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A Startling Case Study of Manual Penalties and Negative SEO

Posted by YonDotan

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

This January, I was at a talk at SMX Israel by John Mueller – Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst – about how to recover from a manual penalty. The session’s moderator opened the talk by asking the hundreds of people seated in the room to raise their hands if they had ever been affected by or had a client that was affected by a manual penalty. Nearly the entire room raised their hands – myself included.

Setting the Plot

I am the head of SEO at yellowHEAD, an online marketing agency. One of our clients, whom we are very lucky to have, is a company called Ginger Software. Ginger has a set of context-sensitive grammar and spell check tools that can be integrated with e-mails, browsers, Microsoft Office, and more. When we began working with Ginger, they were in a great state from an SEO perspective. I won’t get into traffic specifics, but their site has an Alexa ranking of around 7,000.

Ginger was getting traffic from thousands of different keywords. They had links from news portals, review websites, forums, social bookmarks – all part of a really great backlink profile. Ginger could be in a whole separate case study about the benefits of a content strategy. They have put months of work into online tools, sections about spelling mistakes, grammar rules, and more. These things have attracted great traffic and links from around the world.

The Plot Thickens

Given the above, you can imagine our surprise when one day in my inbox I found the dreaded notice from Google that gingersoftware.com had a site-wide manual penalty for unnatural inbound links. We quickly set up a call and went through the tooth-rattling ordeal of explaining to our client that they weren’t even ranked for their brand name. Organic traffic dropped by a whopping 94% – and that for a website that gets 66% of its traffic from Google-based organic search.

I’m not going to highlight where they got the penalty … because I think you can tell.

Full Disclosure

Before we go on any further with this case study, I should come clean. In the years of my working in SEO, I have shamelessly bought links, posted crappy blog and forum comments, and run programs that automatically build thousands of spam links. I have bought expired domains, created blog networks, and have ranked affiliate sites with every manner of blackhat technique.

With that off my chest – I will say with as clean a conscience as possible, we did absolutely nothing of the sort for Ginger. While everyone at yellowHEAD has experience with all manners of SEO tactics, in our work as an agency we work with big brands, the presence of which we are categorically not willing to risk. Ginger is a true example of a site that has ranked well because of an extensive and well-thought out content strategy; a strategy driven by creating valuable content for users. When analyzing Ginger’s backlinks, we were amazed to see the kinds of links that had been created because of this strategy. Take, for example, this forum link on the Texas Fishing Forums.

I was positive that this link would be a spam forum comment or something of the sort. Turns out that it’s a page on a fishing forum about Zebra Mussels. Someone got confused and called them Zebra Muscles; a veteran user corrected them by linking to Ginger’s page about muscle vs mussel.

The Plot Thickens… More.

As we dug deeper into Ginger’s backlinks, we quickly began to find the problem. Ginger had recently accrued a large number of extremely spammy links. Bear with me for a little bit because these links require some explanation. GingerSoftware.com was being linked to from random pages on dozens of different websites in clearly spun articles about pornography, pharmaceuticals, gambling, and more. These pages were linking to random marginal articles on Ginger’s website like this page always using the same few keywords – “occurred,� “subsequently,� and a few other similar words. The only thing these words had in common was that Ginger was ranked in the top three for them in Google.

I had to blur most of the text from this page, as it was inappropriate.

Now, needless to say, even if we were trying to rank Ginger’s site let’s call it ‘unconventionally,’ we wouldn’t have done it to unimportant pages that were already ranking in the top three from articles about pornography.

Now here’s where it gets REALLY interesting

Further investigation into these pages found the same exact articles on dozens of other websites, all linking to different websites using exactly the same keywords. For example:

Link to Wiktionary.org

Link to TheFreeDictionary.com

Link to Thesaurus.com

So – What the $#@!%!#$^ are these links?!

As I mentioned in my disclosure previously – I am no newcomer to link spam, so I happen to know a bit about what these links are. These articles were, first and foremost, not created by us or by anyone else at Ginger. They were also not posted with Ginger Software or any of the other websites linked to in those articles in mind. These articles were posted by spammers using programs which automatically build links (my guess is GSA Search Engine Ranker) in order to rank websites. Each one of these articles linked to some spam website (think something like the-best-diet-pills-green-coffee-beans-are-awesome . info or some nonsense like that) in addition to linking to Ginger.

These programs find places on the internet where they can automatically post articles with links. As a way to ‘trick’ Google into thinking the links are natural, they also include links to other big websites in good neighborhoods. Common targets for these kinds of links include Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and other such websites.

Ginger was not the victim of negative SEO, but was simply caught in the crossfire of some spammers trying to promote their own websites.

