<p>Thanks for sharing, Nick. These was a great alternative to an April Fool. :-)</p>

<p>Nice work, Casey. </p> <p>It's good to see problems like this elaborated. Maybe Google will get to work on this now!</p>

<p>I think that it is applicable to almost anything and especially to SEO.</p>

<p>I agree. I didn't see this as marketing. He presented an approach that you can adopt and use without becoming a client. If you do need to become a client, the most dangerous part of that is finding the right service provider. Here you got a good look at what Mr. Ewel does and his style. You then have the option of reading his blog for free.<br /></p>

<p>I agree. This is the most interesting content of 2017 so far.</p> <p>I came away from this post thinking that an organic #1 ranking is still worth something. Previously, I thought that massive clicks and commerce were happening above the #1 organic position. But, there still seems to be worthy action in the organic results.<br /></p> <p>Thanks!<br /></p>

<p>Great thoughts.... I think that this procedure could also be applied to a "new section of a site" or even a "new page on a site". Thank you!<br /></p> <p>Time spent on the planning and design is really important. At some point, though, you got to upload and see what happens. At that point it is "time to watch the analytics and learn from your visitors". So, don't become so invested in your planning and design that you are unwilling to change. They are simply concept. Practice could be quite different. It takes more than one shot to adjust the sights of a gun or a website.<br /></p>

<p>Hi Bill! </p> <p><strong>If Google offers recommendations for businesses, and can tell if people go to the places being recommended, it might boost the recommendations for that particular businss in search results; and if people don't go to that business, it might demote that recommendation in results for that business.<br /></strong></p> <p>I would love to see this used to enable small business websites prevail over the big directories like superpages, healthgrades, etc. These big directories often do not link to the very sites that they rate, recommend and make ad income from using their info.</p>

<p>I agree... because I don't have this problem for other types of search. Only when I want to find professionals or businesses in small towns. There is no way that they can compete with these big directories with the current Google algo.</p>

<p>Thank you Faisal, Perhaps Google can solve this by placing an option in the search or enabling a filter in the query string that will deliver only sites from the professional or business being queried and eliminate the directory-type sites that are made only to display ads.</p>

<p>This isn't a prediction, just what I would like to see.....</p> <p>When I search for, as example, a physician in a small town, instead of finding the websites of physicians, the SERPs are full of directory-like sites such as... ratemds.com, heathgrades.com, superpages.com, ucomparehealthcare.com, vitals.com and wellness.com. I don't want these sites, they are outdated and have little information beyond ads, addresses, more ads, phone numbers, and more ads. I need a way to get to the websites of the physicians so I can judge their practice by what they present on the web.<br /></p>

<p>Lots of Universities spend $50,000 per month on roadside advertising and spend even more on television. Yet, they balk at spending staff time on the website - where they are only one click away from an application from a potential student who has already shown enough interest to visit.</p> <p>Getting a seat at the department chairs meeting might be easy. The agenda is often controled by a vice president or provost. These folks are always interested in marketing and getting good work from faculty. So, volunteering to that person can get you on the agenda. That's how I got on the agenda. Getting on the agenda also came with technical assistance as long as the department developed and approved the content.</p> <p>I can't speak to legal on monetizing. I think that it is more "mindset". Some faculty and administrators really hate ads, but if they see that they can generate "a scholarship a day", they will start thinking about it. They simply have no idea what type of revenue ads can produce - yet they spend massive amounts of money advertising.</p> <p>At some schools, the Foundation funds a website. They are all about bringing in money and generally have more liberty than the University. They could produce a monetized website featuring news, research, scholarship, data-driven pages or an affiliate mall. This type of website might already exist and they have never thought to monetize it.</p>

<p>Here are a few things to think about for academic websites.....<br /></p> <p>Think about attending academic department chairs meetings to help them think about their department websites and what they wanted to accomplish with them. Many departments have not thought about "who visits their website" and what content should be displayed for prospective students, employers, potential donors, accreditation teams, and others. They have not thought about how short content items, photo galleries, videos and student portfolio samples can be used to show off programs, courses, faculty, students, graduates, research, student organizations, field work, and more. </p> <p>They are not in the business of thinking about websites and you going there with ideas and examples can be an enormous help.</p> <p>At the academic chairs meeting, offer to attend one of their department meetings to help their faculty members and staff think about their website. A similar presentation as was done at the chairs meeting will be a good start, followed by a brain-storming session on what they can do as a department. Meet with the chair for 30 minutes before the meeting to decide what you want to accomplish. Write a list of ideas on the board, refine that list to the least effort, biggest impact items, then the chair should ask for volunteers or where she as authority make assignments. Just two or three people catching enthusiasm can make a huge difference in a department's online presence.</p> <p><br /></p> <p>If you are brave, and at an institution with an open mind, meet with the VP of Finance and explain how a few nicely done ads on the website can generate a scholarship every day at a large school, how an affiliate mall can do the same. There can be a huge resistance to monetization at some schools, but where they have the brains and courage they can bring in money that does a lot of good. Visit the Cornell Law School website and see how they are monetizing the information pages of their website with wikipedia-inspired "if everyone reading this gave $10" messages - in addition to on-page advertising. </p> <p><a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/15-537#writing-15-537_SYLLABUS" rel="nofollow">https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/15-5...</a><br /></p> <p><br />Universities have lots of data bases that can sometimes be shared with the public such as Dean's List, graduates, student clubs, departmental data, alumni information, and varies types of news that connects to specific communties in the schools geographic service area or academic program communities. These databases can be used to generate pages that will market the university and be refreshed a few times per year by a program that taps these data bases. These pages can also be monetized with nice sponsor ads or adsense.<br /></p> <p>These are just a few ideas.<br /></p>

