What if the future of SEO is being rewritten right before your eyes? Join us as we explore this fascinating landscape as we recap Brighton SEO in San Diego. Together with my insightful guests, Venkata and Zak, we unpack the engaging discussions around AI integration in SEO, brand consistency, and Microsoft and Google's latest innovations. The event was not just about absorbing expert knowledge but also experiencing the synergy between SEO and paid search, thanks to the concurrent HeroConf. This crossover provided the opportunity for additional insights, especially in the realms of reporting and data analysis.

Networking is more than exchanging business cards; it's about building impactful relationships. We delve into the immense value of engaging with speakers and vendors, leading to potential collaborations and deep dives into trends like topical authority. Reflecting on the event's accessibility and supportive environment for newcomers, we highlight the opportunities it offers for both seasoned professionals and first-time speakers. Our gratitude extends to Venkata and Zak for their contribution, as we look forward to future conferences and additional episodes discussing more in depth discussions on topics that stood out.


Guest Bios:

Venkata Pagadala:
Venkata Pagadala is a seasoned SEO and Growth Strategist, driving businesses from startups to enterprises generating over $1 billion annually to online success. With data-driven strategies, he has led campaigns achieving 40+ million monthly organic visits and worked with industry leaders like Apartments.com and Recovery.org.

Specializing in AI-driven content creation, site migrations, and technical SEO, Venkata excels at simplifying complex challenges to deliver measurable results. Featured on platforms like Spotify and SEOFOMO, he’s dedicated to building impactful online presences, sustainable growth, and revenue optimization in the digital landscape

https://www.venkatapagadala.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/venkata-pagadala/

Zak Perez:
With over thirteen years of expertise, Zak Perez is dedicated to optimizing LoopNet.com, the largest online marketplace for commercial real estate, with over 20 million indexed URLs.

His background spans SEO, front-end development, UX/UI design, conversion rate optimization, accessibility and AI. He brings a holistic and data-driven approach, aimed at maximizing online visibility, improving user experience, and driving results.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakperez/

Ever wondered if AI chat interfaces could revolutionize your search experience? Imagine having a virtual assistant that not only answers your queries but understands the context and nuances behind them. In this episode, Philip Mastroianni takes you on a journey through the world of AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, shedding light on their growing popularity and transformative impact on traditional search engines like Google. We’ll discuss Perplexity AI, a unique search engine that combines conversational abilities with real-time data retrieval, offering a more personalized and interactive approach to finding information. Philip compares Perplexity's strengths and limitations against traditional search engines, providing a comprehensive look at how these advanced tools are changing the landscape of online searches.

Looking to the future, Philip explores the emerging trend of RAG custom chats and their potential to provide even more personalized and nuanced search experiences. While these specialized chats require substantial upfront effort to curate their knowledge base, the payoff can be significant for users within specific knowledge domains. The episode also tackles the critical issues of trust and credibility in AI-generated content, highlighting the necessary balance between innovative AI tools and traditional search engines. This conversation delves into how AI technology might revolutionize SEO and information retrieval while emphasizing the continued importance of a diverse ecosystem of search tools tailored to different user needs and preferences. Don’t miss this insightful discussion on the future of search technology!

I discuss my experience testing different AI systems prompting including Google Bard, OpenAI GPT-4 / GPT 3.5, Anthropic Claude 2, Llama 2, and Jasper to generate location-specific content. Most of this is based on the last 18 months of building out prompts, and now testing on models released over the last 4-6 weeks.

Google Bard

• Released major update on July 13, 2023
• Prompt strategy: Long paragraphs, numbered tasks, multiple iterations
• Couldn't produce high quality content without heavy editing
• Issues following instructions, needing reminders

OpenAI GPT-4

• Works well with conversational, transcribed prompt
• Able to follow directions and produce high quality content
• No need for shot prompting

OpenAI GPT-3.5

• Uses revised GPT-4 prompt plus follow up to enforce formatting
• Gets content production-ready after second prompt
• Quality close to GPT-4 with additional data/content provided

Anthropic Claude 2

• No API access, using text interface
• Required revising prompt structure significantly
• XML tagging of data types improves context
• Built-in prompt diagnosis/suggestions helpful
• Single prompt can produce high quality output

Meta Llama 2

• Free to use commercially if you have the hardware
• Expected behavior similar to GPT-3.5
• GPT-4 prompt worked well
• Quality closer to GPT-3.5 but better privacy
• Could refine with prompt chaining
• Issues following instructions precisely

Jasper API

• Access useful for building AI tools
• Long prompt length capability
• Appears to use GPT-4 or variant
• Zero shot performs as well as GPT-4
• Able to produce high quality content easily

Conclusion

• GPT-4 and Jasper produce quality results most easily
• Pleasantly surprised by Claude 2 quality and formatting of prompt
• Llama 2 needs refinement to reach GPT-4 level
• Curious about prompt strategies working across models

Full show notes: https://opinionatedseo.com/2023/07/ai-prompting/

Today I have Hassan on the podcast and we’re going to dive into his journey, which started with a lie to his parents! We’ll dive a bit into entrepreneurship, the merit of agencies as a way to jumpstart your career, AI, and some of the original research and work he’s doing in his current role.

Website: https://hassanuddeen.com/
Blog: https://hassanuddeen.com/blog/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hassan-uddeen/

In this episode of The Opinionated SEO, we discuss an alternative to Google Analytics, specifically for those who don't want to switch to GA4. We introduce one of my favorite alternatives, which is a lightweight and open-source web analytics tool that is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR - Plausible Analytics.
https://plausible.io/

Here are some key takeaways:
1. Plausible is a simple and intuitive alternative to the complex interface of Google Analytics.
2. With Plausible, you own 100% of your website data, and there is no need for cookie prompts.
3. Plausible's script is more than 17 times smaller than Google Analytics, making it a faster and more efficient option.
4. Plausible is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and does not share data with third-party advertisers.
5. Plausible offers real-time data and custom goals and events, making it a great alternative for those with small to medium-sized websites or personal blogs.

Welcome to episode 1 of Season 3 - 2023's first episode of the Opinionated SEO podcast! 

I'll be discussing Google's issues that I'm seeing.

• Slow speed of Chrome browser
• Decrease in ad revenue
• Google Analytics 4
• We also spoke about how Microsoft and Open AI's collaboration on Bing is quickly growing and may surpass Google in the future. 

Finally, we provided tips on how to use AI to help create content for SEO purposes and how to share it effectively on multiple platforms. 

In this episode of the Opinionated SEO, I discuss the capabilities of and implications of chat GPT, the free AI-based service from Open AI.

I break down what GPT is, what it's good and bad at, how to craft requests correctly and how to avoid detection from search engine algorithms.

I believes that GPT offers great potential as a tool, but should never be trusted to replace human content writers, especially for investigative reportage.

Full Article and Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2023/01/chatgpt-what-is-it-and-what-should-i-know-about-it-as-a-marketer/

Main Topics Covered:

• Overview of Chat GPT
• What Chat GPT Is Good At
• What Chat GPT Is Bad At
• How To Craft Requests
• Avoiding Detection from Search Engines
• Implications for Content Writing & SEO

I talk about how AI-based content can be used to create content more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional methods; I look at a past piece of content that I outsourced to a writer, compared to the same one using AI with the same prompt.

I recommends trying out Chat GPT, an interface into DaVinci 3.5 from OpenAI, to produce creative, long-form pieces of content without much effort. 

Scott Aaronson was recently interviewed about AI safety; he mentioned that OpenAI research suggests that watermarking could help identify AI-generated content. 

Google's AI tools are able to pick up on certain key features such as punctuation and word choice that may indicate the content was generated by an artificial intelligence program. 

I believes that GPT 4 and 5 will make it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between human-written and AI-written pieces of content without adding original research or interviews. 