We Had Doubts

Once we found these links, we honed our search to find all of them. We were able to do this using Ahrefs, which is a fantastic tool for any sort of link analysis. We organized all of the links to Ginger by anchor text and went after all of the ones with the aforementioned keywords. We removed as many of these links as possible, disavowed the rest, and filed for reconsideration as described above.

As confident as we were on the face of it all – we had serious doubts. We knew how important it was for Ginger’s business to get over this penalty as quickly as possible and didn’t want to get anything wrong. We couldn’t find any other “bad linksâ€� besides these ones but we kept thinking to ourselves “there’s no way that Google completely slapped a website due to some spam links to these random pages.â€� There had to be more to it than that!

Ginger themselves handled this situation incredibly. Where they could have yelled and gotten angry, instead they said, in a sentence “Ok – let’s fix this. How do we help?â€� With Ginger’s help, we mobilized dozens of people inside their company, trained them on finding bad links, manually reviewed over 40,000 links, contacted all domains which had spam links on them, disavowed everything we couldn’t get to, and submitted the request for reconsideration on December 17th, only five days after the site got penalized. The extreme sense of urgency behind this came both because of the importance of organic traffic for Ginger Software, and because the upcoming Christmas and New Year’s holidays. We knew that everyone going on vacation would significantly increase the amount of time it took to have the reconsideration request reviewed. You can find a very long and detailed explanation of the process we used to clean up Ginger’s links here.

Despite the speed with which we were able to submit the request, it took nearly a month to hear back from Google. On January 15th, we received a message in Google Webmaster Tools that the penalty had been revoked. We, and the staff at Ginger, were ecstatic and spent the next few days glued to our ranking trackers and to Google Analytics to see what would happen. Rankings and traffic quickly began to rise and, as of the writing of this article, traffic is at about 82% of pre-penalty levels.

Lo and Behold – Rankings!

The (Very) Unofficial Response from Google

Getting over the manual penalty, in some ways, was almost as surprising as getting it. The fact that all we did was remove and disavow the negative SEO links and the penalty was removed indicates that, indeed, the penalty may have been caused entirely by those links.

At the manual penalty session of SMX, towards the end of the talk, I crept slowly towards the front of the room and as soon as the talk was over, as unexpectedly as a manual penalty, I pounced to the front of the speakers’ podium to talk to John Mueller before everyone else. I explained to him (in a much shorter version than this article) the situation with Ginger and asked if they were aware of this at Google and what they plan to do about it.

John responded with something along the lines of the following:

“You mean like when somebody creates spam links but also links to Wikipedia? … We have seen it happen before. Sometimes we can tell but sometimes it’s a little bit harder… but [if] you get a manual penalty from it you will know about it so you can just disavow the links.�

I have to say, I was pretty surprised with that response. While it wasn’t exactly an admission of guilt, it wasn’t a denial either. He basically said yes, it can happen but if it happens you will get a manual penalty, so you’ll know about it!

So What Does It All Mean?

One wonders if Google understands the impact a manual penalty can have on a business and if they truly accept the responsibility that comes along with handing out these kinds of punishments. Ginger, as a company, relies on search traffic as their main method of user acquisition and they are not unique in that sense. There are a few important takeaways here.

1.) CHECK YOUR BACKLINKS

No matter who you are – big or small, this is crucial. This kind of thing can happen, seemingly, to anyone. We have instated a weekly backlink scan for Ginger Software in which we look through all of their new links from Webmaster Tools, AHREFS, and Majestic SEO. If we find any more spam links (which we still are finding), we try to remove them and add them to the disavow list. Time consuming? Yes. Critical? Yes.

2.) Negative SEO is Alive and Real

It has been my thinking for a long time that links should not be able to hurt your website. At the most, a link should be discounted if it is considered bad. The current system is dangerous and too easy to game. With Ginger, it was obvious (to us at least) that these links were no doing of their own. The links were in absurd places of the lowest quality and linked to low-benefit unimportant pages of Ginger’s website. If this was actually a negative SEO attack, imagine how easy it would be to make it look like it was the company’s doing.

3.) Google is making themselves look REALLY bad.

The action that Google took in this case was far too drastic. The site didn’t receive a partial penalty, but rather a full-blown sitewide penalty. According to the keyword planner, for the top four branded terms for Ginger, there are 23,300 searches per month. In this case that became 23,300 searches per month where people could not find exactly what they were looking for.

Google has an amazing amount of work on their hands staying ahead of the spammers of the world, but they have also become the foundation of the business models of companies worldwide. To quote from FDR and Spiderman (who can argue with that???), “with great power comes great responsibility.� We can only hope that Google will heed these words and, in the meantime, we will be happy with the fact that Ginger are back up and running.


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Content Outliers: Learning from the Web’s Most Viral Content

Posted by jamesporter

Let’s start with some questions.