<p>If Google is pushing something there is usually a benefit in pushing it for Google. Maybe a benefit for you and maybe not. If there stops being a benefit in something for Google then they are gonna drop it and all of your work and investment gets dropped right along with it. </p> <p>Google pushes quite a few propeller hat ideas, just because they are Google. </p> <p>Be extra judicious. Don't try to jump through every hoop like a trained dog - because sometimes Google yanks the hoop and sometimes the reward for the jump will not go to you.</p> <p><br /></p> <p><br /></p> <p>.<br /></p>

<p>Two publications that I have enjoyed are The New York Times and USA TODAY. They are on opposite ends of the "quantity" scale in terms of article length. </p> <p>USA TODAY has articles that are just a few paragraphs and can be read in a minute. Although I really like that style, I don't have the courage to publish a lot of articles like that on my website because I don't think that they will pull the traffic from search for high traffic short tail head terms because they are so short. Maybe I am wrong. Could I get a four paragraph article to rank for "widgets"?</p> <p>The New York Times has fantastic articles - and I sometimes want that level of detail - but usually their articles are waaaayyy too long to be enjoyable reading if you go to the end - so I bail about 25% of the way in and wonder what I missed. If I was the boss there, I would tell authors to cut down the length and use the time savings to write a larger number of articles at same quality level. Is that doable?<br /></p>

<p>SEO is such an important thing and the accurate knowledge of the subject varies person-by-person. I could get into arguments with most SEOs and they could get into arguments with me.</p> <p>So, I am going to "bet on myself" and make sure that the training is done my way to my standards.</p> <p>There is the right way, the wrong way, and EGOL's way. Bet on yourself.</p> <p>........... another way of looking at this....</p> <p>Some people are paid by the hour or by the week. I am paid on the basis of performance. So, I am not going to make darn sure that my performance standard is put into an effort as important as SEO training.<br /></p>

<p>Wikipedia articles would work well in cards. They have a separate section for each subtopic with any images floated to the right. The site looks like crap on desktop because the images are puny and the page spans the width of your monitor but I like it on mobile. </p> <p>If you formatted images and text length nicely it would work well in cards and be beautiful on desktop or mobile.</p>

<p>I am wondering if there is a design-shift here for websites? How can I use "cards" to make a single design that works on desktop of mobile? Maybe I could use css to make each &lt;section&gt; a card? </p>

<p>A lot of visitors don't like to buy on mobile because typing their billing, shipping and credit card info into forms is too much work. So, they email the page to themselves and check out on desktop when they get home. There, they can also print a copy of what they purchased. Mobile websites that enable the customer to check out in just a few clicks have a big appeal. This can be done by offering PayPal checkout or another method of remembering customer data to facilitate easy checkout without a lot of typing.</p>

<p>Green columns that might be added to the spreadsheet are cost of producing the page, ad revenue (last 12 months), ad RPM, retail RPM, ad revenue (last 12 months/cost of page), retail revenue (last 12 months/cost of page). These types of metrics speak to the return on your investment and inform your future content development in financial terms.</p>

<p>Yes, it is two years old. Still, don't want to convert my site with the "hope" that they are now doing a better job. I am waiting to see people say... "I converted my site and my Adsense revenue didn't change." I have not seen that yet. Too much money is involved to take chances. <br /></p>

<p>I have been skeptical about switching my sites to https because <a href="http://marketingland.com/snags-googles-ssl-vision-sites-can-get-tripped-quest-secure-web-97266" rel="nofollow">people I trust</a> reported significant drops in their Adsense revenue after making the switch. I don't think it is wise to risk possible migration problems, your Adsense revenue and the time/cost involved for a rankings boost that people argue about.</p>

<p>Thanks for doing this study. Very interesting. Now I don't feel bad that some of my projects take a long time to get done.</p> <p>As followup to this study. It would be interesting to know how many of these major projects jump the tracks before completion and how many actually deliver their hoped-for results.<br /></p>