Have a happy holiday season and I look forward to seeing everyone next year!

Raj Sharma is an award winning real estate agent and brokerage owner in Southern California - DRE# 01886334, and we chat about some of the marketing efforts he’s done and how they’ve evolved over the last few years with a bit of emphasis on his offline efforts. 

Some key areas Raj talks about:

• What kind of marketing he has done in his 13 years of real estate profession?
• What's changed in the last few years
• What is working for him now
• How he measures success in his marketing
• What his favorite marketing story is
• What should someone do if they are just starting out in their business and they don't have a reputation to use, or a referral network?
• What he says has contributed most to his success

This is a great episode to listen to if you are a small business owner, or are doing marketing for a small business owner, and especially if you are in the real estate space.

Raj's Contact Info:
Email: Raj@legacyhomesrealty.com
Phone: (951) 314-4251
Website: LegacyHomesRealty.com

Full show notes and blog page @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/10/offline-marketing-local-real-estate-marketing-interview-with-raj-sharma/

We have Gerald Murphy talking about everything SEO, marketing, AI content and also his work that he does at similar web as a senior solution business manager.
We dive into topics such as:

• SERP features
• New features coming out for SimilarWeb
• Alternative search engines like TikTok
• The evolution of SEO as a role
• How we saw COVID and Google's real time reaction to the SERPs
• User Behaviors and how you can leverage this as a marketer specifically the user journey and not just looking at keyword ranks
• Creating original content, and how much does Google care about that
• AI content - OPINIONS!
• Gerald's advice for people just getting into the industry

Today, I'm excited to interview Ashwin who is a full life cycle content marketer, currently working as the head of marketing at Optmyzr. We'll dive into topics like diversification of your content strategy, branded search, how to break into the industry, AI content and it's future with marketers, and a bonus question that Ashwin has never been asked in an interview before.

Ashwin Balakrishnan:
Writer, marketer, strategist. Head of marketing @Optmyzr and contributor @sejournal. Proud husband to a breast cancer survivor.

Twitter: @TheCopyTrail - https://twitter.com/thecopytrail
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashwin-balakrishnan/
Optmyzr: PPC Management Software

I interview Jonny Rockz, aka Jonny Polanco about his latest single, marketing in the music industry, and his non profit he's working to help young artists get recording time.

Jonny has opened for the likes of Ice Cube, and his latest single just dropped yesterday. Listen to learn about how the industry has changed in the last 10 years and the types of marketing you can do in the music industry.

Wade Carlson is an SEO professions based out of Orange County, CA.
From his time in the Coast Guard to working at Space-X, he's moved across several verticals and areas within marketing.
He talks about his first passion projects, local SEO, advice for SEO beginners, and we discuss the most interesting man in the world.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wade-l-carlson/

On today’s show, I wanted to talk briefly about a free tool called ahrefs. Many of you have probably already heard of them, but I’m not sure if everyone knows they have a free version you can use by connecting your Google Search Console data. It allows those specific sites to have access to some features in ahrefs.

Go to https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools and you can sign up there.
Let me know what you think!

On today’s show I have Ryan Ricketts. I’ve actually known Ryan for six years now, and we’ve worked at several companies together.
I wanted  him on the show because he's moved between several verticals as well as from different types of agencies and to in-house.

He also gives away his best link building tactic he used for real estate!
Contact Ryan
Website: https://slickettsdigital.com/ or on
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Slicketts

Full Show notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/06/interviewing-seo-ryan-ricketts-moving-verticals-and-agency-to-in-house/

There are a number of common SEO misconceptions or myths. Some of these include the belief that SEO is all about stuffing keywords into content, your keyword density, that link building is the only important SEO tactic. And many, many more,  but let's first talk about domain names. 

I'll start off by saying you can rank any site with any domain name. Within reason. Names should be memorable and easy to remember, and that isn't an SEO thing.

Listen on to get an idea of why you don't need an exact match domain, and why it is better to consider the branding aspect than a descriptive aspect of your domain.

Today I wanted to talk about AI content and my tests on its success as a viable option for creating content that ranks on search engines.

I’ll start with some background on the latest publicly available AI system, an example output that I pick apart, some additional example outputs, and then my opinion on how to utilize an AI system to write content.

See the full show notes / blog post with tons of examples, transcript, and links @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2022/02/can-ai-content-rank-in-google/

Today is February 10th and I wanted to talk about Screaming Frog as well as the new Search Console URL Inspection API. 

Full Blog Post / Show Notes: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e20

Let’s jump right in, what is screaming frog and what can you do with it?

Let’s start at the beginning, it’s free but limited, and you don’t run it online. The paid version is 149 pounds / year, or about $200 US dollars. So you are talking about $16 a month if you wanted to break it down that way. Buy it, write it off, and call it a day, it will save you that money in the first hour you use it.

So what can it do?

Screaming frog is an SEO spider, think GoogleBot but you get to save the data it captures.

Here’s a list of the top features for it:

• Find broken links, errors, and redirects
• Page title and meta data analysis
• Met robots and directives review
• Audit hreflang
• Discover exact duplicate pages
• Generate xml sitemaps
• Create site visualizations.
• You can do up to 500 URLs in the free version, unlimited to your computer’s capacity on the paid version.

But the real power comes in when you use the paid version, and I’m going to just touch on a few of the features.

• Javascript rendering: Actually being able to view the page as a fully rendered version. This includes a screenshot as well as being able to review source code for the rendered version.
  • We’re using this to better understand how the rendering affects crawlability, as well as what’s on the site and what isn’t depending on JS.
  • If you do any kind of client side rendering, using react, or just not seeing Google crawling your site like you think it should, this is a great way to better understand.
• URL Inspection API Integration - I was going to save this for last, but it’s just too good to not put at the top of the list. There are a few integrations you get with screaming frog out of the box. 
  • 1 - Google Analytics 
  • 2 - Google Search Console - this includes the inspection API integration. 
  • 3 - Page speed insights 
  • And non Google related companies like Majestic for backlinks, ahrefs for things like backlinks and URL rating, and Moz for data like page authority and backlink info from their open site explorer metrics.
• Site Visualizations
• Custom Extraction
• Meta Tags - Titles, descriptions, etc 
• You can even generate XML sitemaps
• Find out all pages that have broken links both internally and externally. 
• 301s - 

Integration with the new Search Console URL Inspection API which was officially launched on January 31st, 2022 by Google - and it allows you to see indexation status of your URLs via an API. This was integrated in the latest release in the last few weeks and you’ll see a good share of tutorials out there. 

You probably want to know - what am I doing with this new data, and what data do we get that we can use?

First, the data is used to understand indexation status in Google, errors that are coming up, and last crawl date.

And what am I doing with that data? Let’s start with indexation status - you have a few variations of the summary of indexation, things like index and submitted, indexed not submitted in sitemap, crawled not indexed, discovered but not crawled, soft 404, error, and probably a few more I’m forgetting. By pulling this data on pages, you can get a better understanding of how Google sees your site.

Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 28th, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about ten minutes.

Full blog post, show notes, and transcript @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e19

How does Google recognize paid links?

They have a lot of factors that they look into, not just did someone report this as a paid link.

Does Google care where the internal link is located in the site, header / content / footer?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=36

Running a blog type site without any actual products, but more information about products, they want to know if Google will treat it as a classic product review site?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=265

Local Directories:

Does Google really care if you are listed on local directories and the information is correct?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=451

Links:

Are there any issues with linking to a site that is also linking to you?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=685

Myths:

Are there any myths or inaccuracies that you see out there that you can just debunk right now?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=785

Malware:

Malware is still being shown in the search results.

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1449

A tool to help index sites faster:

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1718

Emojis in titles and descriptions:

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1971

Search Console API Data Accuracy:

Is the data from the API more accurate than the web interface? 