  • Do you want coverage for your brand in major publications?
  • Do you want significant increases in your backlink profile?
  • Do you want a larger, more engaged community?
  • Do you want thousands of new visitors to your site?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you should be thinking about creating viral content.

What can viral content do for you?

This is a piece of content we launched 4 months ago.

Since launch it has been featured on CNN, ZDNet, and Fast Company, has hit over 500 linking root domains, has earned over 95k social shares, and most importantly, has driven 270k+ unique visitors to the client’s site.

So, how can you start creating viral content?


First things first: What do we mean by viral content?

Any sort of content where the viewership grows rapidly as the result of sharing. Here’s a good primer.

Secondly, how do we get good at viral content?

Looking back at past viral success is a great way of understanding what’s going to be successful in the future, so we need to get our hands on some data!

To get that data, I worked with the team at BuzzSumo, a content marketing research tool I highly recommend.

We dug into their database to find the 2,000 most-shared pieces of content on the web that were published within the last six months.

For each of those domains, we then pulled the second-most shared pages, which gave us a great opportunity to do some maths and identify the “content outliers”—the pages on a site that have massively outperformed other content on the same site.

(source)

For this analysis we looked for content outliers within the top 2,000 list, and also took a deep dive into the top 50 most-shared pages.

So, what did we learn from the analysis?


1. Make visual content, because it’s easy to engage

Of the top 50 most-shared pieces of content, 48% were video, and 24% were image-based.

That means 72% of the viral content analysed was primarily visual.

So why is visual content so successful? Visual content is incredibly easy for people to understand and engage with. By reducing the engagement demands on the viewer, we’re increasing the amount of people that take the time to engage with our content and therefore increasing the size of our audience that engage and share.


2. The quality of your idea is EVERYTHING

This sounds obvious, but it’s worth drilling into. In his excellent book, “Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” Jonah Berger flips contemporary thinking on his head by saying that mavens (influencers) are less important than we think. The real key to viral success is the quality of the idea.

This piece of content from Mirabeau Wines, “How to Open A Bottle of Wine Without A Corkscrew,” is an incredible example of a winning idea.

To date, this piece has been shared nearly 1 million times, featured in The Telegraph, The Mirror and Time Magazine, and has been viewed over 5 million times on YouTube.

Content marketing tip: Forget everything else, just get your idea right. How? To start, read this.


3. Create your content around scalable themes

What stood out in the data from BuzzSumo was the broad appeal (scalability) of the topics that were being shared. Marriage, friendship, family, cancer, and personal improvement featured in more than 30% of the top 50 posts.

But why did they feature so heavily?

These concepts are relevant to a large audience and provide the opportunity for wide-scale sharing.

As a content marketer, when ideating content, you need to make the distinction between targeting a niche audience and targeting a broad audience.

Niche audience More viral due to shared values ideals and interests of the niche
Broad audience Less viral due to the disparate nature of the group, but with opportunity to operate at a much larger scale

The audience that you choose to target has a major effect on the level of success that your content is likely to achieve.

Content marketing tip: A third way is to target a broad niche. This involves creating content that is interesting to a specific niche audience, which then stimulates interest in the larger market.

By doing this you get the benefits of the concentrated sharing of a highly passionate user base, which then stimulates interest in the larger market.

Using ‘The History of Dance Music’ as an example, you can see the way the content could spread through the web, from:

Highly active and passionate dance music fans > Interested dance music fans > General music lovers


4. Make content interactive

Interestingly, the two most shared pieces of content pulled from BuzzSumo were both quizzes:

There are many reasons why this content killed it, but one of the key reasons is the interactive nature of each piece. By forcing users to interact with a piece of content to fully experience it, you increase their level of engagement. The more people that engage with a piece, the more people will share it.

Content marketing example: This interactive piece detailing the tech sector’s acquisitions since 1999 has been a great success.

Why it worked: The content encourages engagement via scrolling or zooming to drill into the data.


5. Stimulate an emotional reaction

A key way to create viral content is to stimulate an emotional reaction.

Why is emotional content so often viral?

At a simplistic level, our emotional experiences are amplified through sharing. So when we experience a strong emotional reaction, we want to share it. Think of social buttons as a vent for expressing our emotional experiences.

What’s really interesting though is that the emotion you stimulate (positive versus negative) is less important than the strength of the emotional reaction.

Recent research has found that the strength of the emotional reaction is absolutely key in viral content.

I defy anyone to read this article about a mountain pathway in China without experiencing some sort of emotional reaction (mine: seriously sweaty palms!). This piece has been shared over 1 million times and it’s the strength of the emotional reaction that has stimulated people to share.