<p>Rand, this statement provides a lot of clarity about DA. I think that a lot of people have the impression that the correlation between DA and rankings is almost perfect. Then, when they see websites with lower DA outranking theirs in the SERPs they have a variety of unpleasant reactions. Mix in PA and it is even more complex.</p>

<p>Exactly. The websites looked at by Parse.ly must have enormous traffic. That is the only way that a piece of content could earn back its cost with such a short life. My articles don't earn back their cost until an average of three or four years, but after that the site is self-funding.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.parsely.com" rel="nofollow"><strong>Parse.ly</strong></a><strong>, an audience insight platform for digital publishers, found that 2.6 days is the median pageview peak for any single piece of content. Pageviews basically fall off a cliff shortly thereafter.</strong></p> <p>I was shocked by this. </p> <p>They must be looking only at news sites or sites that pull in visitors by blasting emails or shilling on social. Or maybe they publish ephemeral content like gossip or lottery ticket numbers. </p> <p>Websites that earn a living by competing in the organic SERPs will have a very different pageview peak. That content might not do crap for the first two months or even two years as daily pageviews slowly but steadily climb and climb and climb.<br /></p>

<p>This is exactly right. Google would demote sites in the SERPs that do this.</p>

<p>The day is near when the first page of the SERPs will be 100% paid.</p> <p>They have to show growth to shareholders and the easiest way to do that is to make more money from current traffic, because doubling their revenue by doubling their traffic will be really difficult. </p> <p>Stay tuned for more.<br /></p>

<p>I think that it could be a good way for any business to get local buzz. Let's say you own a web design firm that has lots of clients in a local community. You could offer those clients free space on a card (or even charge them for space). All they have to do is to tell you their free offer and promise to honor it for one calendar year. People who are not clients can get space for a higher fee - if you have enough space on the card to add them. Then these cards are used as fund-raisers by local organizations. It can be Little Leauge, Girl Scouts, Art Club, whatever. The members of the club sell the card and keep all revenue.</p> <p>The benefit for you is that the web design firm will be the host website for the cards. There you can have a description of the program, a list of participating business, and you can offer to sell the cards and deliver them by mail through a form on the site. Your company will get the sponsorship name on the front of the card, get lots of social buzz from people who talk about the program, and lots of mentions on local websites and social media. Soon, other organizations and businesses will be coming to you to sell the cards or become program participants. You can charge them for participation or say... sorry, we offer first opportunity to our clients and will contact you if space is available. There is no reason why you could not have Little League cards, Girl Scout cards and Art Club cards, each with different participating business. You can imagine that the art club and the Little League can generate their own card sponsors - even in a small town.<br /></p>

<p>Here are a couple examples of loyalty programs in very small communities....</p> <p>Little League Discount Card... The kids baseball organization has loyalty card printed and sells them to local residents for $10 or $20. Bearers of the cards present them at participating stores to get a discount or a freebie. The Little League keeps the money from the sale of the cards - and they can sell a LOT of cards. Business owners get very low cost advertising on the back of the card. Every person who buys a card will see your biz listed on the back and think of visiting your business instead of competitors when they need or want what you offer. Businesses also receive recurrent advertising every time a cardholder looks at the back of the card and stream of repeat patronage. I used to live in a community that had one of these programs and almost everyone who lived there had a card - and used it. Here is an example of a website for one of these cards. It is not designed for any SEO benefit and does not have any social media interaction, but it could. <a href="http://oall.org/Page.asp?n=109044&amp;org=oall.org" rel="nofollow">http://oall.org/</a></p> <p><br /></p> <p>Here is another loyalty card program from a small community. Local newspapers offer the cards as a service to their advertisers. They sell the cards, promote the local businesses every week in their papers. This is a much larger program and there are multiple SEO benefits for participating businesses - on the loyalty card website, on the newspaper websites, on local business development organization websites that promote the cards. <a href="http://www.belocalpa.org/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.belocalpa.org/about/</a></p> <p><br /></p> <p>These are just two examples. Imagine if the newspapers organized the programs and then the Little Leauge kids sold the cards. That could be an additional SEO and social opportunity.In a small community the day that the Little Leauge cards become available there is a social buzz about the cards and the participating businesses that repeats every year. </p>

<p>I find this topic to be very difficult to understand. It does not matter if I am reading information published by the FTC or any other author.</p> <p>It is like being presented with a white to black color gradient and trying to decide which shade of gray is where the problem begins. And, that is a gross oversimplification because instead of being a two-dimensional gradient, there are many dimensions, some of which are unknown, unexpected, and/or obscure.</p>