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2054

FAQ Schema:

Our schema looks good from a technical perspective, but isn’t showing on Google.

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2176

Seasonal content:

What should we do with content that’s seasonal like Black Friday?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2257

CWV Impact?

Of the 3 metrics, my CLS isn’t passing, how much of an impact will that have?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2418

Will CWV impact crawling?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2555

Migrating from a subdomain:

The subdomain is old, like 20 years, and we’re looking to migrate to the main domain.

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2677

New Local Site Starting out:

What signals should we look out for or pay attention to.

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=3015

Geo redirects on site:

Should you geo-redirect on a new site?

https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=3195

The last question had to do with branded search - I don’t think it was relevant as it seemed they may have other issues, but feel free to watch that part if you are having any issues with your branded search being visible.

See Full Blog Post / Transcript / Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e18

I wanted to talk about something that came up recently that I’ve mentioned before but is worth devoting some time to.

Three things – 

1: Acronyms and abbreviations

2: Link Juice

3: Domain Authority

A New meta tag and Walmart is making big moves into the Metaverse 

Full Show Notes / Blog Post @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e17

Last Friday, January 21st, 2022, Google Search Central released a new tag.

This tag called indexifembedded, you can tell Google you'd still like your content indexed when it's embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag.There are a few use cases which Malcom Slade over at Creative Race outlined in their blog post. I’ll give a few here and a link to the full blog:

1- Embedding sharable content

2 - Embedding comments - like Disqus where it’s an iframe and the comments are not indexed

3 - Embedding video where you want the video to be indexed on the page

4 - Reviews from 3rd party embeds

5 - They asked for other ideas. One that we’re talking about is a widget that we’ve had around for a while that other companies embed and they can display specific content. Think being able to embed stock tickers. Now, with each of these being indexed, and having links coming back to us, this could really change our link profile.

Overall I like the idea that we can have more control of our content in the wild, but also to allow others to have that content indexed.

https://creativerace.co.uk/indexifembedded-what-does-this-new-meta-tag-do/

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/01/robots-meta-tag-indexifembedded

And it’s been a week or two since I mentioned the metaverse, but it looks like Walmart is the next big name to file patents associated with the metaverse.

One trademark application was for “Financial services, namely, providing a digital currency and a digital token of value for use by members of an online community via a global computer network.” In another filing they mention an on-line retail store featuring virtual merchandise.

If you remember I mentioned other big names like Nike and Disney with similar type filings, but also Under Armor, Urban Outfitters, Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch have also filed similar trademarks with intent on virtualization of retail stores.

Right now, Meta (the King formerly known as Facebook) seems to be pushing both the software and the hardware to the masses. With their Oculus headsets and requirements for a Facebook account, we’re seeing virtual connections that are coming right from existing web 2.0.

So Meta has Oculus, Microsoft has HaloLens, Apple is rumored to be working on hardware, and Google just ramped up their AR hardware with plans to ship in the next 2 years. Remember Google glass came out in 2012, so they have a lot of previous hardware experience in this field, and I know they don’t want to lose out to Meta in the coming MetaVerse wars.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/16/walmart-is-quietly-preparing-to-enter-the-metaverse.html

My personal belief is we are going to see a huge transformation in the next 2-4 years with how we work and interact in business. Right now we are seeing that you don’t necessarily have to be in an office together, though there are some advantages to having access to people right away. Middle and upper management like to have a visual that people are focusing on their work, whether you agree with that or not, it’s something that may never go away.

Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 21st, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about 15 minutes.

Full Show Notes / Blog @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e16

Questions seemed to focus a bit on internationalization, and internal linking. Hope you enjoy:

The value of internal links in header, footer, or in content?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=41

Seeing links - they are paid, and the sites are ranking #1, why is that contradiction from what Google says?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=88

Some links are not crawling according to Google Search Console.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=203

25% of the pages have dropped being indexed, quite dramatically a few months ago. Submitted pages dropped by 50%. They thought it might be structured data that’s not valid.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=342

Seeing images in organic search results, not the image tab. There isn’t documentation in google Search Central. 

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=655

Multiple websites for each location but just a different phone number and address.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=833

Allright, then it was my turn. 

We have a strong US presence and moving into international. Should we go with ccTLDs or a single domain with subfolder country / language. Technology isn’t an issue, and I think being able to target Google Search Console to each unique domain by country may be the most advantageous option.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=1217

Is there a way to capture a folder without a trailing slash in Google Search Console adding a new property?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=1998

Site downtime, and how that affects indexing.

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2064

Splitting the domain, what should we do in search console?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2321

This is kind of a reverse internationalization, removing the countries from the site and just focusing on one. But all the countries were already in subfolders, so would moving the main language to the root have a big impact on ranking?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2684

This person really asked, can we trust the answers given. 

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2868

Internal Linking, more important than URL structure?

https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=3058

I then had a chance to talk to John again and ask about client side rendering issues a client was having, this particular client was having trouble replicating the issue as GoogleBot sees it. 

Today I wanted to focus a bit on privacy and security. This is central to every marketer and I think it’s something we should be considering heavily.

Full Show Notes Blog Post @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e15

The biggest name right now in private browsing is duck duck go who is averaging 105 million queries per month so far in January 2022. Duck Duck Go is actually the #2 search engine on mobile in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. On desktop, it has about 2.5% market share in the US, around what Bing’s market share is at. If you feel have been using Bing for advertising or doing SEO for Bing, then don’t discount DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is also launching their desktop browser which will be in my opinion a major competitor to Google. Their mobile browser has a huge install rate, and it would only make sense that mobile users would like this experience on the desktop systems.

Another search engine that you may have heard of is Neeva. This is a subscription based search engine with no advertising created by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube). Some things that I really like about their platform is that they give 20% of their topline revenue with content creator partners when their content is used to directly answer a Neeva customer’s query. This is great for newspapers and other content creators to get revenue back for content that a search engine like Google would normally have as a zero click result.

They just introduced a free (at least for 3 months) tier, and then it’s $4.99 per month.

https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-neeva-premium

https://neeva.com/blog/supporting-humanitys-curiosity-with-quality-content

As you are looking at marketing channels, consider that this model may become more popular as people prioritize their privacy over highly customized ads. I do like the idea of paying under $5 a month and knowing that my search results are not skewed by how much an advertiser spent. It also has a lot of privacy features which help keep other advertisers from being able to track.

As marketers, we may not love this, but it emphasizes why we need to make sure to fully utilize all marketing channels and not rely on a single one. It also emphasizes how important SEO can be as well as creating top quality content.

Now I wanted to talk about browser plugins that you may not realize are affecting your numbers. The main ones are ad blocking plugins, and I wanted to focus on one in particular as it’s the most popular, but does one thing by default that may surprise you.

And that one thing - it blocks Google Analytics by default. There are over 10 million installed users actively blocking Google Analytics with this one plugin. It may not seem like a huge number, but depending on what vertical your users are in, you may be surprised with the percentage that use a plugin like this.

One thing I suggest doing is pull your Google Analytics data, and cross reference that with your Google Search Console click data and then against your server logs. You’ll have to take into consideration things like bots that GA doesn’t count, but this could give you an idea of the number of people visiting your site that don’t trigger Google Analytics.

So in summary, we’ve got millions of users blocking your tracking software, millions of users moving to new search engines which tout privacy first, and even search engines that have no ads. How are you planning for these numbers to grow in your marketing. What moves are you making to measure impact of your marketing efforts that don’t involve digital online tracking? I’ll be talking about

I wanted to do something a little different today. Since I didn’t see much that was really newsworthy - the usual rumblings about a potential algorithm update, and some ongoing Twitter drama about SEO in general. I thought I would talk about a book that should speak to most of us. The book is Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin.

