Melissa Rice (00:00:00):
Hi, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today for our 42nd episode of SEO for Bloggers. So if you’re joining us live today, you’ve already noticed the new change of address where let’s face it, we’ve had a major glow-up. Look at us, we look so great. We are now streaming directly from StreamYard and on YouTube Live. So yeah, we’re doing cool new things.
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Joining me today in new and improved HD quality are our panelists, Casey Markee of Media Wyse, Andrew Wilder of NerdPress, Arsen Rabinovich of TopHatRank, and I’m your host, Melissa Rice. In a few moments, we are going to dive right into the last three months of the algorithm. So if you’ve been wondering how these recent Google changes are shaking up your SEO game, you are in the right place.
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But first, a little about our Q&A at the end of this episode since things have really changed around here, we are going to ask that you use the chat to submit your questions by typing the letter Q followed by your question. So be sure to tell us where you’re coming in from, where you’re tuning in from and, yeah, we’re going to just get started. We’re rolling right into this. Casey, first question to you. What have we learned so far about the August 15th algorithm update?
Casey Markee (00:01:15):
Well, it was very similar to being punished as a child, mostly using where you have to go outside and your parents ask you to cut your own switch. Does anyone remember that? You have to cut your own switch and then they use it to beat you about the body? Very similar. I know that we’ve got a lot of that feedback.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:01:33):
Oh, many, many, many, many years ago.
Casey Markee (00:01:35):
Many, what are you talking-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:01:36):
When people used to go outside.
Casey Markee (00:01:38):
Yeah, exactly right, long time ago, long time ago. Good times. Well, the update lasted 19 days. It was a little bit smaller, shorter than we’ve had in the previous period. I mean, we usually last … What was the last one, Arsen? 42 days or something like that?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:01:53):
Yeah.
Casey Markee (00:01:54):
It was a pretty good length. We’ve had a lot of noticeable movements. We’ve had sites that did nothing got improvements, we’ve had sites that made a lot of improvements and got improvements, and we’ve had sites that made a lot of improvements and got no improvements at all. So it was all over the place. The sites that I have access to, again, I have about four, gosh, it’s a large number, four or 500 sites in my Google search console, they were all over the place. We have a ton of sites that lost traffic. We have a lot of sites that had recoveries. Arsen and I were just talking about this. We’ve yet to see a site with a full recovery, but we’ve had some that were very close. The largest one I’ve seen is 75% recovery from September levels. So we’re still seeing some lessening there. I don’t necessarily see, I know of only a couple examples of sites that have actually bounced fully back and actually increased, and they’re few and far between.
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The sites that lost traffic from what we’re seeing, and we’re going to get into this a little bit more, had intent shifts. We had relevancy changes and we had general quality downgrades, and we’re going to get into what all of that is later on, but it’s clear that quality is more than content to Google. Google is really clearly evaluating the relevance of the site overall with regards to UX, with regards to ads, with regards to how things are presented, with regards to sourcing, all of that. And that’s why myself, Arsen, Andrew, everyone else, we take a kitchen sink approach when we look at sites. Our goal is to find and diagnose every possible issue we can and fix those, and that’s why I think that we’ve been very successful with some of the recoveries we’ve had from bloggers back in March, back in August and hopefully in the future.
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Now, I’m going to send some resources over here. This is going to help you understand what’s going on with this update specifically. Let me go ahead and see if I can paste that in. I can just paste that over, Melissa, into the comment section and it’ll pop right over?
Melissa Rice (00:03:46):
Yeah, it should.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:03:46):
Hopefully.
Casey Markee (00:03:48):
Okay. So see how they’re all just going together?
Melissa Rice (00:03:50):
There we go.
Casey Markee (00:03:50):
Yeah, that’s fantastic. I already don’t like this. I apologize. I want to blame Melissa-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:04:00):
I don’t like change.
Casey Markee (00:04:01):
… or throw her under the bus here.
Melissa Rice (00:04:03):
You look beautiful though.
Casey Markee (00:04:04):
We will make sure … Yeah, I have the filter on. So we’re going to send and make sure that all these resources are published. We’ll even put them in the notes on YouTube, that’s not a problem. But I think the big takeaway, and again, these resources that we’re sending over, I have a colleague of our, Ian, analyzed 55,000 sites monetized with Raptive, Mediavine, and AdSense. 53% had increases, 47% had decreases. He does a good job of breaking that down. Alita, our colleague, Alita Solis had analyzed a lot of big sites. She showed how Reddit continues to kill it. They got a huge lift. Amazon, YouTube, Walmart, all lost visibility. Sites like WebMD, Mayo Clinic, Verywell Health, all had increases, so it was all over the place. Barry Schwartz interviewed recently with Danny Sullivan. It’s a fantastic read. I pasted that link over here into the huge blob of content you see, so good luck finding that.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:04:58):
We’ll clean it up in the post.
Melissa Rice (00:05:04):
Your last link is going to a 404, unfortunately, Casey.
Casey Markee (00:05:04):
It’s probably because everything was cut off because of the limitations of this platform. That’s probably what happened.
Melissa Rice (00:05:11):
I did not create this platform.
Casey Markee (00:05:14):
Well, anyway-
Melissa Rice (00:05:15):
I’m going to do my political hand with that.
Casey Markee (00:05:17):
… if there’s any links that were cut off, it’s not a problem, folks. It’s clearly not important, but we will get those links to you in the YouTube comments. But I think the takeaway here is that this, I know many of you probably are going to disagree, but this was a lessening. This update was a lessening of overreach for a lot of bloggers. So that’s why we have a lot of these phantom recoveries where bloggers really didn’t do anything and suddenly jumped back. That’s also why we had a lot of bloggers who recovered their thumbnails and the like. I had over a dozen sites in my Google search console that did absolutely not one thing and had a recovery. So it is what it is.
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One of the other things that we want to do is we’ve had sites that I believe, and again, this is my personal opinion, I know I’ve talked about it with Arsen a little bit, these core updates are just a continual fine-tuning by Google of understanding and evaluating intent, and they do this by taking information from Chrome, they do this by taking information from the Quality Radar feedback, and they do this from Navboost.
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Now, for those of you who are not familiar with Navboost, it’s basically a Google ranking algorithm that improves search results for navigation queries by analyzing user interventions or interactions, things like click-through data, things like click-back data, pogo sticking and things like that. That’s all where Navboost comes into play. I’m going to pace that over as well, and that’s definitely something that you want to take out. Our colleague here, Dan Taylor, did a good job going over what Navboost is, why all bloggers should be familiar with it. It’s something we suspected that Google has been using for years, but then they finally acknowledged that they did and only the link from the DOJ link that happened a couple years back.