<p>In the debate about removing content or improving content the important element is <strong>TIME</strong>.</p> <p>If you can improve your content quickly then do it. However, top-quality content requires time to produce. </p> <p>Lets say you have 200 vulnerable pages, 600 top quality pages, and just got whacked for half of your traffic with rankings down across the site. If the work of improving those 200 pages is very slow and you can only do one per week (a four-year job to improve the entire 200 pages), then you better get that poison content off of the site and get the 600 good pages back into top rankings. </p> <p>What if you can hire a couple people who can improve four pages per week? That is still going to take a year. It might still be a good idea to remove the poor content and publish the improved as it becomes available. That will improve the average stature of your site and perhaps Panda will rank all remaining content better. Keep in mind that Panda is supposed to be running continuously. Fixing your quality ratio immediately might be beneficial.</p>

<p>Interesting post. Thank you. </p> <p>The example here is about how the publishing options of the CEO can influence his social status according to google. Could a similar template be identified for what makes a small niche retail site successful? </p>

<p>Thank you, Brian. Very interesting. This article should serve as a warning to people who like to monkey with their URLs.</p> <p>I am curious about what you or others do in these common situations.....</p> <p>A) You stop selling a product and you have a similar, but not identical product to replace it. Do you redirect to the new product or announce that it is sold out and link to the new product?</p> <p>B) You stop selling a product and you have no replacement. Do you redirect to a category page? Or to your homepage?</p> <p><br /></p>

<p>I agree. He is talking about people chopping off parts of the site without analysis. I think that most people will do some analysis before that type of surgery. Even a muskrat stuck in a trap will think about consequences before chewing his foot off.</p> <p>If a site has a Panda problem or the potential of a Panda problem, then time is very important. The best thing to do is to quickly noindex or delete the thin pages to get them out of the index. That will allow the pages that remain in the index to be as strong as possible, avoid Panda, and recover</p> <p>After that you want to get the noindexed pages back into action as quickly as possible so that you enjoy the traffic and income that they produce. If yours is the kind of content that can be outsourced and still retain quality then it might make sense to outsource that work and get those pages back to earning money right away. The quick return to action of those pages will fund the content development. If you are the only person who can do that writing and have limited time, then I would write the most valuable ones first, one-at-a-time properly, to avoid thin content on the site.</p>

<p>Thanks Everett,</p> <p>For Panda victims, I tell them.... You must chop off your foot to save your ass. </p>

<p>Excellent article. The best SEO article that I have seen in a long time.</p> <p>I have a site that got hit by the second Panda update because it had a lot of republished content and a lot of thin pages that had been on the site for a decade. I took a hatchet to the republished and used noindex on the thin. The thin is being replaced by substantive at a rate of just a few articles per month because they are time consuming to write. Got out of Panda quickly and traffic is climbing slow but steady. This stuff works!</p>

<p><strong>People Also Ask knowledge panel tends to appear in short or navigational queries</strong></p> <p>This is exactly what I see. One and two word queries - especially nouns - have these at a higher rate than more specific queries.<br /></p>

<p>I think that Google should stop doing this. Lots of the information that they offer this way is incorrect, out of context, or half of the necessary facts. </p> <p>Lots of people are going to believe the information in these snippets because they "got it from Google". The searcher should be sent directly to the information source where all data and disclaimers are presented. The visitor can then read or ignore at their peril. This is especially true for YMYL topics.</p> <p>For the same reason I don't believe that "buy buttons" should appear in the SERPs. They will convert the visitor without the visitor reading full descriptions, disclaimers, warnings, and terms. The merchandise sold this way will have a very high return rate. <br /></p>

<p>That's a good point, Antonio. </p> <p>If they became the retailer and slapped a Google logo on Brand X digital cameras, I think that it would accelerate sales. :-)</p>

<p>I have always wondered why Google never became an affiliate or a retailer or partnered with a company like WalMart.</p>

<p>It is getting to the point where I think I need a consultant to tell me what I should do and what I should not do. </p> <p>Google is coming out with things like authorship, Google+, https, mobile friendly, amps, etc... and I can't tell if they are "opportunities"... "directives"... or something else.</p> <p>At some companies they might put three people to work looking at these things and implementing some of them. Other companies have three people total who must do everything from content to fulfillment and sweeping the floor. .</p> <p>Something like amps is probably great for some types of websites and not worth the money and effort for others, but it is really hard for the average person to decide if you are going to get a positive return.</p> <p>This WBF was really good because it helped me understand something that has been "mysterious" to me, even after reading a few articles about it. Thank you.</p> <p>My question is... do you foresee anyone who really understands amps (and other mysterious subjects) like this offering a consulting service that reviews websites and talks with webmasters and gives a solid recommendation to "do this" or "forget this" or "do it with <strong>this</strong> specific portion of your content" or "do this instead of mobile friendly" or whatever? </p> <p>A lot of these mysterious things arrive with evangelists who advocate them for everyone and want to charge you a bucket of money to implement if for you. Many people don't want the evangelist.. they just want to know "does this make sense in my situation?" <br /></p>