The full title: Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, is really just that, Rand is brutally honest, to the point where you can feel his pain in his words. If you listen to the audio book, he narrates himself.

This book is really for anyone who is an aspiring startup founder, an entrepreneur looking for insider tips, or just anyone fascinated with the world of business and especially how venture capital ties into that.

The book really talk to you about investors and how the wrong ones can be devastating for your business. How a transparent office culture can make or break a business. And what happens when you take shortcuts.

Rand started out like so many of us, doing small projects and then took the leap to starting his own company to do it full time. His story feels like the untold story of most startups, a lot of money issues, wrong moves, over-extending. But Rand had built a name for himself and his company. His “whiteboard Fridays” were the stuff of SEO agency legend, many companies would stop all work and watch, just because they were so insightful and well done.

SEO Moz, or now just Moz, was really one of the first SAAS (software as a service) companies for SEOs. It started in 2004 and finally found itself around 2017, it took nearly 13 years for it to become a stable profitable company. At the time of publication, the company was bringing in 45 million in annual revenue.

What I find fascinating about his next area in the book is talking about the success of companies, which 5% of venture backed companies actually become profitable, is market research. His new company Spark Toro does exactly that and I can see how his identification in the book here and his years of experience led him to starting that company. For example, Uber used search trends for “taxi” to determine their markets to move into.

Once you get about half way through the book, you start really disliking venture capitalists, and I understand his frustrations. The push for large returns is never ending, and only three in ten venture backed companies will yield even minimal returns.

Rand gives several scenarios where Moz simply failed internally, from how it catered to employees with unique needs to its racial diversity. He takes a long hard look at how he led the company and how it was hard to recognize the changes that needed to be made. Once made, he saw huge changes and attributes that new culture to the success of the company.

The big takeaway from his book for me:
Don’t let the hype about superstar startups lead you down the wrong path. Consider very hard what types of investments you are willing to take and what that means to your ability to grow the company. Be transparent and honest with your employees and your customers.

If you are starting out on your own, even just as a freelancer, this is a good book to give you an idea of what the next stage might look like. Rand does go into a lot of detail about his early years building websites and optimizing them as a small business of 2 or 3, and the insights are still valid today.

Thank you - I hope you found this interesting.

Have a great day and see you tomorrow.

I thought today would be fun to talk about a single marketing newsworthy campaign revolving around cats and a mixer and 100 backlinks from major news networks. (I'll also talk about a few noteworthy SEO items)

Full show notes and blog post: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e13

Backlinko was just purchased by SEMRush, Brian Dean, maybe one of the best marketers out there and a crazy good newsletter. News broke this morning on Twitter and SEMRush’s news site.

https://twitter.com/BrianEDean/status/1483915288815022082

Someone asked John about a high DA website and spam checked score of 6+. I didn’t really read anything more than that in the question because those are number like in the Whose Line is it anyway game show, “where everything is made up and the points don't matter.”

Also, the word “link juice” was used, which feels very cringy to me. Can we stop saying that. How about we just say authority, because that’s really what it is.

John responded: “Since Google uses neither DA nor the spam score, it doesn't really matter either way, right? That's why I said to just ignore all of that and do something real instead. If experts are telling you to do this, then find other experts.”
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1483757660302417921?s=20

OK, to the main event - Cats got backlinks.

So a few weeks ago a couple name Nikki and Jessica bought a vitamix. Upon the arrival, they sat it down on their kitchen floor and promptly their cat decided to sit upon the unopened box. Jessica took a photo and posted this to a Facebook group called THIS CAT IS C H O N K Y.  The group boasts nearly a million members, and the post immediately took off. Over 10k interactions by the next day.

They have three cats, and they wouldn’t leave the box. They resorted to feeding the cat on the box as she refused to get down even to eat.

Jessica continued to post updates and then reached out to Vitamix via their facebook page to ask for three empty boxes, enough for their three cats. The saga got it’s own hashtag that trended, The Great Vitamix Incident of 2021 and/or #Appliancegate, has developed.

https://www.facebook.com/1606875812956981/posts/2924246927886523/

OK, that’s all, folks, see you tomorrow!

Today is January 18th and I’ll be talking about a potential algorithm update, Reviews in maps, Google My business hours, page experience going to desktop, Travel & Google Ads webinar, Competitive analysis and more!

Full Blog Post and Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e12

January 14th and 15th seems to be a lot of movement in the algorithm trackers - was there an update?

Some of my sites that are relatively newer content seems to have jumped up quite a bit in this time, but I think that might just be a coincidence. This podcast’s main site had a jump to about 1400 impressions in Google Search Console compared to its average 50-100 per day. That ended up dropping back down a bit, so if Google was doing something, it might have been temporary if this site was an indicator.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-update-january-14-32762.html

Allie Margeson, the Director of SEO  Services at Whitespark noticed review snippets getting visibility on maps. See her tweet.

https://twitter.com/SeoAllie/status/1483166745980456966

Colan Nielsen for Sterling Sky writes about Google My Business and when to list your hours as 24/7.

https://www.sterlingsky.ca/when-should-i-list-my-google-business-profile-hours-as-open-24-7/

We mentioned it a couple weeks ago, but Yoast officially launched their Shopify SEO app.

https://yoast.com/release-yoast-seo-for-shopify/

Google has been giving us a heads up on Page Experience rolling out to desktop. Search Console now has a dedicated desktop section in its Page Experience report to help site owners understand Google’s page experience criteria.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/11/bringing-page-experience-to-desktop

In case you missed it, Google Ads put on the “Travel On Air” with Episode available for on demand viewing. If you are a marketer in the Travel industry (I’m talking to you Louderback and Dylan!) then this may be of interest!

https://adsonair.withgoogle.com/events/travel-on-air-episode-4

SEMRush published an article on their blog about not the ten, but the 12 Best Competitive Intelligence Tools for Market Research.

https://www.semrush.com/blog/top-18-competitive-intelligence-tools-advanced-market-research/

And, since we seem to always talk about internationalization, John Mueller answered a question on Reddit asking if Google used the same algorithm for each language.

“Mostly. Search uses lots & lots of algorithms. Some of them apply to content in all languages, some of them are specific to individual languages (for example, some languages don't use spaces to separate words -- which would make things kinda hard to search for if Google assumed that all languages were like English).”

https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/s64i0e/does_google_use_the_same_algorithm_for_every/

Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 14, 2022. I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video was an hour, I summarized this for you in 15 minutes.

Full Show Notes / Blog Page @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e11

Are there any negative SEO effects with a large robots.txt file?

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=45

If we don’t include the sitemap in the robots.txt, is there any negative SEO implications?

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=118

How does Google handle non user relevant HTML fragments, and AJAX calls. 

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=134

Is there any guideline to the robots.txt file as far as file size. 

https://www.robotstxt.org/

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/intro 

https://github.com/google/robotstxt 

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=285 

Heading Text: How important is it to use hierarchical vs just however you want. Does size matter? 

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=375

Adding a new domain for a new service offering. How long until we start seeing the traffic looking like our current domain.

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=528

Custom content or rather a custom page that is geo-located by state. 

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=854

The questioner is seeing good conversion rates on their app, but not so much on mobile website. 

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=1228

They wanted to know if the pages had to be exact but different currency and language. 

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=1500

This question was about backlinks and removing spam backlinks once you hit the 2MB file size limit on the disavow.

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=1643

Do I need to mark up content on my page with HTML semantic elements for example, footer?

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=1789

Should we expect a drop in traffic if we remove AMP?

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=1845

https://kinsta.com/blog/disable-google-amp/

They’ve got a few thousand links that they’ve disavowed, but they’re worried they may have done some legit ones. 

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=2014

Seeing knowledge panel on mobile but not desktop and does Wikipedia influence when someone would be shown?