(source)

Content marketing example: As a content marketer, it can be pretty difficult to create an emotional reaction if you’re in a boring industry. But you need to look beyond your products to your audience and the things they love and care about. Think of the Dove Real Beauty campaign. Soap is boring. They took an existing emotional issue that their consumers cared about and developed it into an incredible marketing campaign.


6. Leverage social triggers

Hat tip to Jonah Berger again for this one. If we can link our content to existing environmental cues, then it’s more likely that we will get our content noticed by our target audience. This works because we are leveraging existing audience awareness to get cut through.

By playing off issues that are already front of mind for our audience, we increase a piece’s chances of success.

There were various examples of this throughout the BuzzSumo data, but a key one (not in the list) was from Time, titled “The Selfiest Cities in the World.” Selfies are a major social trigger at the moment, so Time have hooked their content into that.


7. Personalised content

What can you teach people about themselves? Content that allows people to better understand themselves and their relative standing with the rest of the world performed really well in the data sample.

The following is a great example of this type of content. By making content specifically about a user you automatically stimulate interest.


8. Target an audience likely to share

We all know that you need to create content for a specific audience (and ideally for your customers). But you can increase your chances of virality by targeting audiences that are highly likely to share…

If your content is targeted towards a group of people that don’t share a lot, then it is going to be harder to create viral content in that space.

Pro tip: An audience that Buzzfeed target their content towards is the “Bored in Work, Bored in Line” audience. Basically this audience is a group of people who are bored, surfing the web, looking to be entertained or surprised.

The “What Career Should I Actually Have” is a classic example of Buzzfeed targeting this audience.

Content marketing example: Another great example of audience targeting comes from the site “Wait But Why,” called Why are Generation Y Yuppies So Unhappy. By specifically creating content for and about Generation Y (a highly active sharing group) they were able to increase their chances of success. This article was syndicated to the Huffington Post and became that site’s most shared piece of content (1.2 million shares).

Pro tip: According to viral kings Upworthy, “middle-aged women are the biggest sharers on the web. If you can target them, do!”


9.Take a contrarian viewpoint

A great way of stimulating an emotional response is by taking a contrarian viewpoint. An example from the buzzsumo list of contrarian content was this:

Content Total Shares

Christopher Columbus Was Awful

1,164,991

By taking an entrenched viewpoint and flipping it on it’s head, you’re making a piece of content a must read because you are challenging people’s existing views.


10. Reinforce viewpoints people already have

Another viral content approach is to make people feel right. Creating content that reinforces what people already think and feel is a great way to stimulate sharing.

This video is about people using their phones too much and not living in the moment.

It expresses a sentiment that a lot of people related to, which in turn increases their propensity to share.

Content marketing example: Upworthy focus the majority of their content towards existing viewpoints that people already have. Whether it’s LGBT, education, parenting, guns and crime, by playing off existing emotionality, they increase the virality of their content.


Here is the full data list of BuzzSumo’s 50 most-shared pieces of content on the web along with the sharing statistics:

URL

Total Shares

What Career Should You Actually Have

4,419,323

How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk

3,478,306

If Only For A Second – You Need To Watch This

3,296,397

Como fazer um batuque com seu porco de estimação

3,229,795

39 Test Answers That Are 100% Wrong But Totally Genius At The Same Time

2,508,120

Russian Mother Takes Magical Pictures of Her Two Kids With Animals On Her Farm

2,494,802

Best coin ever spent.

2,404,200

Compilation of Cats Stealing Dog Beds

2,144,399

30 Naughtiest Dogs: You’ll Crack Up When You Find Out What They Did

2,133,342

This Might Be The Scariest Trail In The World. But You’ll NEVER Guess Where It Leads. Unbelievable.

2,108,904

I Can’t Believe How Funny This Is. I Am In Tears, Make Sure Your Sound Is Turned On!

2,048,539

Homeless dog living in a trash pile gets rescued, and then does something amazing! Read more: http://www.trueactivist.com/gab_gallery/homeless-dog-living-in-a-trash-pile-gets-rescued-and-then-does-something-amazing/

1,992,817

While Their Kids Sleep, These parents Pull Of This Amazing Stunt…

1,860,502

Marriage Isn’t For You

1,848,969

Creative Mom Turns Her Baby’s Naptime Into Dream Adventures (Updated)

1,787,279

Compilation of Cats Stealing Dog Beds

1,717,782

Beware Of The 5 lb. Bag Of Sugarless Gummy Bears On Amazon.com – The Reviews Are Priceless!