<p>Thank you Eric. </p> <p>I was thinking on a different channel. But, thank you for sharing your thoughts on noindex,follow for these types of pages and getting the article rewritten with a different spin.</p>

<p><strong>Freely share the best content covering your market, including that created by others.</strong></p> <p>Nice work Eric. Thanks.</p> <p>A few years ago I was republishing a lot of content given to me by academic institutions and government agencies. Then I got hit with a Panda problem. </p> <p>To escape Panda, I deleted most of that content and added noindex,follow to the pages that were most popular with my on-site visitors. That got my site out of Panda and my visitors still consume the popular contributed content.</p> <p>Today, I rarely add content given to me by others. I am afraid to add very much of it, because it might cause Panda problems. That approach reduces the breadth of depth of my website and gives my own visitors a smaller menu of content to consume. </p> <p>My question to you is... What do you view as "best practice" for adding content provided by others? </p> <p>A) Republish verbatim, but noindex,follow those pages?</p> <p>B) Require contributor to provide a rewritten version and publish as index,follow? </p> <p>C) Republish verbatim, but add substantive upgrades or editorial of my own to the page and publish as index,follow?</p> <p>D) Republish verbatim, but add rel=canonical pointing to the same article on contributor's website? </p> <p>E) Republish all of this content on a subdomain?<br /></p> <p>Finally, how much of this type of content can I add to my site? If 10%.... 25%.... 50%..... or more of my content is noindex, rel=canonical, will I start flirting with another Panda problem?</p> <p>I know it is hard to predict how Google will handle this today, and how they will handle it tomorrow. Thanks for any thoughts that you can share.<br /></p> <p><br /></p>

<p>Thanks for the info on NewsCred and Percolate. I was not aware of them.</p>

<p>Tracking can be valuable for distributed content too. If a tracking code was inserted between &lt;article&gt; and &lt;/article&gt; and that block of code was dropped into a page on a partner's website, then I will have access to how many times my article was viewed on their site. This would be valuable information for me to know the power of their site for driving traffic to my article. It would help me decide if I want to share more content with that website.</p> <p>That data would also be valuable for the host publisher because they will know if my content is being viewed by their visitors and if they want to give me similar opportunities in the future. Maybe some people charge a fee for each time an article is viewed, with either the publisher or the author being paid, depending upon the details of their agreement. Third-party metrics would be nice for these arrangements.</p> <p>I'd like to see someone develop a system where authors could offer content and publishers could shop, select, post and then the author would be paid on the basis of views - either through direct pay or the presence of my ad codes embedded within the &lt;article&gt;&lt;/article&gt;. This would be self-service through a membership site and eliminate contact, negotiate, accounting. </p> <p>Added: Embedding of rel=canonical would be an important part of this system.<br /></p>

<p>I experimented with Moz content and thought that it was an interesting tool. It also tabulates metrics for pages on a website that a lot of people enjoy.</p> <p>I think that the product could be more valuable with additions similar to these..... </p> <p>1) Give users a tracking code that they can place in the footer of their articles and another code that they place on their "conversion page" whatever that might be... shopping cart, lead form, signup, download, whatever. That will help users determine which content is on the path to conversions. That can place a value on their content that is closer to greenbacks.</p> <p>2) A different tracking code might be placed on pages that generate income from advertising. This code will tally visitor metrics, and the processing would pull income values from Adsense (or a revenue estimate the the user inputs manually.</p> <p>Now, if I have the ability to input my cost of producing the content, then Moz Content will be able to tell me which of my articles are making a profit, how long until a profit will be turned at current rate, how many pageviews will be needed to turn a profit. Then I can sort these numbers and know which of my pages are really making money and which ones are not.</p> <p>Greenbacks are the best metric for a lot of people.<br /></p>

<p>I really enjoyed this article. The whole time I was reading it I kept thinking... "This is what people miss when they install an ad blocker."</p>

<p>I believe that Google launched "Authorship" in a self-serving effort to attract an erudite audience to Google+. They knew that associating authors with their content might be valuable information but they were not prepared to do that. Now, they are making noise with a patent application. If they really want to do this right, the author should be able to connect his content to his best biographical page, where ever that exists on the web, rather than to a property owned by Google. </p>

<p>Wow! The last two minutes were great. Kick 'em in the pants without them realizing they were kicked in the pants. :-)</p>

<p>One of the best times to "republish" is when a topic that you already have on the site is hitting the news. That is when searcher interest is high. It is also when interest is high among people who share your content. So, when related topics hit the news, quickly update your old content, address the news in your opening paragraph or in a callout box at the top of the page. Then "repromote" that content on your own site, to your tribe, or to people who liked your original work on this topic.</p>