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So that’s kind of where we are right now. If you haven’t seen any improvement yet, the good news is is that Danny Sullivan was very clear. He said that you can make improvements now and you don’t have to wait for a refresh, which was crazy. This is the first time that Google has said that. So that implies that there’s some kind of a realtime algorithm component going on now. If we make dramatic improvements between the trolls of these core updates, we should be able to see some uplifts. So again, take the kitchen sink approach, really focus on what you’re doing. Did you over-optimize? Did you take some bad advice from people? Are you writing posts that you just want to rank, not necessarily because your users have requested them? Lots of factors go into that as we’re looking to recover a site that’s been hit by these updates.
Melissa Rice (00:07:46):
I’m surprised I didn’t see Arsen doing plenty of this. You know what I mean? He loves that. That’s his signature move, guys. All right. Andrew, several bloggers noticed dropping clicks and impressions even though their site maintains the same ranking positions. Can you help to make sense of this for the bloggers?
Andrew Wilder (00:08:06):
Yeah. Google’s constantly evolving and the search results are constantly changing. So this is unfortunately part of the deal, right? They’re constantly optimizing their search results pages and tweaking it and changing it, and they’re always trying to find the best search results for whatever the query is and what the intent of the query is, but people search for really short things, right?
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So I had a client who ranked really highly for a DIY foaming hand soap, and so they came up top of the search results for foaming hand soap, and all of a sudden, their rankings or their traffic tanked, and what happened was Google changed the results so that the first four or five results were where to buy foaming hand soap, and then there was a batch of results after that of DIY foaming hand soap. So they were still ranking number one basically for the target query of DIY, but it’s further down on the page. So things like that could happen. Of course with AI overviews happening right now, that’s one of the ways that content gets pushed down on the page. So there’s a lot of stuff like that.
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Another thing is with the return of thumbnails, if you hadn’t lost your thumbnails, but other people now have gained back their thumbnails, that might be causing your click-through rate to change. So if you’re still ranking really highly, then there might be nothing you can do on that search query. It could also be that maybe we’re getting a lot of clicks and traffic for correlated or similar keywords but that weren’t your actual target keyword that you’re looking for, and so maybe they’ve changed the intent with that. And if you have a few of those that are lower volume, collectively, they might’ve been making a difference but you didn’t quite realize it. So all these little things can compound, and basically, all you can do is look for making sure your rankings are still as high.
Melissa Rice (00:09:45):
Okay. Casey, again, back to you. If bloggers were hit in the March update and this most recent update, should they pause new content production and just focus on updating old content?
Casey Markee (00:09:58):
Well, this is a tough one to answer and the answer is it depends. I know. I’m the first one to say that today. I feel dirty. I feel dirty. But anyway, remember this. It’s just that when if you’ve been hit by these updates, you don’t have a classifier against your site. Basically, that means that there is a filter against your site. It’s basically like blogging with your parking brake on. You’re going to find that newer content just does not seem to want to stick or rank competitively, and you’re going to find that older content that you’ve updated will improve a little bit, but just not as much as it could previously.
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My advice is, of course, to always try to update as much of the old content as you can. I tend to recommend a 90 to 10 or 80 to 20 approach. For every eight or nine posts we update based on better practices, based upon intent shifts, based upon better keywords, we might publish one or two new posts. And the reason that you probably do want to continue to publish some new content is for your email list, is for your email list. It’s for your social communities. I get it. Again, search does not happen in a vacuum. I would want you to continue working on your community building and it would be very hard and very ineffective or certainly not effective in many aspects for you just to continue to share all these updated posts to people who have seen this content previously.
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So if you can update and reshare your content, clearly, that’s where the majority of your efforts should go into, but with regards to the email and building your communities, I see the value in continuing to try to publish new content. It might not rank competitively now, but I can assure you that it might rank very competitively in the future once the classifier is removed.
Melissa Rice (00:11:37):
Okay. Arsen, backing up for just a second. What was the recent Google update supposed to do or accomplish?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:11:43):
Well, it does the same thing that it always does. It’s to improve results, it’s to improve experience. We saw certain things happen with this update that we were expecting to see. We wanted to see those classifier. Like Casey said, we wanted to see the classifier removed. The other thing that’s really awesome about this update is that now when you’re making changes, you see that result. Even though Google did mention in their help document for this update, they did mention that it will take and they added affection about how long it will take to see results and they said months and sometimes you will have to wait for another refresh. But again, I think that’s like a boilerplate answer they always give, but we are seeing.
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So we are touching, we have clients when we are touching posts and we are seeing improvements and we are seeing responses. If a site is considered to be on the lower quality side, you will see slower crawl rates, so your time to seeing results might be a little bit longer than usual. But look, it’s the same stuff that Google always does. It’s to update, it’s to show better results, and this is the byproduct of that.
Melissa Rice (00:12:54):
Okay. And one more question for you. What should we be doing if we weren’t touched by the September or March update but have seen drops in August?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:13:03):
So we haven’t had enough time with this update to really come up with anything definitive as far as advice, but again, based on observations, and we did have a few clients who we worked with, and one of my coaching clients who was doing very, very well and actually grew through September of last year and March of this year update and then got severely hit in this August update. And when we reviewed, when we actually looked into the post and we took a look at what’s being beat up, it’s the stuff that’s overoptimized. So go back to the basics.
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Casey and Andrew and I since 2019, I think our first episode we talked about overoptimization. There was a November update in 2019. We did a huge study around it. We started beating that like, “Don’t overoptimize.” It was there, right? It’s happening again. Go back to the base, look at your post, read through the post. You don’t need to have your primary keyword in every single one of your headings. Those will get hit. Anything that might look potentially spammy in terms of, “I am writing this for SEO,” most likely will get hit.
Melissa Rice (00:14:20):
It’s been very, very volatile considering it all. How long can we expect the volatility to continue, Arsen or anybody?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:29):
Look, these updates are going to continue rolling out. This is one of those things, and it’s been volatile for a while. Sometimes Google will give us a few months to rest, but it’s been. There’s been updates. This is a whole new algorithm, Casey, right? It’s a whole new ecosystem at this point. It’s not what we were talking about back in 2022, 2023. This is a completely different thing now. So is it going to be volatile? Most likely.
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Now, also, because it’s a new algorithm, the changes are happening much quicker. We’re seeing results jumping around very, very quickly. So we might see these changes to the way Google presents search results, to the way it templatizes pages, and that’s all going to affect your traffic and positions. So this is the new world. We have to change your approach. All of my talks that I’ve been giving since these updates have been, “Hey, we have to change our fundamental approach to how we do SEO now.” It’s a whole different ballpark.
Melissa Rice (00:15:24):
It sure is. Andrew, is it important to update strong performing Q4 posts even if they don’t really need any updates in an effort to make it clear that they’re still relevant or show Google that the post was updated recently?
Andrew Wilder (00:15:40):
What do we always say about unicorns? Unicorn is top three search results, right? There’s only one direction they can go down. That’s it. They can’t go up if you’re number one. So if you’ve got a top performing post, don’t touch it. Why would you risk breaking it? Because you can’t get any better. In that case, if you do want to ensure that it continues to perform well, you might want to look at other off off-page signals like linking to it from other posts on your site or trying to get backlinks from other sites, continuing your social media presence and things like that.