1,646,695

After I saw this, I put down my phone and didn’t pick it up for the rest of the day…

1,631,432

This Three Minute Commercial Puts Full-Length Hollywood Films to Shame

1,599,884

WestJet Christmas Surprise Will Make You Believe in Santa

1,594,405

Murmuration

1,575,770

Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization

1,529,580

A Big Butt Is A Healthy Butt: Women With Big Butts Are Smarter And Healthier

1,514,008

Icomania

1,512,417

This Is What Happens When A Kid Leaves Traditional Education

1,464,780

See That Box? That’s Where They Put the Babies. And It’s the Most Remarkable Thing You’ll See All Week

1,462,126

Riding A Bike Over 72ft Canyon – Amazing!

1,429,648

Sexiest Twerk Choreography… Ever?

1,415,268

How to interact with the introverted…

1,409,372

KitKat Break Labs

1,400,393

You’re a stay-at-home mom? What do you DO all day?

1,396,121

Robert Downey Jr Sings With Sting And Absolutely Kills It.

1,381,969

This is one happy fox.

1,358,921

What a Choir of Silent Monks Does Will Make You Laugh

1,336,482

Share This with All the Schools, Please

1,284,285

Airline Pulls Amazing Christmas Stunt on Passengers

1,276,863

What You Get When You Pour Molten Aluminum Into An Ant Hill

1,273,036

Police Chief writes EPIC letter to Kanye After He Compared Himself to a Police Officer & Soldier

1,262,817

A Boy Makes Anti-Muslim Comments In Front Of An American Soldier. The Soldier’s Reply: Priceless.

1,231,198

Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

1,230,618

Chase Mission Main Street Grants

1,220,665

After Reading This, You’ll Never Look At A Banana In The Same Way Again

1,217,816

Khan Academy

1,215,464

17 Things That Happen When You’ve Been Friends With Someone For, Literally, Ever

1,197,644

Hidden Camera Catches Beagle Stealing Chicken Nuggets In Epic Style (VIDEO)

1,181,805

Christopher Columbus was awful (but this other guy was not) – The Oatmeal

1,164,991

What Little Girls Wish Daddies Knew

1,114,981

Twins were born, but haven’t realized that

1,075,449

Pope Francis Condemns Racism and Declares that “All Religions Are True” at Historic Third Vatican Council

1,075,410

Married or not… you should read this.

1,040,203

Hope you enjoyed the post. Fire any questions to me in the comments. Up and to the right!!!


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Keyword Targeting, Density, and Cannibalization – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Keyword targeting is still an integral part of online marketing, but it isn’t the same as it used to be, and we want to make sure you’re able to keep up with the changes. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers today’s best practices for keyword targeting, and clears up some common misconceptions about keyword density and cannibalization.

Keyword Targeting, Density, and Cannibalization – Whiteboard Friday

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I’m going to talk a little bit about some keyword targeting, density, keyword density, and cannibalization issues. These are issues that I’ve seen come up a few times. I’ve received some email questions about them, and so I thought maybe it’s a good time to readdress some of these best practices and to talk about how things like Hummingbird, in particular, have changed some of the ways that we think about keyword targeting, as Google’s engine has really evolved to be more sophisticated with how they identify and process keyword use than they have historically.

So, first off, I’m going to start by identifying this page, actually a really wonderful blog and website from a local Seattle blogger, talking about Seattle Espresso. So I did a search for Seattle’s best espresso, because that’s a topic of us many here at the Mozplex and many of you who come to visit Seattle are often interested in, and I found this wonderful page.

Now, there are some interesting things about it. It ranks very well. I think it’s ranking number four, and another blog post from the same guy from the next year of his reviews is ranking number five. So he’s got sort of two positions in there. But what’s interesting to me is there’s not a lot of keyword targeting. In fact, this particular gentleman even has something on his About page that says, “If you’re an SEO or a social media person, don’t even contact me.” So clearly this is not a guy who’s thinking tremendously about SEO, doesn’t have a lot of keyword targeting in mind, but is doing a tremendously good job of ranking, and that’s because he’s, perhaps unintentionally, following a lot of really smart rules.

So first off, as opposed to early keyword targeting world of SEO, today I really don’t stress repetition. I think repetition is something we can almost avoid. So I don’t worry about, “Hey, I only have four instances of the term ‘Seattle’s Best Espresso’ on the page. That’s not enough. I really need six or I need seven or I need five or I need three.” I don’t worry about the number. I do, generally speaking, like to make sure that at least somewhere on the page, at one point or another, the phrase is mentioned once or twice is generally good enough, and sometimes if it makes sense to have it in the copy anyway, for user experience reasons, for readability reasons, for content reasons, great, fine. That’s okay.

Also, I never, ever use a density metric. It used to be the case that density was somewhat reasonably okay, reasonably correlated with better keyword targeting. But, honestly, that went out the window so long ago. I think when I started in SEO, in 2002, it was already dying. People were already talking about keyword density being a relatively useless metric.