<p>Beat their content, not their links. That's what it takes these days.</p>

<p>Doesn't it make sense that Google would verify the value of links with engagement as a confirming metric? Certainly some links, such as those from hard core vaults of integrity can be trusted without confirmation. However, those coming from places where they can be "built" or "bought" would need engagement confirmation to be viable.</p> <p>Perhaps links and engagement alone are additive in the algo but where they play in concert their weight becomes multiplicative.</p> <p>You really see very little rubbish content at the top of a Google SERP for a competitive query. So, I think that the take away from this WBF is really that rubbish (defined as unengaging) content has little value and that the most undervalued asset of a company is an employee who produces engaging content. </p> <p>Google now must make content ownership and attribution a priority, because content theft and infringement is now where they are having a problem with their algo. They think that they are "good at it" but they are not. The importance of this increases as the use of engagement as a ranking factor increases.</p> <p>ADDED: Maybe that's why they are <a href="https://www.seroundtable.com/google-authorship-take-back-20978.html" rel="nofollow">bringing Authorship back</a>.<br /></p>

<p>Ronell, </p> <p>I really enjoyed the screenshot from the two-way radios SERPs. Their bread crumbs were.....</p> <p><a href="http://www.rei.com" rel="nofollow">www.rei.com</a> › Learn at REI › Expert Advice</p> <p>That "expert advice" might earn extra clicks.</p> <p>Thanks<br /></p>

<p>Great list, Doc.</p> <p>Has anyone done a similar list of all of the hoops that google tells people to jump through?</p> <p>* https</p> <p>* mobile-friendly</p> <p>* nofollow</p> <p>* rel=canonical</p> <p>* authorship</p> <p>* google+</p> <p>* site verify</p> <p>* etc</p> <p>I think it would be pretty interesting. All that they say to do, all that they abandoned, all that the abandoned and then told you at a much later date.</p>

<p>It's a great way to get your content duplicated on a powerful site. :-)</p>

<p>Nothing like a great article to set the SEO chicken coop on fire. :-)</p> <p>I agree that every website needs to have a few technical details in place. A good navigational structure and content recommendations make it easy for search engines and visitors to find and consume your content. And every author will get better mileage out of his content with a little knowledge about optimization and presentation.</p> <p>But, once you have those basics in place, a good author can get by with five minutes of SEO per day. </p> <p>However, most people are not good authors or they are simply promoting products without anything remarkable to make their site popular. These folks need SEO, or maybe a magician to make their site visible. </p> <p>So, the great content producer can get by with five minutes of SEO per day and some expert assistance at the start and occasionally thereafter. But most people don't have the content producing abilities to pull this off. Thus the need for SEOs, magicians, and simply honest people to tell them that their content sucks or their biz plan has a very low probability of success. <br /></p>

<p><strong>There's no wrong way to set up your editorial calendar..</strong><br /></p> <p>Good. You understand me. :-0<br /></p> <p>No calendar here. I have a big list of ideas and new ones crop up constantly. Inspiration arrives a couple times per week and I get to work on it. About half of the time I go straight to completion. The other half of the time, I get half way there, hit a problem or get tired. That topic gets abandoned - for now - and it's still good. </p> <p>I currently have a folder of about 100 abandons, but at least once a week I stumble across a great photo, a great piece of information, or a great something triggers my mind for one of the works in the abandoned folder. </p> <p>I get the old work out and finish it quickly, with better ideas than first time around. About 1/2 of my finished work, and most of my best work, comes from abandons. </p> <p>It's like findin' money. :-)</p> <p><br /></p> <p>I would not work well with a "calendar" or with a boss. If I had to "write this" or "write that". Today and now. I'd feel like a race horse pullin' a plow. That's no fun. And, under that yoke, it would be really hard to do "best work". <br /></p>

<p>Ryan, that is one of the best comments that I have seen on this type of topic in a long time. "Make time for things you believe in." That's perfect. (I can't understand why someone would give it thumbs down.)</p>

<p>Very interesting. Thank you for sharing this data.</p> <p>A question that I have is... What data do you use to inform content development or the issuing the call for content contributions? Do you monitor the types of content (by topic or by target audience) to see what is consumed by members? What brings in traffic from search? What triggers conversions? What is evergreen?</p> <p>My experience in a very different industry is that the most successful content is the topic that is a surprise for the visitor and is totally off my radar screen. But, this can be risky content to spend time or money on, yet it can be awesome when it succeeds.<br /></p>

<p>I admire how you kept working when people pointed at things that they didn't like. :-)</p> <p>Keep up the great work!<br /></p>

<p>Thank you, Daniel. This article was full of valuable tips.</p> <p>Hey, if you decide to write "how to get your content featured" I am ready to read it !</p>