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You could do a quick review and make sure it’s as complete as possible on your recipe card, and in that case, you could edit the recipe itself through like if you use WP Recipe Maker, you could edit the recipe through the manage feature where you’re not actually updating the post, you’re just updating the recipe, which that would be such a minor thing that I don’t think Google would have a problem with that, but yeah, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Melissa Rice (00:16:42):
Okay. Arsen, stop moving things around. We’re in the middle of it. Anyways, I’ve got a question for you to keep your hands busy. A lot of bloggers are reporting gaining rankings in some posts and losing others. How can they have grown when it’s like or how can they grow, rather, when it’s like two steps forward, two steps back? What’s the advice here at this point?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:16:59):
I actually just saw this today and we keep seeing this, and this has happened through every single update. This is nothing new. You will have chunks of keywords that you used to enjoy traffic from. Keywords that you didn’t even expect to optimize or rank for, they were just a byproduct of Google having a really poor understanding of the query. So an example that I saw today, and I might get it wrong, I think it was brownie, a recipe was brownie bars, used to rank for brownie squares, now it doesn’t. It still ranks for brownie bars, but it doesn’t rank for brownie squares anymore, and she used to get a lot of traffic from brownie squares.
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So you will lose keyword positions and traffic for keywords that you weren’t even targeting now that Google has a better understanding of what the user wants to see for that result, whether it’s a shift in intent. I’ve also seen shift in document type, right? So you used to have a list item post, a roundup that used the top 10 results for roundups. Not anymore. Now, it’s an in-depth article or vice versa of that. So you will see that happening.
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So you have to go through search console, you have to go through your analytics, and you have to take a look and say, “Okay. Look, this makes sense. I’ve lost positions for this particular keyword. Let me check.” As you lose positions for some keywords, you’re probably gaining or retaining positions for other keywords. So you take a look at your post and it’s like, “Where did I grow? What is Google seeing? What is Google extracting from this post now?”
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So for brownie bars, which was the intended keyword for this post, she’s still holding onto her position. It’s a really good position. Brownie squares has much more search volume and thus, she was getting that traffic and now she lost it. It wasn’t an intentional keyword she was ranking for, but she lost it and now she’s not getting that traffic.
Melissa Rice (00:18:51):
Casey, if bloggers notice a minimal drop in rankings on an important post, what are some off-page things they could try before editing the post?
Casey Markee (00:19:02):
Well, there’s several, actually. You could send some new internal links into the post, specifically with some focus keywords that you notice you dropped for. Where a lot of bloggers make mistakes is a very poor internal linking. Our goal is to build … We have an incredible asset there in our site. We want to send internal links with varied anchor texts, preferably long tail in nature targeting those falling posts. We would also want to consider resharing that post on social and sending it out anew to our email list. Those are all things we could do. As Andrew mentioned, we’d also want to make sure that our recipe card is fully optimized because the plugins, especially WP Recipe Maker is database-driven. You can just go directly into the card through the managed section, make the changes, those changes go live on the page without you ever having to touch the post itself. So those are always things that we want to do.
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But yeah, internal or external signals specifically will help send some new external links. Feature that in a roundup, refeature it in an email list that’s going out, whatever you can do there. You could even pop it on this sidebar for a little bit of a internal linking boost there if you’re really concerned about it, but there’s lots of ways that you can improve both the visibility and the bottom line metrics of the post as opposed to touching it directly.
Melissa Rice (00:20:24):
Okay. Arsen, has anyone seen recovery like complete recovery or even better?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:20:30):
Yeah. I mean, we were just talking about this before we went live and Casey showed us a graph. We haven’t seen a full, full recovery because, again, just like I said earlier, you are going to lose traffic and rankings for keywords that you, or queries that you didn’t intend to rank for initially, queries that … Google has a change of intent, document type, whatever it is. So I don’t think you’re going to see full 100, 110% recoveries.
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Now, are we seeing recovery? Yes, absolutely. There are recoveries. There are recoveries to sites that did make improvements, sites that did cut down on overoptimization, sites that did improve their content, sites that did improve signaling, sites that did clean up a lot of their technical crawlability, accessibility, renderability, indexability issues. Is it 100% back? I have not seen one yet.
Casey Markee (00:21:22):
Yeah, and again, I wish that was the case we’re tracking, and the links that we sent in, at least the ones that work, will send you to reports on the update. It will show you the sites that have recovered. It will show you the sites that haven’t. It will even provide some general analysis. Danny Sullivan has really made it clear that if it’s a reshuffling in many cases, they’re changing how they … Like I said, it’s an evolution of intent previously. A good example, which we were talking about before we got on the call, was about a site that had a how to improve pancake batter, and they were ranking for a lot of brand-related keywords that they will no longer rank for. We cannot get those back. Google has changed the intent of those brand names to more of an e-commerce shift and recipe sites do not fulfill that e-commerce shift.
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So in that case, when I was talking to the blogger, I just had to accept that she is not going to get those brand name searches back. They’re going to show the brand instead and a target carousel and an Amazon gallery and all of that, and she’s going to push her down below the fold and she’s not going to get that traffic back. So this is not a you issue, it’s more of a Google issue, and unfortunately, we can’t really fix that.
Melissa Rice (00:22:45):
Andrew, I have probably the greatest question to ask you. Bloggers are reporting that web stories are coming back after this update, and for those who deactivated theirs, is it worth turning them back on or would they risk being flagged for thin content? I know you love this. I know you love web stories.
Andrew Wilder (00:23:08):
Longtime listeners will know I hate web stories, so I’m also shaking my fist.
Melissa Rice (00:23:11):
[inaudible 00:23:11] “No.”
Andrew Wilder (00:23:11):
“No. Please, please, don’t let them make a comeback.” Look, I think web stories suck in general, and so they don’t deserve to make a comeback. If they are making a comeback, it’s probably a blip that I would not encourage you to spend a lot of time on unless you’ve been trying it and it’s working for you. So you have to take everything with a grain of salt, that I say because I’m a curmudgeon about this. If you have some web stories and you want to reactivate them and give it a try, go for it. Will it work? Probably not. So please don’t spend a lot of time on that. I don’t want you to go back and create hundreds of web stories because one person said it’s working for them. Also, if you did deactivate them and they’ve been a 404 for a long time and suddenly that URL is back, Google may not trust it right away, anyway. I feel like there are better ways to spend your time, frankly.
Casey Markee (00:24:03):
Very important on that last point. It’s not even a matter of they’re not. They won’t, especially if you’ve had the 404 or 410 live for months. No, you’re not going to get legacy value from that URL. It’s gone.
Andrew Wilder (00:24:17):
So then change the URL?