Let me just explain what density is very briefly for anyone who might not know. So there’s a lot of content here, in fact 67 unique words, and what I’ve done is highlight in purple these Seattle, espresso, best espresso, espresso, 67 unique words. Keyword density basically says, “Well, there are four instances of espresso. Out of 67 words, that’s a 5.97% density of espresso.” Can you see how incredibly useless this is?

So search engines evolved dramatically beyond keyword density, probably as soon as the late ’90s. So we’re talking a long time ago, and yet there are still a tremendous number of SEOs who look for a keyword density analysis and density tools and think this is a good way to do the best practice. It really is not. I would urge you not to use density as a metric, not to think about it. You won’t find it in our keyword tools. You won’t find it in most good keyword tools.

Title is very useful. It’s a very useful place to employ your keywords, but a click-worthy title is actually worth a lot more than just a perfectly keyword-targeted title. So perfectly keyword-targeted would be keyword phrase right at the beginning, exact match, so something like “Seattle’s Best Espressos,” and then “I review 113 different coffee places in the city.” Okay, that’s not a terrible title. You could imagine clicking that.

I actually really like the title that this blogger’s put together: “The Best and Worst in Seattle Espresso, 2011 Edition.” This isn’t perfectly keyword-targeted. I searched for “Seattle’s best espresso,” which is, by far, the most common phrasing that searchers are going to use. But he’s got “best” separated from “Seattle Espresso.” It’s not right at the front of the title. It’s still a great title.

You know what’s even smarter, that I really like, is the way that he writes it. “The Best and Worst in Seattle Espresso” is almost more compelling to me than just knowing the best. I’m really curious about the worst. The worst holds a curious fascination for me. If I see some coffee shop that I really love on the worst list, well, I’m going to get all inflamed about that and riled up. But what a great way to write headlines, to write titles. He’s employed the keywords intelligently, but he’s made me want to click, and that’s something that I think we should all take away from.

On page is very useful. So putting the keyword on the page, especially important in the headline. Why is it so important in the headline? It’s not because SEO is about perfect keyword placement and getting that H1 tag. It’s not actually that important or critical that you get it in the H1 or the H2. It’s a best practice, and I would generally recommend it, but it’s okay if you don’t.

The reason I really recommend this is because when someone clicks on this title in the search results, “The Best and Worst in Seattle Espresso, 2011 Edition,” if they land on a page that does not have that headline, that title at the top of the page in some bigger font, instantly searchers will get the impression that they’ve landed on the wrong page and they’ll click the Back button. As we know, pogo-sticking is a real problem. People jumping from a result over to the search results and then jumping back to search results, that gives the engine an indication that people were not satisfied and happy with this result. They’re going and they’re scrolling down and clicking on other people’s results instead. You don’t want that. You want to own that experience. You want to be the provider of the best possible relevancy and searcher experience that you can.

That’s why one of the other recommendations that I have, when it comes to on page, is never sacrificing user experience. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, Rand said I should really have the keyword on the page in some sort of exact format, like at least twice and in the headline,” yes, but if you think that’s making a worse user experience, then mixing it up a little bit like this blogger did, mix it up a little bit. Go for the better user experience every time. Particularly because of things like what Google did with Hummingbird, where they’ve gotten much more sophisticated about text, contextual analysis, relevancy, the way that they interpret things, you can see a lot of search results now where it is not keyword targeting that’s winning the day, but really searcher intent. Meaning, if I’m going and searching and this blogger has done a really good job of connecting up the terms and concepts that Google has identified that they associate with best espresso, they’re going to rank particularly well.

Let me show you some really smart things that perhaps unintentionally this blogger did. He mentions coffee shop names — Victrola, Cortona. He’s got Vivace down there later. He has Herkimer Coffee. Herkimer is the maker of the espresso that they serve at Cortona Cafe. This is incredibly intelligent because when Google scans the Web and they see lots of people talking about Seattle’s best espresso, these coffee shops and roasters are mentioned very frequently. There’s a high degree of network connectivity, keyword connectivity between these terms and phrases.

So when I see, as Google, Seattle’s best espresso and I don’t see any mention of Herkimer or Vivace or Victrola or Ballard Coffee Works, Seattle Coffee Works, I’m going to get a little suspicious. If I see things like Starbucks and Tully’s and Seattle’s Best Coffee, which is a brand, I’m going to think, “Gosh, I don’t know if they’ve actually localized. I don’t know if this is relevant to that searcher’s query.” In fact, if you look at the front page for Seattle’s best espresso, you will not find places that list, well, most of the results do not list places like Starbucks and Seattle’s Best Coffee and Tully’s, and these bigger national brands or regional brands.