<p>I have always believed that "people asking for you by name" has been part of the algo. <br /></p> <p>Smart people can help the public ask-for-them-by-name by obtaining a very easy domain name and using it as a <strong>call-to-action</strong> (not simply including it) in/on their physical products, product packaging, billboard advertising, TV / radio advertising, swag :-), biz cards, YouTube videos, doman (rather than brand) mentions on distributed content (may be more valuable than anchor text), apps, jingles, tweets, and any other thing that you can get out to the public at scale. Heck, while you are at it tattoo it on your forehead, paint it on your car and make some graffiti.</p> <p>QR codes might be valuable (the next patent?). Short domains, provocative domains, memorable domains, keyword domains (that some people query naturally), domains that play on <a href="https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/micromoments" rel="nofollow">micromoments</a>, have always been a smart idea. </p> <p>&lt;rant&gt;They would be total idiots if they were not using this before pagerank. It is so basic that they should not be granted a patent for it. :-)&lt;/rant&gt;<br /></p>

<p>WOW! Nice work Kristi. This article is a "gift to Moz". It is so well written, so well illustrated, so nicely subheaded for scanning and on a topic that should pull in a lot of traffic, shares, links, bookmarks, and envy from other webmasters. Every website should have some great "industry basics" content like this. Inspiring.</p>

<p>Wikipedia has high rankings everywhere. So if they change pages on their site from http to https then the percentage of https URLs on page 1 of those searches should shoot up by 10%. So, in my mind https is not a factor here. In fact, the histogram above might understate.<br /></p>

<p><strong>my simpleton analytics mind</strong><br /></p> <p>Alan, you are an honest man to make a comment like that. :-)<br /></p> <p>All of those spreadsheet functions like "<b>=LEFT(B1,FIND("/",B1,9)-1)</b>" are the real trade secrets. I'll bet only about five people on the planet know how to do that stuff. But now that you have those functions you can probably step through parsing the data. But, it probably would pay to let her do the rest of the work because there is a genius mind doing the evaluations. </p>

<p>Hello Ruth, great to see you on WBF.</p> <p>This is the type of video that Moz should make more of. Good, basic, evergreen SEO advice - with a bonus of some "not often thought about" information such as mitigating scraper risk with rel=canonical and the fine points of crawl budget.</p> <p>Anybody who didn't watch this because they thought it was a noob topic missed out.</p> <p>Thanks for the video.<br /></p>

<p>Thanks for the post with all of the nice graphs that summarize the information. </p> <p>This is another article that reveals that most website visitors prefer short articles of about 300 words. I don't disagree with that. I like quick reads too. And, my complaint about great websites like the New York Times is that their articles are generally waaaayyy too long. </p> <p>My experience as a webmaster (at least for the topic areas where I write) is that 300 word articles don't perform well in search. They rarely rank well for difficult queries unless they are on a domain with overwhelming power. On a site of medium strength they will probably not rank on the first page of Google for a competitive query and they don't have enough keyword diversity to pull lots of long tail traffic. </p> <p>Maybe Google knows that people prefer quick reads, but that is not what their algos promote to top positions.<br /></p> <p>So, unless you have a really powerful site or a lot of traffic that arrives from sources other than search, a 300 word article written for competitive queries might not be profitable. </p> <p>What do you think?<br /></p>

<p>Great video. Inspiring. Watched it twice. </p> <p>"Do what others are either unable or unwilling to do."<br /></p> <p>The horizontal axis on that graph was great!<br /></p> <p><br /></p>

<p>I believe that Google has been using these types of observations in determining rankings since at least 2005. It has allowed strong content on weak domains to rise in the SERPs without the typical SEO promotion. The rise is very slow and may take a year or more but these pages can obtain very visible rankings. </p> <p>It is what allows very small niche retailers to rank above domains like amazon, walmart, ebay, etc. even though these giants have standard SEO metrics that are absolutely overwhelming. This does not happen often because very few small retailers have made the content investment, along with the website presentation, required to earn the deep click. Earning the deep click is a lot more difficult than doing standard SEO but it can be effective. Deep click more often wins on second tier keywords than on head terms where brute force usually dominates, but that's where buyer intent is often found.</p> <p>So, next time you see a webpage ranking above yours and you think that Google isn't treating you properly because your DA and PA are superior, the website beating you might be doing a better job at engaging its visitors and you are going to have a hard time doing anything about it.<br /></p>

<p><strong>What SEO problems make you angry?</strong></p> <p>I don't like getting webmaster messages from Google telling me to "do this"... "do that".... "jump through this hoop".... "jump through that hoop".</p> <p>There's a limit on how much a small company can learn, implement and maintain on top of running their business, trying to stay competitive, and maybe try to get a little ahead.</p> <p>I would not complain if these are genuine improvements that Google has researched and has a commitment to make them a significant part of their algo. But, a lot of this stuff that Google tells you to do today gets abandoned by Google tomorrow and they don't even tell you that they abandoned it. It is like they hold up these hoops and tell you to jump it and then pull the hoop away after you left the ground. </p> <p>So, the dilema for me is deciding what I am NOT going to do.<br /></p>