Casey Markee (00:24:19):
Yeah. You can certainly try to refeature them if you guys have absolutely nothing to do. I mean, I can give you a whole list of items to do that’d be worth more of your time than web stories.
Andrew Wilder (00:24:26):
So here’s my thing with web stories. Is your web story useful for your visitors?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:24:32):
Never is.
Andrew Wilder (00:24:33):
Okay. That’s the answer then.
Casey Markee (00:24:35):
Yeah. Would you link? If someone came to a site, obviously candy corn, and they wanted to make homemade candy corn, would you want to send them to your homemade candy corn recipe or would you want to send them to this homemade candy corn web story? End of story. So there you go.
Melissa Rice (00:24:51):
Very good point, Casey. Casey, some bloggers have lost featured photos even though they’re still in the top 10 of search results. Any reason why Google restored some to other blogs but seemed to have gotten rid of others?
Casey Markee (00:25:07):
No. No rhyme or reason to that. Google has said it’s a quality issue. I will tell you that we had a “shit ton” of bloggers recover their thumbnails, and so we know that this is something that’s going on at Google’s end that probably wasn’t necessarily just a … Could have been a bug and they fixed that, but there’s a lot of thumbnails popping back. Now, I will tell you that the bloggers who’ve contacted me that have still lost their thumbnails have significant quality issues, significant, overoptimization, poor technical SEO, overreliance on AI to write their posts, poor internal linking, extreme excessive UX issues with overabundance of ads, just runs the gamut over and over again.
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And I’ll send them, I’m like, “Well, why don’t you try to fix these 10 issues first and then maybe we can get your thumbnails to pop back?” Just understand that if you lost your thumbnails, there has to be a reason for that. It’s not that Google has it in for you, and usually nine out of 10 times, there are things that we can fix on our site to make us be more attractive to Google to communicate, “Hey, we deserve those thumbnails in search.”
Melissa Rice (00:26:13):
Got it. So Andrew, one of our subscribers reported that their posts with table of contents were not ranking well or the posts without it. Sorry, let me rephrase this. The posts without it are doing really well. Should table of contents be avoided going forward?
Andrew Wilder (00:26:36):
Okay. So anytime I hear, “One person had this experience, should we all do it?” immediately that’s a red flag. As soon as we get an email that says, “I heard on Facebook that …,” we’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” So that does not make a trend. There could be a whole bunch of other reasons why those posts aren’t performing well.
(00:26:53):
Table of contents, if they’re done in a way that’s, say it with me, useful for your visitors, then you should keep them. They also have the added benefit that if they’re done smartly, you may get site links in the search results, which you’ve got the regular search result and below that can be those little text links in a row that dig into lower down on the page, so that can help improve your visibility and click-through rate on the SERPs.
(00:27:17):
So yeah, do what’s working for your visitors. How do you know if it’s working for your visitors? You can install something like Microsoft Clarity or Hot Jar and look to see if people are actually clicking on them. So get some screen recording going. If people are actually using them, great. If they’re not, then maybe you do want to get rid of them and get your content up higher.
(00:27:36):
Also, I’d say if your contents really short, you don’t need them. That’s just going to be in the way, but if you’ve got longer form content, if you’ve got five or six sections where people might want to jump to the middle because that’s the content they really want, then you’re just doing them a favor by giving them the shortcut there at the top.
Melissa Rice (00:27:53):
Did you want to say something Casey?
Casey Markee (00:27:55):
Yeah. I would just say that, again, we’re tracking a huge amount of sites. I know Arsen has access to hundreds. I have access to a lot of sites and I have them on a spreadsheet and I have them sorted so we can see, “Okay. These sites have site links or these sites have table of contents, these sites have jump buttons. Here’s a section of sites that don’t have either of those,” and when we do that, there’s never any correlation there. There are plenty of people on this very call who have jump links and either they gain traffic. So I don’t put you on the spot, but you know who you are.
(00:28:26):
So again, this is just that we just don’t make those correlation arguments. It’s just like I went outside yesterday and picked up the trash and there was a car accident down the bottom of my street, so I’m never going to pick up the trash outside again, okay?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:28:44):
I’m with that. I’m with that.
Casey Markee (00:28:45):
So that’s just the kind of thing. Again, that’s perfect. That makes perfect sense though, right? So just to understand that the correlation causation thing is very outdated.
Melissa Rice (00:28:54):
Very well said. Casey, what factors go into determining a blog’s trustworthiness? Can you elaborate on this and its significance? Is it more important now than ever or how do you feel?
Casey Markee (00:29:10):
Well, I think, let’s see if we can paste over what I said. I think we paste over something in the … Maybe you can find that for me, that Google uses many different factors thing. See if you can find that and paste it over. That’s fine. The thing to understand about trustworthy, Google has this EEAT. It’s experience, expertise, trustworthiness, authoritativeness. This is not a high bar for blog owners to overcome. If you have a site that is easy to crawl, if you have a site that is easy to navigate, if you have a clear privacy and contact page, if you actually show your photo on your About Me page, if you list your social profiles, if you make it easier for users in Google to find and contact you, if you verify your site in Google search console, if you install analytics, these are all trust factors.
(00:29:57):
If you make health claims and you link out and support those health claims, that’s a trust factor. If you go out of your way to make sure that you’re providing detailed step-by-step photos and a nice labeled photo of the ingredients, that increases the trustworthiness of your content to users. If you don’t use AI to make your images, if you don’t use AI to write your content, if you make sure that you’re supporting everything that you say and providing your own real-world experience on why this works for me and it could possibly work for you, that is going to provide the trust and the veracity you need to be successful in Google. There is no real formula there.
(00:30:33):
I appreciate Andrew pacing over the PDF there, but that’s going to help you if you just go in. There’s various checklists that you can download, EEAT checklists. I provide one in my audits, that if you just go and you just click those things off, “Do I have a privacy policy? Have I have a clear author on the page? Did that author link link to an About Me page or a page showing my expertise? Did I fill out all my recipe schema? Do I have clear internal links to related content?” All that stuff is going to be in Google’s eyes. Votes for prom, that’s what you’re doing. You’re going to win that prom. You didn’t win prom when you were in high school, it’s okay. You have your chance now. You can win Homecoming King and Queen in Google Prom. All you have to do is fill out these little items every day.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:31:21):
Okay. So a few things I wanted to chime in on the About Me, and I explained this a lot and I think we’ve covered this in the few of our episodes. But look, you have to look at it from a perspective, at least the EEAT signaling perspective. So your About page shouldn’t just be like, “Oh, I started this blog on this year and this is one of my most popular posts,” something to your post, “and this is my favorite category, and look at this picture of my dog.” That’s great. Establish expertise. Google has time and time and time again said this in their documentation that we want to know why people will trust you with whatever you’re writing about.