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=2117

Jason Barnard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OFPrIcv7_8 - mentioned by John.

Synonyms - The entire system is automated, there’s nothing manual.

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=2284

Several locations, what is the best way to include local schema?

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=2410

15-20 FAQs on my page, should I include all the questions?

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=2440

Can Google use content that is initially hidden for structured data. 

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=2494

Product reviews:

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=2776

Coverage issue - crawl currently not indexed, discovered, not indexed.

https://youtu.be/GZ_wSeQqPZk?t=3109

Should I add unique content to my ecommerce site?

h

We’re going to be recapping the SEOs & DEVs video published yesterday on YouTube with guest Michael King from iPullRank. URL to watch: https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw

Full Show Notes / Blog Post: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e10

Checklists, beginner SEOs, and tools:

From a developer’s point of view, it seems like a lot of times with SEOs that we’ve got this fire drill mentality and sometimes a single thing can seem like it’s the absolute most important thing to one SEO but not to another.

Furthering the conversation - why do the tools push out a 30 page report?

And this comes down to reports and tools that don’t know the context of your site. 

Our job is to interpret that through the frame of what the business actually needs to do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp2wAqWeOgw&t=60s

Why context matters for automation:

 A lot of SEO can be automated, but you really need human interpretation to ensure that it doesn’t go overboard.

https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw?t=320

The up-to-date, the out-of-date and the myths:

Things like text to code ratio and W3C compliance. They’re out of date, with no backing, and the tools still show them. 

https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw?t=439

Documentation drift & Doing your own research:

Google’s documentation may be out of phase and the pagination rel previous next was brought up as an example of discussing how Google should even handle it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp2wAqWeOgw&t=623s

The audience challenge:

The documentation is often positioned to the middle, between engineers and SEOs. 

https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw?t=829

Give us feedback:

They actually read the feedback. A lot is constructive and helpful, and of course not everyone has nice things to say.

https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw?t=983

Why docs sometimes create misunderstandings:

There’s even tools that have different scores after different runs and that is due to things like network conditions. 

https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw?t=1112

Getting past “us vs them” together:

We all come from such varying backgrounds as SEOs and learning to work with the engineers in a more effective manner by understanding what they do and see from their perspective.

https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw?t=1426

How to support each other:

Making sure that its understood when working with engineers that everyone did the best they could on this, and we’re as SEOs only looking at this from a different perspective.

https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw?t=1526

Summary: 

SEOs should value the different perspective of different people and be receptive to do their own research, and developers need to be more trusting towards SEOs and take them on the journey with them to figure things out together. That would make things a lot easier.

Mike sums it up well: “No SEO is trying to ruin your website. They just want to help its visibility, drive

Today I’ll be looking through some items I found around the web that I think will be of interest from search console tips to top marketing campaigns on 2021. Tomorrow I’ll have a recap of the SEOs & DEVs video with Michael King from iPullRank - I just didn't have a chance to go through the whole video today.

If you have multiple properties in search console, http https domain etc., it’s fine according to John Mueller in response to a Reddit thread.

I think it’s actually good to have them, you’d be surprised what you end up finding and it’s better to have them to ensure you don’t have any potential old data around.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/s30xqy/google_search_console_properties/

Page indexed without content in Search Console? Might just be a server related issue. John Mueller chimes in again on Reddit that it’s usually an empty page that’s returned when you get this error. I’d suggest also to try crawling your site with screaming frog and turn on save html as well as render html, and see if there’s any issues going on there. My guess is they’ve got a low end host that’s restricting bandwidth usage even from Googlebot.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/s22dxn/confused_about_new_coverage_warning_help/

Have you had your site’s non secure version get indexed instead of the fully secure one? This question was posed on Twitter - and it looks as though sometimes Google will index both versions, and as long as you are properly 301’ing the domains, it will settle down over time and won’t cause any issues, so long as the redirect is done properly. It looks like this can sometimes happen if you have a large number of links coming into the non secure version, but Google will understand, so not much to worry about.

https://twitter.com/ChrisNicholsSEO/status/1481732282629165059

Matt Southern put together a nice article on the reasons that Google can’t provide details about core algorithm updates. There are a lot of quotes from various folks at Google including John Mueller, Martin Splitt, and Gary Illyes. Their hands are actually pretty tied, but a real takeaway is this: “write good content, don’t buy links”

There’s also no penalty for a site during a core update, rather a re-optimization and improvement for other sites that are just doing a better job.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-cant-provide-details-about-core-algorithm-updates/432651/

Want some inspiration in marketing campaigns? Marketing Dive put out a last last month of the best marketing campaigns on 2021. To give a few overviews:

Chipotle entered the metaverse with a virtual maze and $1 million in free burritos.

Wendy’s transformed into Morty’s of Rick and Morty

Tide did a large push for reduction of greenhouse gasses with their $TurnToCold campaign

Burger Kings leveraged NFTs

Starbucks leveraged TikTok

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/best-marketing-campaigns-2021/611068/

Today is Wednesday, January 12th, and I’ll be talking about Shopify, Server Logs, winners and losers from Google’s December 2021 Product Review update, Google Search Operators, thread on all the different templates/checklists/flowcharts, women in tech SEO newsletter, and shocking, someone’s site isn’t getting indexed and John Mueller kindly responds.

Full Show Notes / blog: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e8

Was there an algorithm update on the 11th?

The guys over at Search Engine Roundtable may think so.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-update-january-11-32742.html

Yoast released an in depth article on SEO for Shopify.

They cover everything from optimizing core web vitals, lazy loading images, how to blog with shopify, and of course, how to use their new app with Shopify. 

Yoast also announced version 17.9 of their plugin which integrates with Wincher

https://yoast.com/shopify-seo/

https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-17-9/

Search Engine Land published an article on Monday about server logs.

https://searchengineland.com/why-server-logs-matter-for-seo-378199

Screaming frog Log File Analyzer had an update yesterday as well: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/log-file-analyser-4-0/#4.5

Lily Ray tweeted about the winners and losers from Google’s December 2021 Product Review update. 

https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc/status/1481354389004693507

https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc/status/1467948310094823425 

Looking to take some of your knowledge up a step - check out 

SEO nerd Switzerland meetup with Brenda Malone who will discuss Advanced Google Search Operators For Smarter SEO.

https://twitter.com/SEOnerdSwitz/status/1481276706308689923

Meetup Link: https://www.meetup.com/SEOnerdSwitzerland/events/282426514/

Aleyda Slis shared a 2021 thread on all the different templates/checklists/flowcharts she’s shared over the past year. It’s an incredible thread full of amazing content for any SEO. 

https://twitter.com/aleyda/status/1477639252783828992

Another newsletter to sign up for besides the #SEOFomo - is the women in tech SEO newsletter by Areej AbuAli. Help them get to 3K newsletter subscribers before their January edition, they’re about 167 subscribers away!

https://twitter.com/areej_abuali/status/1480984918012448770

And what better way to end today’s podcast than another - my site isn’t getting indexed: 

Veerendar Sunkara said his site isn’t getting indexed on Google, it’s been 2 months. It’s an Amazon affiliate blog. John Mueller chimed in

https://twitter.com/iamveerendar/status/1481319335

Today is Tuesday, January 11th, and a few Google and marketing news updates for you from updates to video results in Google to a few google ads updates, redirecting a website and blocking slow counties to increase CWV scores.

Full Show Notes / Blog Post: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e7

We saw trending results on mobile for the discovery section, and now it looks like Google is rolling this out as a test to videos in mobile search. 

