch into it. Some strong opinions to finish this off.
Mark: Yeah. In terms of page content, I'm always a fan of not including things like, certainly, not things like slash, blog, 'cause it's just wasted space. I don't like even, including things like category in the URL. I like going straight to, in this instance, say the blog post name, because future thinking as well, it makes things a lot easier to reach out into different categories or to migrate when you don't have to consider that that post is in that category and then actually you want to curate it later in another subcategory, and what on earth are we going to do now, how the breadcrumbs going to work, et cetera.
In my experience, from what I've seen, from what I've heard, from what I've heard from Google, from what I've tested, the actual words in a URL have negligible impact on ranking. I see sites ranking perfectly well that have query string URLs and no keywords. The thing I will add to this though, is that you have to bear in mind, most people that naturally link to your site will do so with the naked URL. If you have your keywords in that URL, Google will still treat that as anchor text and use them as a hint to what is on the page. So, it can be useful to have keywords in URLs just because that essentially you are automatically giving yourself an anchor text. Therefore, I would do this middle ground you spoke of I wouldn't have these onerous long URLs that are hard for people maybe, to copy and paste and things like this. I keep them short, memorable as possible. But if you can, I would include the main keywords that kind of identify what that page is about. If you can at least have a fairly good guess about what you're going to land on from the URL, I think that's helpful, again, to users-
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: ... and to search engines.
Jack: Nice. Free bit of anchor text advice there, dear viewers. Well, I think that about wraps us up, right? We're coming up on the hour. I know we are.
Mark: I see there's someone's putting chat slash blog is useful for separating blog traffic in Google Analytics. Yes, it is. But there's lots of ways that you can tag that traffic anyway on page or analytics. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but to me, I just don't see a reason in having it. We're working on, we won't announce it yet, but a content site that Andy's has built, and one of the ways that you'll never guess what it's about. We'll come back to that. Yeah. One of the ways we are handling this is just going the domain slash and then straight to the name of the article.
Jack: Cool. Do you think that wrap us up?
Mark: Yeah, we got three minutes left, so-
Jack: We got three minutes left. So, thank you everyone for joining us for our first ever live SEO Q&A on LinkedIn. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope the audio quality's been good. I know Steve messaged us saying your audio quality is sounding good, so thank you for your support there, Steve, both through SISTRIX and being here live with us, answering questions like a third host. We appreciate everything. And Mark, thank you for joining me. Thank you for bringing me on to do this live. I think we're going to plan to do a little bit more often, which it's taken us like 38 episodes to do the first one. We won't leave at another 38 to do the next one. Like I said, I've been recording a lot of episodes recently, so I've got quite a few really, really good interviews and interesting topics with guests coming up.
And then Mark and I are going to kind of try and introduce a bit more kind of live Q&A and news recap kind of stuff in there as well, so we make sure we're not leaving it for months and months without any news or anything like that. So, hopefully, being a bit of balance, kind of having guests, and also covering the news, and Q&A stuff there as well. So, thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining me, Mark. Thank you everyone in the chat who has submitted questions and those of you who submitted them ahead of time on LinkedIn as well. It's very, very kind of you. And we will be back sometime in the future to do a live LinkedIn thing as well. But yes, please do subscribe to the show, and we'll be at brightonSEO so-
Mark: You can see us live there.
Jack: Yeah, come in live and ask us questions, please.
Mark: I don't like that.
Jack: Please don't ask us questions. But yes, we and many other Candourlorians will be at brightonSEO at the end of next week. So, if you are going to brightonSEO, please do come and say hi. I know a lot of the guests who we've already had on are going to be there as well. There's some fantastic talks from some guests there as well. So yeah, if you are going to Brighton, come and say hello to the Candour crew. We're all very friendly. Even Mark, he's the scariest but he's friendly, so yeah, absolutely. Anyway, thanks for joining us folks and we'll see you again soon. Bye-bye!
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