(00:32:02):
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about health or you’re writing about transmission repair. You need to establish this. You want to look at it from an entity perspective, so just having a picture of Huffington Post or the Food Network and all of that on your About page, that’s not enough. You want to have a section there, where I’ve been mentioned. You want to link to those places, where I’ve contributed content to. If you’re a writer for another publication, link to your About page there. Connect the dots for Google. Google will crawl those links and understand entity relationships. This is how Google will start understanding that, “Hey, you are who you are and this is what you write about.”
(00:32:40):
And look, there’s third party validation on this other website. Link to your LinkedIn, link to your profiles, link to where you were interviewed. You had a guest appearance on some webinar, link to that. Create those connectors for Google. The more of that you do, the more blossoming you’ll see from your content.
Melissa Rice (00:32:59):
We want to know all about you everywhere at all times. No, I’m kidding. Okay. Arsen, this is the last question until we get to Q&A. Please, please, please tell us why is Google pushing out all these updates.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:33:13):
I mean, we touched on this. Google is doing this to improve the experience for its users. Obviously, I’m sure there’s other reasons why Google does this, and they’re a corporation and their bottom line is always in their best interest. So whether it’s going to be reorganize the result page so they get more ad clicks or whatever have you, but this is the ecosystem. Google is one channel of acquisition for you. It has an algorithm just like Facebook, just like Instagram, just like TikTok, just like everywhere else you go, it should not be your only channel, and we’ve talked about this also since the first episode, right?
(00:33:48):
It’s one of the best channels. It makes you the most money, but you’re at the mercy of this algorithm and they’re going to continue to do this. It’s about you. It’s about how you are going to be adjusting to these changes, how are you going to change your approach. And I frequently say this, I want to take you by your shoulders, not physically, but I want to take you by your shoulders and say, “You’ve been going doing it this way. I want to move you in this direction and show you how to do it this way.”
(00:34:13):
And this is the time to do this. This is the time to go back and go back to the basics. Go through our episodes. Go through our episode number two, number three where we talk about overoptimization. It still applies. That stuff still sticks. Now we have new layers, now we have thrust. Now we have …
(00:34:32):
Another thing that we’re noticing, content that does a really good job at answering all of the questions around the topic that you’re covering. Ask yourself this. Does the user have to click the back button to go back to Google and to ask a question about something that it did not cover about this topic here? We can talk about creating secondary content, the methods to chop potatoes if you’re going to talk about potato salad. It might not rank in Google for how to chop potatoes, but you’re providing that resource for the user that you can link to, “This is how I chop these potatoes.” It doesn’t have to be that. I’m just great with examples.
Melissa Rice (00:35:06):
No, you love potatoes.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:35:07):
Right, right, but that’s what I’m talking about. It’s about not looking at it, not just like, “Am I chasing? Am I getting that green light in Yoast?” It’s about providing the right experience for the user, and that applies to all of your pages, to your content pages, to your category page, to your homepage, to your about page. Look at it that way, you’re going to start winning.
Andrew Wilder (00:35:25):
Can I just add something to that? The thing that Google has always tried to do since day one has basically been like optimize for readers, do something valuable and useful for your readers. And we started keyboard stuffing in early 2000s because Google picked up on that and was like, “Oh, this post is about potatoes.” Then they’ve been constantly pushing back against that. Well, think about AI right now and what it can do. You give it a three-word prompt, it can write you an essay on something. It might not be that great, but it’s pretty impressive, right?
(00:35:53):
Well, think about flipping it around. You don’t need to optimize your post anymore to say, “Potato, potato, potato, potato.” It knows what the content is because it can analyze the whole blog post and really understand it. Schema, I don’t think schema should even be necessary in recipes. I think that’s Google being lazy or it was Google training the AI to understand it better. So we just fit it all in. That’s what the CAPTCHA is. When you’re clicking on all those street signs and bicycles, you’re training the AI.
Casey Markee (00:36:18):
Sure, you’re training the AI.
Melissa Rice (00:36:19):
It’s nerve-racking.
Andrew Wilder (00:36:23):
So we basically in the last year reached a point where the AI is able to understand it in a way that doesn’t have to have all those little mechanical inputs and overoptimizations, and now because it can do that, it sees those overoptimizations as writing for Google instead of writing for visitors. So I mean, this is a big reset, right?
(00:36:39):
The other thing I want to say is think about when you go to a website, how do you trust that website? What do you look at that site to say, “You know what? I’m going to get information from this site that I can trust,” whether it’s a recipe or how to fix your transmission to use Arsen’s other example. What clues do you look at?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:36:55):
You’re welcome.
Andrew Wilder (00:36:56):
Thank you. What clues do you look at when you go to that website? You probably do go to the about page. Is the website easy to navigate? Does it have a nice font and does it look trustworthy? Is it polished or is it really messy? All these little tiny micro clues do add up or do you have the publish dates at the top of your post. As a reader, I like to see when something was published and I like to see when it was updated. That’s really important to me.
Casey Markee (00:37:18):
At the top. Go ahead. Sorry.
Andrew Wilder (00:37:21):
That’s why hubbub, when you have social sharing buttons, we share the share counts because that’s social proof to say, “Hey, look, 550 people share this on Facebook,” and then you see that and you go, “Oh, there must be something to it.” There’s that validation. So think about when you go to a website, how do you trust it. That’s all Google’s doing. It’s just AI now doing it instead. So when you go visit your website, think about, are you doing those things that are going to convey to a reader, “Hey, this site is trustworthy. I know what I’m talking about and you should read me”?
Melissa Rice (00:37:49):
Casey, anything else to add?
Casey Markee (00:37:52):
I just bought a very expensive watch for a friend who celebrated his 50th birthday and it was a very expensive watch, and I was like, “Okay, I’m definitely not telling my wife I bought this.” So I bought the watch and I wanted to make sure that I was going to get the watch. I’m not going to buy it. I wanted to make sure I use a verified, a trusted seller, and the first thing I asked was my son who loves watches, “Where did you get your watch?” blah, blah, and I looked there and it was a very well done site. It had incredible amount of earned expertise on the site. We had detailed reviews, very clear shipping policy. It told me if it was in stock. I could tell that the SEO was good. It had verified reviews. It had a good return policy, even showed when the page was last updated and how many were in stock. Those are simple things that you’d be shocked at how many e-commerce companies do not do.
(00:38:44):
Now, take that, and by the way, I did get the watch even a day earlier than I thought and it was in good condition, so I can’t complain, but think about how you can apply that to your recipes. One of the things that we’re seeing, one of the overoptimizations that was pointed out by Glenn Gabe and others is that he noticed that people were spamming the PAAs that people also asked. He pointed to an example where a blogger had put 20 PAAs on a page. They literally went to Google and found every one of the PAAs they could find and put it on a page, and that page was one of several that was symptomatic. What’s the word? Symptomatic of issues that they’re having on the other pages. That’s not useful. That’s a spam technique.