It looks like it’s been seen in the wild for food, music, and restaurants. I continue to like seeing this, I think it helps push new results to more people and allows for some virality in the SERPs.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-trending-videos-32725.html

A couple Google Ads updates:

This happened a few days ago, but Google is allowing ads for sports betting from certified and state-licensed entities in New York. Advertisers must apply for certification which started on the 7th of January. 

https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/11522848?hl=en&ref_topic=29265

The IndexNow Plugin for WordPress was updated on Monday with a few bug fixes and domain resolutions.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/indexnow/#developers

A question was asked during last week’s SEO office hours about dates, and John had a bit of a follow up type question where he linked out to the Google documentation on the best way for Google to understand the date for your page. 

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/03/help-google-search-know-best-date-for

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1480641280384376832 

A TechSEO Reddit thread where Marwoob had asked about blocking counties that have much lower core web vital scores, and also happen to be counties they don't serve. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/rywrgk/should_i_block_slow_countries_from_accessing_my/ 

Last one here is a reddit thread about migrating your site and keeping the old pages live even though you have 301 redirects. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/s15pg9/after_creating_301_redirects_from_an_old_site_to/

Today is January 10th, and I’ll be recapping the Google SEO Office Hours from January 7th 2022 which ran just under an hour. There was somewhat of a theme this office hours with a lot of questions around internationalization and language, subdomains and subfolders, and of course indexing and crawl budget.

Full show notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e6 with links and more detailed descriptions.

As always, a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. I’ll skip questions that didn’t really have an answer or were so unique I don’t think it would apply to most marketers.

• We started off with another crawl budget question. Blogging consistently compared to someone who doesn’t, will Google crawl at a different rate? Does consistency have anything to do with ranking?
• If I post less often and less consistently, will Google pull my sitemap less frequently.
• Google will not penalize you for having duplicate content on your site
• If you have an older piece of content and you are updating it, should you repost it, or update the old post. 
• HREFLang again. The question was about a site that was doing well in one language. How should the HREFLANG tag be handled?
• Page experience. Are there more than just the three that we can see in Search Console. 
• What data is Google Chrome collecting from users that is used for rankings?
• They don’t have HREFLANG tags setup, should they?
• Updates to job related markup for direct reply. 
• They moved from folders to subdomains for country based jobs. 
• How to get another language version of a website into top stories.
• Since the number of features are increasing, how is search console calculating rankings?
• Their JavaScript rendering has some forward slashes in it that GoogleBot is interpreting as a URL and they’re seeing errors in search console from this. 
• Another question about subdomain and subfolder related to languages.
• Using rel=nofollow on links to a page to effectively no index it.
• Another my page isn’t indexed yet question.
• Pruning low quality content. What is the minimum traffic to keep an article?
• Structured markup - specifically breadcrumbs.
• New extensive review updates, how is that affecting new e-commerce sites?
• They had a lot of content theft, and after having them removed via DMCA, they didn’t see any increase in ranking. 
• Google is pulling the wrong info for his site, specifically the dates are pulling the wrong year, and showing up in the SERPs.

Today is January 7th, 2022 and I’ll be talking about some Google SERP updates, a Google ads error, New Display Ads for Podcasts in Spotify, WordPress major security release, Making money from a site hack, and some actionable tactics to help drive customers to buy.

Full Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e5

Google has launched a “Shops” section in the mobile search results with three results that can be expanded to 10. Google’s statement:

 “We recently launched Shops, a new module available on mobile devices for select US-English shopping-related queries,” 

https://searchengineland.com/google-launches-shops-section-in-mobile-search-results-378256

https://twitter.com/b4k_khushal/status/1477337833643786242

Google looks to be testing or updating their Google Discover section with trending searches. See if it’s updated on your device.

https://twitter.com/jasonmandragona/status/1478748397372940290

Google Ads has an error right now when saving exact keywords saying they are being saved as broad. Google Ads Liason replied that it was a bug and they were working on fixing it. So don’t be alarmed, but is this the beginning of the end of match types? 

https://twitter.com/adsliaison/status/1479189369529450496 

While we’re talking about ads, Spotify is going to be bringing display ads to Podcasts. Spotify is calling them Call-to-Action cards. These will be visual and interactive during ad plays as well as retargeting while exploring the app. 

https://www.newsroom.spotify.com/2022-01-06/spotify-introduces-call-to-action-cards-for-podcast-ads/ 

Wordpress released a security release yesterday which patched 4 major vulnerabilities. This affects versions 3.7 to 5.8, so pretty much any WordPress install out there. 

https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/wordpress-5-8-3-security-release/ 

So, if your site is hacked, what do you do? First, you get it cleaned up and then make sure your IT or Dev Ops is taking proactive steps to ensure that it can’t happen again. If you don’t know anything about cleaning up - check out SUCURI, I’ve used them in the past to clean up a hacked site and they took care of things in just a matter of hours.

So what did years ago when her main site was hacked and started ranking for Michael Kors handbags. she was able to remove the hack and then redirected all of those pages to Amazon using her affiliate link. She made a few hundred dollars before turning it all off.

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1479143529020592130

Katelyn Bourgoin spent over 1500 hours learning about cognitive biases and heuristics, the stuff that drives customers to buy and she put together a Twitter thread of the top 19 concepts that marketers need to know: 

https://twitter.com/KateBour/status/1478792178726019073

Today is January 6th, 2022 and today I’ll be talking about IndexNow from Microsoft, a couple domain related questions answered by John Mueller during his “ask googlebot” video from yesterday, a thought provoking local SEO article by Mirriam Ellis at Moz, and finally Disney is getting into the metaverse.

Microsoft Webmaster Tools released their IndexNow WordPress plugin over the holiday weekend.

https://searchengineland.com/indexnow-plugin-for-wordpress-378228

Ask GoogleBot - Domains Lightning Round From January 5th 2022.

Does Google care about tld?For example a real estate agent might want jimsmith.realtor instead of jimsmithrealtor.com.
Google says they don’t care, it’s treated the same.

https://youtu.be/9ERB7gJV7o8?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUM9wKeb-Gvm8bgpFM72yiXw&t=16

Can I rank globally for a domain with a ccTLD. The example was using .fr and you are a French site, but you want to target Brazil as well. In Search console, you can only setup one Country to target. Once you remove that, you are no longer targeting a single country.

Also, having a ccTLD send a signal to Google and tells it which country you are targeting.

https://youtu.be/9ERB7gJV7o8?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUM9wKeb-Gvm8bgpFM72yiXw&t=80

Miriam Ellis puts together another great article over at Moz - this is giving me whiteboard Friday feels. The article talks about 2022 Local SEO success. There were a few really great takeaways as I read the article and I encourage you to take 5 or 6 minutes and read it all the way through.

But what I liked most was the talk about supply chain gaps and how you couldn’t buy name brand anti-bacterial, but then your local brewer started making them. How you couldn’t buy masks but there were teams of Etsy sewists. Did you Google making your own bread or where to buy flour locally? The savvy business owners came up with new solutions.

https://moz.com/blog/2022-local-seo-success

And a few days ago we talked about Reddit’s homepage getting taken down a notch from a DMCA request. To follow up with that, a Reddit thread by user dustyd22 discussed a site that is copying their site word for word and just adding a “the” in front of the domain name.

A quick response links to Google’s content removal form.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/rwvaqi/website_duplication_by_a_competitor/

https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en

Disney has entered the metaverse.

Remember yesterday’s news where I talked about Nike the perfect Corp entering the metaverse. Well, Disney has just entered and they’re looking to make it big. IGN has an article on this, outlining the several patents that Disney just filed on An Augmented Virtual World Simulator That Doesn't Need a Headset Or Glasses.

https://www.ign.com/articles/disney-patent-augmented-reality-theme-park-rides 

Y2K 22? How does an out of stock product page affect SEO? What platform is winning the Core Web Vital Game? A new app to improve SEO with Shopify, the metaverse and ecommerce, and a Search Console bug fixed.