The last thing that I’ll mention on targeting is that providing unique value is essential. I did a whole Whiteboard Friday about providing unique value and the uniqueness of content. But those topically relevant terms that I just mentioned can be very helpful here. But really it’s about providing something that you’ll never find anywhere else. Not just unique content, meaning this text is unique to the Web, but meaning the value provided by it is truly unique. I can’t find this value. I can’t get what I get from this article anywhere else on the Web. That’s critically important.

All right. Next piece is cannibalization, and keyword cannibalization is sort of a tough, meaty topic. It’s not quite as important as it used to be, because Google has gotten much more sophisticated, more advanced in being able to tell. Basic idea behind cannibalization is, “I’ve got a page targeting Seattle’s Best Espresso, and then I have another page targeting Wallingford’s Best Espresso, which is a neighborhood here in Seattle. Should I be really careful not to use the word Seattle on my Wallingford Best Espresso page? How do I link between them? How do I make sure that Google knows which one to rank well?” In the past, Google was not smart enough, and a lot of times you would see these not as relevant pages outranking the one you really wanted to rank. So people in the SEO world came up with this term keyword cannibalization, and they tried to find ways to make Google rank the page that they wanted. Google’s gotten much better about this. There are still a few best practices that we should keep in mind.

So, first off, on page targeting for a unique keyword phrase is optimal. So if we know that we want a page that’s Seattle’s Best Espresso, great. Having that term in the title, in the headline of a unique page is a very good idea. If we know that we want another one that’s Wallingford, that’s great too. Bt it is okay if you have multiple pages employing part of a keyword term or phrase. So, for example, I’ve got my Wallingford page. It’s okay on the Wallingford page if I also mention Seattle. I could say “Seattle’s Wallingford Neighborhood,” or “The Best Espresso in Seattle’s Wallingford Neighborhood,” or “In Wallingford, Seattle.” That’s okay to do. That’s not going to create the cannibalization that it might have in years past.

Linking with appropriate anchor text is very helpful. So let’s say here’s my coffee addict’s guide to Seattle, and I’ve got links in here: “Best coffee roasters in Seattle,” “Best espresso in Seattle,” “Best coffee online from Seattle’s roasters.” Great. So now I have unique keyword phrases that I’m targeting, and I’m going to link out to each of these pages, and then from each of these pages, if I’ve got my best online coffee from Seattle roasters page, I probably do want to link to my best espresso in Seattle page with that anchor text. Call it what the page is. Don’t just say, “For some great espresso places in Seattle, click here.” No. “Click here,” not great anchor text. “Best espresso in Seattle,” that’s the anchor text I generally want to have, and that’s not just for search engines. It’s also for users.

Number four, the last part about keyword cannibalization is if you have older pages, this happens a lot for bloggers and content marketers who are producing pages, lots of unique content over time, but some of it is repetitive. So if you have an older page, it can be very wise to retire that content in favor of something newer and fresher, and there’s a number of ways to do this. I could 301 from the old URL to the new one. I could use a rel=canonical to point from my old piece of content to my new one on the same topic. Or I could refresh the existing page, essentially take the same URL, dump the old content, and put the new content on there. I could even archive the old content on a brand new page that’s sort of like, “Hey, if you want the old version of this, here it is.”

You can see we’ve done that at Moz several times with things like MozCon, with our industry survey, with our old ranking factors. We sort of move that old content off to another URL and put the new stuff up at the URL that’s been ranking, been performing so that we don’t have the challenge of having one trying to compete against another.

These techniques can be really helpful for those of you who’ve got sites and you’re producing lots of content, you’re targeting many keywords, and you’re trying to figure out how to organize these things.

I look forward to some great comments. Thanks very much gang. I’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Google’s 2014 Redesign: Before and After

Posted by Dr-Pete

Over the past few months, Google has been testing a redesign of both their overall SERP format and their AdWords blocks. In the past day or two, it appears that they’ve rolled these changes out to a large part of their audience. While we still have a chance to grab before and after versions of the SERPs, I thought it would be worth a quick stroll down memory lane and a look at the future of Google.

I. Basic search result

Let’s start with a pretty basic search result, a query for [pygmalion]. Here’s the before and after:

The title font in the new version is slightly bigger, and Google has done away with the underlining. Interestingly, the source URL is actually a little smaller. The snippet and mini-links seem to have remained the same.

II. Expanded site-links

Here’s a #1 result with expanded site-links. The query is [carolina place mall]:

Like the main result, site-links are also getting the larger title font without underlines. This example also clearly shows that some title tags will get cut off with the new, larger font. This could impact click-through rates, so you may want to consider shorter titles going forward (at least for critical pages).

Notice the faint horizontal divider at the bottom. This sets the expanded #1 result apart from the rest of the SERP. These horizontal dividers are used frequently in the new design, and I strongly believe that they are a move toward a more card-like look (akin to mobile, Google+, and Google Now).