(00:39:28):
Again, that’s why when we use FAQs on a site, I usually say three to five of them. What is the most important information that you’re trying to convey to the user? Your goal is not to answer every question that the user has. Your goal is to use your expertise along with the feedback you see on your site and what you know from your own expertise to answer those questions, and that’s helpful to users. What’s not helpful is trying to write a complete post that is 4,000 words and has a lot of unnecessary superfluous information and 12 foot is at the finished dish, which I still saw as of an audit yesterday. So that stuff still exists. We have to continue to push back on it as much as we can. Awesome.
Melissa Rice (00:40:07):
All right, guys. We are just in time for my favorite part, which is-
Casey Markee (00:40:13):
Q&A. Well, look at that. I want you to know that that took her all day to do that popup, okay?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:40:21):
You’re very proud.
Casey Markee (00:40:22):
Very proud of her, okay?
Andrew Wilder (00:40:30):
This is why we moved to StreamYard, for that.
Melissa Rice (00:40:30):
No, no.
Casey Markee (00:40:30):
Literally, that was the only reason that Melissa is using this right here. The StreamYard is because of that popup graphic there.
Melissa Rice (00:40:35):
Listen, visually, we are killing it today.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:40:41):
That is great. I’m loving it way better than Zoom.
Melissa Rice (00:40:45):
I put myself in that corner because, Arsen, I think you should be front and center, but okay.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:40:49):
Sure, sure. I’m coming back. Done.
Melissa Rice (00:40:53):
All right. So we’ve got our fair share of questions. We’re going to start right off with Aaron.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:41:01):
Ooh, these graphics.
Melissa Rice (00:41:02):
“Old blog versus new blogs. Do new blogs stand a chance?”
Casey Markee (00:41:06):
Absolutely, just not on Google initially. There is the-
Andrew Wilder (00:41:11):
Oh, yeah, just not on Google.
Casey Markee (00:41:12):
Just not on Google. Absolutely they stand a chance. Look, I know that people have … We’ve argued about this for years, but now with recent leaks and all with the recent ranking factor leak and all the other studies we’ve run over the last years, there’s clearly some kind of a sandbox. There is some kind of a shadow ban that does exist on Google. It takes a while for new sites to really earn the trust, to really earn relevancy, to really earn enough authority that they can rank effectively for a lot of keywords, and that’s fine because you should be spending that first six months to a year building up your email list, focusing on your social profiles, getting a nice section of content ready to go so that we can get that to rank competitively in Google. It doesn’t mean you can’t rank in Google, it’s just you’re going to find it’s very muted.
(00:41:58):
We’ve seen multiple instances where literally 14 to 18 months down the road, it’s like we took the parking rake off a site and Google just starts to trust the content again, the content goes a little higher and we see a lot easier gains in that. I think that’s going to continue to happen, and it is going to be harder because there are so many new people trying to start blogging. It’s never been more competitive to be a blogger than right now. It’s like COVID all over again, COVID times 10 where everyone decided to start a blog.
Andrew Wilder (00:42:27):
Can I say though? There is going to be some attrition. When I started my food blog in 2010, I thought I was late to the party like Elise and David and Ree had started in 2005, 2006 and I’m like, “Oh, my god, I’m so late. How could I ever catch up?” It was a different landscape then. In retrospect, that was still early days, but when I started, it felt like I was late. So I hadn’t thought about the attrition rate. There’s going to be a lot of people who started blogs in 2020 with the start of the pandemic in 2021 and maybe they got hit by the update too and maybe they give up and move on. So there is going to be attrition. You just have to be patient.
Melissa Rice (00:43:05):
Okay. This one’s a little bit longer. Let’s pray StreamYard doesn’t cut it off. Here we go, Joanne. “I would like to know how do you build more of a newsletter following if your content isn’t being seen much anymore because Google tanked your traffic and your content isn’t being seen to get subscribers?”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:24):
So there’s a few things you can do. One of the things that we’ve done successfully in the past is running social ads and running social ads to build your email list, and those are usually much cheaper. A lot of people don’t want to run social ads because they think they’re so expensive. They’re not. So if you’re just collecting email information, it’s just a simple ad that you’re going to run. You can start with an email list that you already have to create an initial audience, that you can create a lookalike audience from it. You can run ads to that audience essentially saying, “Hey, get these recipes in your inbox for free. Click here,” and they don’t even leave Facebook or Instagram to do it. It’s a form and it populates their email.
(00:44:02):
So your cost for acquisition is much lower because the user is not leaving the platform, so you’re paying much less and you’re getting those emails. They’ll be anywhere from like 35 cents to a dollar and we’ve seen it as high as $2 if you really want to get targeted to a specific demographic.
Melissa Rice (00:44:18):
Okay. Next question. Let’s go. Tammy asks, “If my traffic has somewhat improved since the update but still well below my traffic from last year, does that mean that the classifiers have been lifted from my site?”
Casey Markee (00:44:33):
No one can answer that question, but most likely yes. If you’re seeing a noticeable-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:37):
But I will.
Casey Markee (00:44:38):
Yeah, I’ll answer it. I mean, I’m not supposed to, but I mean … So again, if you’re seeing uplift and it’s noticeable 10, 15, 20%, then, yeah, a classifier that was on your site has either been lessened or removed completely. Common sense. So again, if I’m going to the casino and my budget is 200, but I put in my card and I got 500, hey, I’m going to take that 500, I’m not really going to say much about it. It’s a very similar with the classifier. The classifier could still be limiting your visibility a little bit, but most likely if you’re seeing recovery, and as we mentioned earlier, we’ve not seen any full recoveries.
(00:45:19):
And remember that you could actually have a full recovery based upon the fact that you lost traffic you never were supposed to be getting in the first place because of intent shifts and the fact that Google now has AI overviews on the site and they have these new blocks for Reddit and elsewhere that have completely changed the SERP. So understand that you stayed, you did what you did, but everything else changed around you, and as such, you might not be getting the percentage of traffic before because that percentage of traffic no longer exists.
Melissa Rice (00:45:53):
Really quickly, Diane had just asked since it’s pertinent to this, “Can you define what a classifier is by any chance?”
Casey Markee (00:46:00):
The classifier is the term that Google has used specifically to denote an algorithmic suppression on your rankings based upon changes at Google that affect you. So it’d be like if you had … Usually we still have them, but we don’t see them much anymore, Google has what are called manual actions. A manual action can in occur if you’re doing something illegal or against Google’s spam or webmaster guidelines, and that manual action is literally a filter that they can put on your site, which will reduce your rankings across the entire site or on specific pages depending upon the penalty.
(00:46:30):
This is the algorithmic version of it. It’s not manual, it’s algorithmic. So when we go in and change things sitewide to improve how our site presents to these baseless algorithms who clearly hate us, then we can get that classifier hopefully lessened or maybe removed completely. That’s what the classifier is.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:46:50):
They basically classified your site as not helpful. That’s the classifier.
Casey Markee (00:46:57):
Good times.