Full Post: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e3

Y2K strikes again. This time for 2022, but it’s actually the exact same issue we had 22 years ago with dates being stores as 2 digit numbers. If you are active in email marketing, especially B2B, this may have affected you.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/email-stuck-in-exchange-on-premises-transport-queues/ba-p/3049447 

How are you handling out of stock or low stock items, and does this affect SEO? The low stock question was asked on Twitter to John Mueller.

https://twitter.com/mckeinze1997/status/1478421272161927168

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-handle-temporarily-out-of-stock-product-pages 

Shopify is doing a great job in the core web vitals area. Using data from HTTPArchive, Barry Adams noted that Shopify is performing better than AMP pages.

https://twitter.com/badams/status/1478340899088343040 

Yoast is best known for being an SEO plugin for WordPress with over 12 million users. They just announced their Shopify App which goes live on January 18th 2022.

https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-is-coming-to-shopify/ 

There was a user issue in Google Search Console where full users may have seen their status as delegated users and not have the full ability to do things like add new users. 

https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/136042635/are-you-not-seeing-users-and-permissions-in-search-console-settings-read-this?hl=en 

The Harvard Business Review wrote an article about brands entering the metaverse. 

Some brands to note:

Nike filed several trademark applications directly related to downloadable digital goods specifically for the metaverse. 

To see some real world implementations, visit on your browser in the links below.

https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-brands-can-enter-the-metaverse

https://www.emarketer.com/content/social-commerce-2021

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/02/nike-is-quietly-preparing-for-the-metaverse-.html 

Perfect Corp. virtual booth experience @ CES 2022: https://www.perfectcorp.com/business/CES2022 

And since it seems we can’t go a day without talking about TikTok, an article from the Verge suggests that TikTok is testing a new feature that is similar to the Twitter retweet function. 

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/4/22867456/tiktok-share-repost-retweet 

Today we’ll be looking at some negative SEO issues that have come up including how an onlyfan performer may have taken down reddit’s homepage, your IP address in Google results, Meta’s new restrictions on advertising, and the worst practice for handing over a site from one agency to another.

How easy would it be to remove reddit’s home page from Google’s index? Apparently a simple DMCA is all it took. Cyrus Shepard noted on twitter that the main reddit homepage wasn’t ranking #1 anymore and some further investigation looks like a DMCA request was the culprit.

While you are checking out the tweets, also take a look at Cyrus’ company Zyppy and their SEO success factors. Probably one of the better put together lists of ranking factors you should and shouldn't care about.

https://twitter.com/CyrusShepard/status/1478101570646540289

https://zyppy.com/seo-success-factors/

We’ve all been there, a staging version or just the straight IP version of the site gets indexed. I didn’t bring this up yesterday as part of the office hours recap as John somewhat touched on this issue, but there was a reddit thread where he put in a lot of effort into the reply and I think it’s important enough to mention. John Mueller said that generally, Google will list a site in its search results with the domain name rather than using an IP address. But if you see both and know your website is crawlable via this protocol then there's no reason to worry about being deindexed. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/rs7pjb/perfect_storm_caused_a_tank_in_ratings_ip_address/ 

Starting January 19th, 2022 Meta (You know, Facebook) will no longer allow you to market certain targeting options relating to sensitive topics. A list containing examples for all types of sensitive categories was given 

• Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”)
• Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”)
• Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”)
• Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures

I think this is a great move, and I am happy to see this. Having worked in marketing in the medical field, I did sometimes feel like we were able to target a little too accurately and it felt someone intrusive. Little by little, we’re getting less targeted ads, but we’re also safeguarding our privacy. I think the balancing act is a tough one, but this is the right direction. This also is something I think will help balance out the ability to influence a specific group too much, and forces advertisers to broaden their ads to a larger spectrum of people with differing political or social beliefs. 

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/12/08/updating-metas-detailed-targeting-options/

Hiding results when handing over a site: 
Just a fun little reminder of the URL removal tool in Search Console - which is used to temporarily remove a result from the search result pages. Think of it like a filter for results, and you are asking Google to filter the results out that follow a specific pattern. I’ve seen this used in negative ways when handing over a site from one agency to another, it’s a bit hidden but a great way to hide the important parts of a page with nothing else wrong with the site. 

https://twitter.co

There wasn’t a lot of SEO news over the holiday weekend and the new year, but I wanted to recap what I felt were the most important takeaways from Friday’s English Office hours with Google’s John Mueller. As always, a synopsis, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video.

Full post here: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e1

Some people may rely on the cache pages in search result pages to verify the indexing of the content correctly. The cache pages are handled separately from the index, so you may have a page in the index that you don’t have a cache page for.

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=334

Poor translation automated translation of an alternate language, how does this affect the SEO’s main language version. This comes down to metrics that Google uses that are sitewide factors vs single page factors. If you have low quality pages, whether that’s thin content, badly translated content, or another issue, this can bring down overall site / domain quality rankings and be harmful to your SEO efforts. 

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=412

Google crawler ignores all permission requests from your site. This came up in a question that was related to IP based content detection that was causing their site to skew towards a specific geographic area for indexing.

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=1056

If you have pages that are authoritative, have good backlinks, but you don’t want them indexed, consider using a rel canonical tag to flow that authority to a different page. The question was asking about using a redirect for just GoogleBot, which is very borderline against Google guidelines. 

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=1190

This question is really relevant to work I’ve been doing recently where we saw over 150k pages removed from the index within about a week as Google picked up a no result message that we had in the source code but was hidden. If you have any text in your source code, whether hidden or not, Google CAN index it and use it. 

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=1424

Using the indexing API to get your results indexed faster than letting Google find it via a sitemap. John says that yes, it will crawl the page so it can review the content and the structured data associated with jobs. 

https://yoast.com/live-indexing-bing-google-yoast-seo/

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=1988 

Discussion about title rewrites that don’t make sense: Seems like it is still happening and can definitely be an issue if you are adding new types of content or products and Google hasn’t fully aligned that with your domain.

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=2492

This is the big one, my site isn’t getting indexed. How long does Google take to pick up on quality changes?

https://youtu.be/MrgtKt4u8nk?t=2556

 Screaming Frog updated their software to ver 16.5 which closed another log4j vulnerability that showed up, however a new one surfaced again, and they responded to my tweet to see what their timeline is for a fix. They can provide one via an email to their support team. 

https://twi

Google has made a change to the rich result reports for product structured data on December 28, 2021. This means that it is viewable in Google Search Console and may lead to different numbers of entities than before this update was implemented- which could affect your rankings!

https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-products-rich-result-report-error-handling-updated-378082

A nice tip from Dan Shure about finding gift keywords which saw a lot of visibility in 2020 and 2021. Adding adjectives like “funny” or “unique” came up with a lot of new mid & long tail keywords opportunities.

https://twitter.com/dan_shure/status/1476240334740934665

If you were getting a Search Console Emoji Alert, it was a Google bug, so you can ignore it as confirmed by John Mueller on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/rqrbec/weird_seo_spam_search_console_emoji_alert_lol/

SparkToro has a new homepage - Rand asked if anyone has 2 minutes to look at it and let him know any mistakes / issues. If you don’t have enough budget for a QA department, this is a great example of how you can get a lot of people looking at something and giving solid feedback.

https://twitter.com/randfish/status/1476608277165137921

Today we’ll be talking about Google’s ability to crawl large pages, who uses screaming frog, what backlink types are simply ignored, and was there an algorithm update over the last few days?

Google’s HTML size limit is in the 10’s to 100’s of megabytes. Confirmed via tweet by John Mueller. This was in response to a Bing Webmaster Tools notice. 