III. Image vertical results

This is what the new image vertical results look like. The query is [roger williams university]:

The new format has the new font, plus a fairly pronounced “More images…” link. Again, the vertical results are separated (above and below) by a horizontal divider. The images themselves appear to be formatted the same.

IV. News vertical results

Here’s a query for [wtop traffic], showing the redesigned news vertical results. Note that these were captured on different days, so the actual articles have changed—the count/layout are equivalent, though:

All articles links are using the larger font (with the same implications for length/wrapping). Like image vertical results, news results get a top and bottom divider. In general, you can see that almost every type of result is taking up significantly more vertical space.

V. Local pack results

Here’s a 3-pack of local results, for the query [lands end] and focused on San Diego, CA:

Larger font, no underlines, horizontal dividers—you know the drill. Note the lighter-gray text on the actual location information (address and phone).

VI. In-depth articles

Here’s a look at Google’s newest vertical, in-depth articles. The query is [palm oil]:

The redesign pretty much follows the pattern of the other verticals. Note that the actual header font—”In-depth articles”—is a bit smaller and slightly grayed out.

Google has been testing many variations of in-depth articles, and all of them suggest that this expanded format may be replaced with something more Spartan. Here’s a recent test (this is not live, and this design will likely change), for the query [foreclosure]:

While this test format follows the rules of the redesign, it is in every other way dramatically different from Google’s current treatment of in-depth articles. Note that this test version appeared in the “#2” slot (right after the first organic result), whereas current in-depth article blocks usually appear at or near the end of page 1. Expect in-depth articles to get a major overhaul in the next few months.

VII. Video thumbnails

In 2014, video results are really more of an enhancement than an actual vertical. Here’s a quick before and after for the query [wild kratts]:

This is essentially just an organic result, with a bit of information and a thumbnail added—the general layout and thumbnail characteristics have remained the same. This also true of authorship results and review snippets—the title and URL fonts have changed, but the general layout, thumbnail size, etc. seem to all be the same.

VIII. AdWords (top)

On top of the general design change, Google has been testing a new AdWords format for months—these may be rolling out together, but the tests themselves have been separate. Here’s a reasonably complex AdWords block from the top of a query for [keens]:

In addition to the larger, non-underlined titles and horizontal divider, the colored background is gone, and a yellow [Ad] box appears next to each individual ad. The “Ads related to…” text has been removed as well.

IX. AdWords (right)

The AdWords block in the right-hand column has also changed, but the difference is a bit less dramatic. Here’s the same query ([keens]):

There’s just one yellow [Ads] label for the entire block, and there’s no change to the background (because the old version didn’t have a colored background). The new fonts do expand the titles significantly and increase the vertical area of the total ad space.

Note that the AdWords block on the bottom of the left-hand column looks very similar to the redesigned top AdWords block. Other SERP elements, including the knowledge panel, answer boxes, paid shopping, and carousels seem to have been unaffected by the redesign (so far).

It’s in the cards

Back in November, I predicted that Google would move toward a more card-like format in 2014. While my future SERP concepts were heavily influenced by mobile and Google Now and are more extreme than the currrent redesign, don’t overlook the way Google is using dividers to separate out SERP elements. As mobile and tablet proliferate, and new devices like Glass come into play, Google wants to have SERPs that they can easily mix-and-match, providing whatever combination is most relevant for each device and situation. For now, desktop remains a fixed, two-column format, but Google’s design decisions are being driven more and more by mobile devices, and the future is in individual information elements that can be easily rearranged.

To see this idea in action, here’s a local (Chicago suburbs) search for [starbucks]. Notice how the dividers separate the expanded top ad, the expanded #1 result, a local 3-pack, a news box, and, finally, the rest of the organic results:

While a horizontal line might not seem like a big change, Google is clearly working to carve up the SERP into units that can potentially be mixed and matched. Also note where “#2” is on this page. As simple as they may seem, these design changes are redefining organic results.

Do you like it?

Trick question—no one cares. Sorry, that was a bit harsh, but here’s the reality: Google has been testing this for months across what are probably millions of unique visitors. A few dozen marketers complaining about the new design is not going to sway their decision. At this point, the decision is 98% made, and it’s made based on Google’s goals and Google’s data. The best you can do is try to assess how these changes impact your bottom line and adjust accordingly. Don’t waste your time shouting at the wind.

One final note: While this redesign seems to be rolling out, Google has not officially confirmed the change and it may still be in testing (albeit widespread testing). I wanted to put together a post while we could still compare and contrast the before and after versions, but this design could still change over the next few days, weeks, or months.

Update: In the comments, Gaurav pointed out that Google’s lead search designer, Jon Wiley, confirmed the roll-out yesterday on Google+. Looks like it is at least mostly official.


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