Melissa Rice (00:46:58):
Yeah, right on. Okay. Kristina’s question up next, “When updating a post that you will also be updating photos for, is it recommended to keep one or some of the original photos in the post for SEO purposes or does it not matter?”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:47:14):
Casey?
Casey Markee (00:47:15):
Let’s define what an SEO purpose is. So it used to be … This is actually, and first of all, Kristina, this is a very good question because we still get this quite a bit. It used to be many years ago you wanted to keep an original photo because sometimes you would get a ton of image traffic based upon the fact that Google had aged relevancy of legacy value on your photos. That’s no longer really the case. You can just basically delete photos from a post, replace them with the new photos, and Google has re-indexed those photos probably before you even went to bed that night. Usually, it’s much faster, and those photos are literally replaced. Google’s really good at replacing the new photos with the old photos or the old photos with the new ones.
(00:47:54):
So no, the days of you keeping maybe at the bottom of the post you had, “Here’s an example of a photo that I had seven years ago to show you how terrible it was and how much my photography’s improved,” I still see those, by the way, you don’t need to do that anymore. You can remove all of that. Just focus on putting your best foot forward, focus on putting your best photography forward. Just please remember to put those nice descriptive and correct alt text in there for those of us who are visually impaired like myself when I’m watching a football game.
Melissa Rice (00:48:25):
Good point. Next question is from Nicole, “Thoughts on adding to a unicorn post to bolster the content and make it more helpful versus straight up changing it? Will this help or hurt?”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:37):
What’s a unicorn post post?
Melissa Rice (00:48:40):
Like a never-
Casey Markee (00:48:42):
Never touch a post, a post that’s doing really well, ranking really well, already doing well.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:46):
Tell them, Casey.
Casey Markee (00:48:50):
I would like you to just go outside and grab a big flower pot and I just want you to drop it on your foot.
Melissa Rice (00:48:57):
Oh, no.
Casey Markee (00:48:57):
Drop it on your foot. That’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to break a toe and you’re going to break the toe of your unicorn post if you needlessly touch it.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:06):
Don’t even look at it.
Casey Markee (00:49:08):
Yeah. If you have a post that’s just killing it, and you know it’s not the best post, and folks, we see this all the time. Had it on it today with a blogger and she’s, “Oh, man, I got this post. I’m in the top three. I really want to get to number one.” Google, Danny Sullivan just did a fantastic interview with Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. It’s also on SEO Roundtable, and one of the things that Danny said was that, “Hey, if you guys are in the top three, you’re doing things really well and we clearly like your content, but don’t think that you can update something at three and jump to number one because, historically, those tend to be locked for a reason.”
(00:49:44):
You usually find that off-site factors are necessary to move a post out of the top three logger jam, as it’s called. So I would absolutely not make any unnecessary changes to a post that’s ranked like that, and I think you find that that’s just not the best use of your time. Even though the post isn’t perfect, it’s clearly perfect enough to Google, and that to me is something that I would live with and move on to other battles to fight.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:08):
We usually say don’t look at it, don’t even breathe in its direction, leave it alone. Now-
Andrew Wilder (00:50:16):
Sorry.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:18):
You can improve secondary supporting signals to the post and go in and improve internal linking.
Casey Markee (00:50:26):
You can still send candy to Google engineers.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:29):
You can send write. You can send candy to-
Casey Markee (00:50:30):
To us, candy corn, preferably.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:35):
You can improve, you can build more backlinks to it, good high quality backlinks. So those signals, you can definitely, those supporting secondary signals, they will help. Go ahead, Andrew.
Andrew Wilder (00:50:45):
Oh, I was just going to say that unicorns are really pretty, but they’re evil and they don’t like it When you make eye contact.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:50):
Don’t look.
Andrew Wilder (00:50:51):
Don’t even look at the unicorn or it will stab you in the face with his horn. That’s all you need to remember.
Casey Markee (00:50:57):
There you go.
Melissa Rice (00:50:57):
Very good advice. I like that. Andrew, you’re going to like this one, I think. Olivia said, “Do you recommend us deactivating web stories then? I have a bunch but haven’t touched or edited them forever. Should I just delete?”
Andrew Wilder (00:51:15):
Are they getting any traffic?
Casey Markee (00:51:17):
Are they getting any traffic? Go into Google search console, go down to the URL view, go to the right, there’s a little inverted pyramid. Click on the inverted pyramid, put contains/web, sort all of your web stories down there in Google search console, see if any of them have any traffic. You can even export that, play around a CSV file for that. Maybe if you notice that you’re not getting a lot of traffic, don’t worry about deleting them. Just go into Yoast, go down to other search features. There’s stories you tend to have to expand it because you don’t see it on the left-hand side. Find stories and just no index all the stories. Totally fine, and then that way, you haven’t done anything that you can undo in the future.
Melissa Rice (00:51:59):
Awesome. Sounds good. Okay.
Andrew Wilder (00:52:01):
What about redirecting web stories to the parent post or the related post.
Casey Markee (00:52:06):
I mean, if you think about it, why would you do that? There’s no authority to be taken from the web story. I mean, I know a lot of people used to do that, but-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:17):
[inaudible 00:52:16] anyways.
Casey Markee (00:52:18):
Yeah. So that’s all good, so I mean, it’s fine. I wouldn’t get any value from it.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:22):
I don’t think it’s going to harm or it’s definitely not going to help. It’s not going to harm also.
Andrew Wilder (00:52:25):
Because there probably aren’t inbound backlinks to those web stories.
Casey Markee (00:52:28):
Yeah. No one’s linking to web stories. No one’s sharing web stories on Facebook, at least I’m not aware, but I know.
Melissa Rice (00:52:35):
Okay. April’s got a great question, “What would be the reasons for losing essentially all of your backlinks aligned with the HCU? I went from over 70K backlinks to basically zip and it happened so quickly. What’s up with that?” What is up with that?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:50):
Okay. So depends on where you’re looking, A, how are you tracking these backlinks. Question the legitimacy of that toolset and then their inventory of information. Also, sites could have just been taken down through an update and a lot of spammy farms. We’ll just be like, “Okay. Well, we’re not going to survive this. We’re just going to take the entire thing down.” Look, Google does not look at every single link. Not every single one of your links gets calculated into this giant whatever equation they use to-
Casey Markee (00:53:24):
And Google doesn’t even know which links they count.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:53:27):
Google doesn’t even know. So out of 10 links, Google could be using five, Google could be using-
Casey Markee (00:53:33):
Zero.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:53:33):
Right. So you can’t look at it that way, right? We’ve stopped. Casey knows. I made a lot of money back in the day doing backlink audits. That’s all we did. We did recoveries from penalties. We used to do this. I haven’t done one in years. There’s just no point.