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1468538974406946823

Screaming Frog is one of the best pieces of software you can buy. It’s somewhere around $150 - $200 for year and you run it locally on your system. It’s invaluable for ad hoc reports, technical analysis and more. A recent reddit thread got a little more visibility when John Mueller chimed in that he personally pays for a license.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/rrcji8/how_to_justify_screamingfrog_cost_to_my_boss/

No Follow, User Generated Content, and Sponsored backlinks are all treated the same, basically they’re ignored.
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1476140327174082564

https://youtu.be/wdE3ElNf4LA?t=2036

Confirmation - you don’t need to keep a 301 redirect on an old domain for more than a year.
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1476583352828366854 

According to recent SEMRush data, in December of this year was when things started getting really volatile. We saw a lot more movement than usual with Google and their products. In fact, this year is one of the most volatile years according to SEMrush.

https://www.seroundtable.com/semrush-google-december-2021-most-volatile-32668.html

Around December 27th and 28th we may have a Google search ranking algorithm unofficial update. It is not unusual for Google's search results to fluctuate without Google manually pushing an algorithm update. There’s a lot of chatter especially in the affiliate groups..

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-jolt-32670.html

There are many strategies and tactics in the SEO world that seem completely backwards at first, but if you take them into consideration they may actually work. Aleyda Solis' recent Twitter thread asking “what's the most counterintuitive recommendation/implementation I've done over my career which paid off as expected?”  

https://twitter.com/aleyda/status/1455613252663193605

Also, while you are at it, sign up for her weekly SEO Fomo Newsletter @ https://www.seofomo.co/ 

Today we’ll be talking about the most blocked crawler bot, some takeaways from SEOs & Devs: Harmony in Tech, and a new notification system on Google Search Console that wasn’t supposed to be public yet.

Ahrefs is the most blocked bot from robots.txt files as tweeted by Malte Landwehr from data via builtwith. Something to note - Ahrefs is blocked by default on Shopify sites as well as by default on any plesk servers. Majestic and SEMRush were the only other SEO tools in the top 10. Some more data: https://trends.builtwith.com/robots 

https://twitter.com/MalteLandwehr/status/1473392514833043465 

A great article by Mirriam Ellis at Moz that sums up a lot of SEO with a bit of emphasis on local business.A few big takeaways from this are: 

• 69% of people say at least half of their searches have a local intent
• “Available near me” searches increased by 100% globally in 2020.
• 33% of searches result in a Google local pack being returned
• Google hiding website links in 59% of local packs.
• 87% of consumers read reviews. 
• 78% of consumers want to text with your business
• 60% of shoppers say they would change their purchasing habits to protect the Earth and 
• 83% of young people want to patronize brands which align with their values

https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-industry-story

Worth a listen talking about separating the content and the technical and making sure that’s not the same person. In fact, it can be two completely different agencies that you work with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMIKtfVD21g&t=625s 

SEO and JavaScript - a hot topic for many as Google recommends server side rendering instead of client side rendering, but how can you work with you dev team. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMIKtfVD21g&t=273s 

You might have seen this happen to your advertisements on Google. You may have had an ad that was originally disapproved because of a past violation, but now it's not!

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-past-violations-32652.html

Google is testing a new feature that will show products at the top of their search results pages. The option to mark as special has just been added, so we'll see how this improves your online retail experience!

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-business-profile-products-mark-as-special-option-32660.html

Google's April 2021 and December 2021 product reviews update only targeted English language content. Has it already rolled out to other languages though?

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-product-reviews-update-other-languages-32658.html

We were excited to see a new announcement bar on the Google Search Console interface! The most recent update had three levels of urgency depending upon how important it is for you know about this issue. 

https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-testing-announcement-bar-378064

A lot of today’s podcast is going to be focusing on the Google SEO office hours with John Mueller - some of the more important things I think were discussed and my additional thoughts. From how scrapers are using Google’s own servers to crawl budget concerns.

Google's John Mueller was asked on Twitter why the link report seems slower than most of the other reports. He said that links is not an area they think SEOs should focus too much on and thus the report is not something they "spend lots of resources" on.

https://twitter.com/abondance_com/status/1473925258281426951 

SEO expert Alan Bleiweiss asked John Mueller of Google if Google has a "Google Book of Secrets" where it stores all the algorithmic changes it makes in a single location. John Mueller said that yes, Google does document all of the changes it made.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=2306 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-book-of-algorithm-updates-32650.html

John Mueller discusses a question about breadcrumb schema markup but gives some info about matching what a user sees with what is in the markup. It seems Google may not utilize markup if it doesn’t have a matching value the end user sees. FAQ schema is an exception, as you can have collapsed answers that aren’t visible.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=2385

When looking at multilingual sites, especially as you start out - you don’t have to translate every page. Google looks at multilingual sites by page.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=2636

Another question came up about crawl budget on Google SEO office-hours, and again John asked the number of pages. About 10,000 pages and John quickly said you don’t have to worry about crawl budget. The question was more about auto-generated pages that are no-indexed and showing up in search console and John gives a good answer on when you would no-index vs block in robots.txt and how those pages might still show up in the index.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=2751 

Scrapers are getting smarter and using Google Cloud services to run their quote GoogleBots to scrape site content. Doing this at first glance is a Google IP and may not set off red flags, and even allow more unrestricted access to your site. Make sure the IPs reverse domain to googlebot and not just google.

https://youtu.be/LHf8DvfPbRU?t=3502 

Most of the search algorithms Google launches work across all languages. There are exceptions, like when Panda first launched and the product reviews update and some others. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithms-languages-32643.html

This year was full of surprises for search engine and digital marketing professionals, as well as the second year of the COVID pandemic. From title change fiascos to improved shopping options and new ways of tracking data, this year was packed with changes that could potentially affect their brands' visibility.

https://searchengineland.com/seo-2021-year-in-review-endless-updates-title-rewrites-g

Today is December 27th, 2021 and here's some of the top stories I am covering:

• Is 100k pages on your site an issue for crawl budget?
• Updated image results?
• A great thread about ranking in a top position for a highly searched term. 80k in value
• Does google use analytics data? Does google use CTR on SERPs data?
• Bing and shopify integration
• Google Ads issues with GMail ads
• If you aren’t looking at tiktok in your 2022 marketing plan, take a look at this article
• Facebook is losing a bunch of execs, especially in the advertising segment

News items discussed:

Google does not use Google Analytics 4 for ranking purposes, and has always said it has never used Google Analytics in its algorithm.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-4-google-ranking-32622.html

Google Image search on mobile has these labels for sections of the images it sometimes shows in the search results. A new label I have not seen before is showing "top categorized results."

https://twitter.com/SaadAlikhan1994/status/1473330087147802637

A look at how to use meta descriptions to help search engines understand your page's content. Meta descriptions are considered an indirect signal, in that they do not directly influence search rankings. They do help with other goals such as improving click-through rates.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/optimize-meta-description/

A Reddit user woke up to an additional $80,000 in monthly traffic after his site reached the fifth rank for a competitive keyword. What should he do to the page with a weak call to action?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/rm5la2/woke_up_to_80000_increase_in_monthly_traffic/

Microsoft Bing has announced a Shopify integration that allows products to be purchased from the Bing Shopping and Search features.

https://www.seroundtable.com/microsoft-bing-shopping-shopify-ethical-shopping-32639.html

Google has a new serving issue with Google Ads that is impacting ad serving on the desktop version of Gmail. So if you are serving Google Ads on Gmail, your ads may not show to a "significant subset of users," according to Google. Google is working on resolving the issue but has yet to resolve it.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-serving-issue-32649.html

According to our research, 68% of marketers said they didn't plan to use TikTok for marketing purposes in 2021. Those who did plan on increasing their use of TikTok were also heavy users of Facebook and Instagram.

https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/tiktok-growth-projections-and-the-opportunity-with-gen-z/

Facebook's most notable departures from the company in 2021. Many senior executives left or announced plans to depart in the coming months.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/23/here-are-facebooks-most-notable-executive-departures-in-2021