Casey Markee (00:53:51):
No reason.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:53:52):
It’s useless, right? Don’t look at your backlinks. Unless you have a penalty from Google or you can say, “Arsen, I’ve paid a sketchy guy overseas to build links for me and they pay them money for it and we only communicated through WhatsApp,” then there might be a reason for me to take a look at your footprint, right? But right now, there’s really-
Casey Markee (00:54:13):
What’s wrong with WhatsApp?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:54:13):
I don’t know. I just picked one.
Melissa Rice (00:54:22):
Very good. I was about to say, tale as old as time. Okay. We’ve got another question from Joanne, “Do content pillars and clusters contribute towards EEAT in Google’s eyes?”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:54:34):
Okay. So EEAT as a signal, and Casey, I might be completely off, it was not algorithmic. We’re just looking at connectors here. So there is something to be said about topical depth. Am I using the right word? Casey, right? Topical depth.
Casey Markee (00:54:49):
Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:54:49):
So let’s say Arsen’s awesome potato soup blog, and I have a category for baked potato soup, and inside of baked potato soup, I have pages, 10 paginated pages, and then there’s 10 posts, 10 excerpts on every page. That’s 100 baked potato soup recipes. We’re in heaven, but for Google, this is a signal saying that, “Hey, Arsen is authority on baked potato soup because he has so much content around that one particular topic.” So topical depth is a contributor to that overall authority. Now, how it’s all calculated and all of that, we don’t don’t know.
Casey Markee (00:55:25):
And again, it’s just one of those things where Google has these twiddlers and maybe we’ll do our next thing on twiddlers.
Melissa Rice (00:55:30):
Twiddlers.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:55:30):
Twiddlers.
Casey Markee (00:55:33):
Twiddlers.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:55:34):
They need a better name for that stuff.
Andrew Wilder (00:55:34):
We do. We do.
Casey Markee (00:55:37):
It adds some negative connotations, but these twiddlers, they can impact content depth and they can also impact these content pillars, but the thing where I get a lot of bloggers who are confused is that making everything a content pillar like just because Yoast is telling you, “Hey, you should make this cornerstone content,” doesn’t mean that you’re going to miraculously have some kind of uplift in your SEO or traffic because you have designated a category page or this roundup on baked potato soups, a content pillar. Please understand that. Content pillars are literally about making it easier for you to remember to link to your existing content. That’s all it is. It’s a link target.
(00:56:17):
A content pillar is just a fancy way of saying, “Hey, this is my section involving all of this specific content.” Content pillars by themselves are never going to help you rank better, especially if they’re very low quality or you don’t have them built in external signals into the content pillars. So we can reinforce as much as we can internally on the content pillar, but that’s going to be part of a full SEO strategy. It’s never something you’d ever want to rely on by itself because you’re just not going to be successful.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:43):
You can’t create a category for dinner and then put all your dinner posts in there and expect to rank for dinner. It doesn’t work that way, but we’re like 1% there, right?
Melissa Rice (00:56:53):
Okay. We are running out of time, so I’m just going to go ahead and go for the most upvoted question just to wrap this hour up and for everything else we’ll answer on our blog post next week, but here we go. Let’s see. Julianne asks, “Should we still use keyword variations in headings? How do we feel about that?”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:57:14):
Andrew? Andrew?
Andrew Wilder (00:57:15):
Right for your humans.
Casey Markee (00:57:19):
Look, guys, we’ve said this. It’s okay to add your keyword to your heading, just not all of your headings. I have been seeing a lot where there’s just been surprising underoptimization, which is crazy because we tend to go the other way. But if I’ve got eight headings on a page and I didn’t mention the keyword in one of them, that’s a missed opportunity. There’s no reason, for example, for me to say, “Here’s a baked potato soup step-by-step,” or, “How to make baked potato soup.” Nothing wrong with that, and then maybe further down, I’ve got a baked potato soup FAQ. Totally fine, but you just don’t need to have every heading on the page say baked potato.
(00:57:55):
I think that’s where bloggers get a little confused. They take things to extremes. We don’t do extremes. We put some keywords in, but we don’t put all the keywords in and that’s fine. It’s a balance. One of the things you should be looking at is look at what Google is ranking, specifically in the search results. I know that’s old hat. We say that all the time. See what the headings are looking like on the top ranked post. In many cases, they’re not as overoptimized as they used to be.
Andrew Wilder (00:58:27):
Oh, can I-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:27):
Go, go, go, go.
Andrew Wilder (00:58:28):
So I really want to get away from this whole like, “What should we do for Google thing?” Think about the technology we have right now with AI. You go to ChatGPT. Take your whole blog post, paste it into ChatGPT and say, “Hey, what is this about?” You don’t need to put potato soup in every heading. It’s going to know. And Google is doing that on steroids. So I want to get away from, “How long should my post be? What should my keyword intensity be? Should I use the same variation of the keyword?” It knows all this. It just knows what you’re writing about by the nature of you writing about it because it basically is starting to think like a human. So we’re actually converging finally on what Google has been saying all along.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:01):
Your keyword intensity should be very intense. Okay. One last thing. So I want you to think of your headings as a parent-child relationship. So your primary heading is an H1, and your H1 should definitely have your primary keywords so that could be like potato soup recipe, but then the H2 is a child of the H1. So if you’re going to put ingredients, you don’t have to put ingredients for this baked potato soup recipe because it’s an H2. Google understands that these are the ingredients for that H1. So you’ve already contextualized it.
(00:59:33):
Now, you were putting stuff in there because Yoast was telling you to put stuff in there. You followed some crappy advice from somebody else. We’ve been saying this since 2019. You shouldn’t do this. Look at it from a top-down perspective and read through it. If you’re going to be talking to somebody conversationally, are you going to repeat, “Casey, you want to know the ingredients for my baked potato soup?” “Yes, Arsen, I want to.” “Here are the ingredients for my baked potato soup, Casey.” You’re not going to repeat it back to the person. Make it sound natural. And when you start doing that, when you start looking at it from that perspective, you’re going to start winning.
Casey Markee (01:00:07):
Exactly. Exactly.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:08):
Yes. Lots of potato soup for everyone.
Melissa Rice (01:00:11):
Keep it natural, not robotic. Before we go, I wanted to remind everyone watching that our video recap will be immediately ready on YouTube after this, once we’re done airing.
Casey Markee (01:00:28):
Right away.
Melissa Rice (01:00:28):
We’re so techy, okay, but if you’re not a subscriber, I would really consider signing up so you can get access right away. The full recap with links and the resources will be available next week on our blog, the TopHatRank blog. Subscribers will receive an email from me, yours truly, with all of that information next week. So just keep an eye out and, yeah, thank you for joining us on this wild ride where Arsen pressed way too many buttons.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:56):
Should not have control of these things.
Melissa Rice (01:00:58):
I don’t know either, but we will work on that, I promise. Thank you so much, Casey, Andrew, everybody for joining.
Casey Markee (01:01:06):
Bye, everyone.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:01:07):
Bye, everyone.
Andrew Wilder (01:01:07):
Bye.
Melissa Rice (01:01:07):
Bye.