<p>Lots of small businesses are able to figure out how to get their products into Google Shopping. Some of them simply enter their data into Excel. Many of them entered almost identical data into Excel to populate their shopping cart - just ad a couple more columns. Many of them have become bigger businesses because of Google Shopping. Those who want to participate in Google Shopping and can't figure it out, hire someone to do it, or hire someone to teach them will probably be going out of business for other reasons. </p> <p>If you are an effective discount seller and have the ability to produce or acquire attractive images, Google Shopping will be a much better match for your business than the organic SERPs or Google Adwords. </p> <p><br /></p> <p><strong>Also, if two or more advertisers are selling the same product, then Google would promote the cheapest item, creating a possible pricing war between sellers. While this would be bad for existing advertisers, the increase in competition would be great for consumers. </strong></p> <p>This is exactly why lots of buyers love Google Shopping. They can sort by price. It is the same reason why discount sellers find it to be the perfect niche.</p> <p>If you are shopping for one-of-a-kind goods like "antique mantle clocks", Google shopping is awesome because merchandise offered can simultaneously be browsed by price and appearance. If you are searching for products available in diversity of appearances, such as "tweed fabric" or "gray tweed fabric", again, Google shopping gives you searching abilities that are hard to beat anywhere else on the web. </p> <p><br /></p> <p><br /></p>

<p><strong>I get a bit frustrated by the idea that Google wants us to write descriptions that are "good for users", but then they'll rewrite those descriptions if it's "good for users".</strong></p> <p>Exactly! Isn't that arrogant of them?</p> <p>Something else about #2. When I look at snippets they very often begin with a capital letter and end with a period. </p> <p>When you look at those extra long snippets, has taking a complete sentence - including the period - often been the overextending reason?<br /></p>

<p>Sometimes I have these two thoughts....</p> <p>1) Don't write a description because Google will probably grab something great from the page.</p> <p>2) If you do write a description, make it three or four very short query-answering sentences and google will use two or three of them verbatim.<br /></p>

<p>OMG! 241 pitches! Congrats to the six winners! The selection committee deserves a week at the beach!</p> <p><br /></p>

<p>On my sites that are not Mobile-Friendly yet, the ratio of iphone visits to total visits has dropped. The drop started occurring last Thursday and Friday. It pretty easy to check this just plot an X-Y graph with total visits on one axis and iphone (or other mobile) visits on the other axis.</p> <p>I don't see any real change in my trophy keywords, so the long tail keywords is where the loss seems to be occurring. I am lucky that mobile traffic is a very small percentage of my total visitors.</p>

<p>Dr.Pete, something tells me that the heat is up big time today. <br /></p>

<p>I enjoyed reading your article, Eric. I am betting that lots of companies spent buckets of money converting their websites to "mobile-friendly" and are seeing a puny benefit from that cost.</p> <p>Google used FUD as motivation for a coding goal rather than a genuine improvement in the website. So, if Google now demotes sites that did not comply, the content quality of their SERPs will decline. So, I think that mobile-friendly is going to be a puny factor in the mobile algo.</p>

<p>Right! I am glad that they didn't lose sight of that. </p>

<p>FUD. I agree. </p> <p>I think that people are still figuring out how a mobile site should be designed, and that there are many ways to effectively make a mobile page for products, categories, articles, homepages, etc.</p> <p>In my opinion, "Mobile-Friendly" was a "coding goal" set by google and not a "usability goal". Any bonus in the SERPs that there were offering with this update was simply based upon you having the right code. </p> <p>If Google was serious about improving mobile usability they should have started a long time ago, discovered how to DESIGN mobile pages of various kinds and held good performing pages of various kinds up as examples. They didn't do that, they just threatened people to get the right code on their pages. So webmasters spent buckets of money getting the right code and slapping it on their site, without advancing the usability or the quality of their pages / websites.</p> <p>If Google would have made Mobile-Friendly a big factor in the mobile algo the quality of pages in the SERPs would have dropped. </p> <p>That's just an opinion. </p> <p><br /></p>

<p>I am a bit surprised that being mobile-friendly or not being mobile friendly didn't make a bigger difference in the mobile SERPs - I say that based upon how Google marketed the need to get your site mobile friendly - even marking sites in the SERPs with that designation. </p> <p>I am sure that lots of people exerted themselves and spent major money converting their sites and and now feel that, like the https scare, this was another example propeller hat whimsy from Google. <br /></p>

<p>Doing term frequency analysis might be really valuable if you build it into one of those "content spinner" programs or a "mash-up generator".   So, I might agree with that as an application for term frequency.  </p> <p>I don't think that it has a place in the evaluation of genuine editorial content.</p>

<p>Cornel,</p> <p>I agree that the high quality content producers are looking at ways to improve their content and putting a lot of effort into it. They are spending a lot of effort on things like clarity, impact, reading level, and engagement.  </p> <p>If they are comparing the term frequencies of their documents against the term frequencies of their competitors documents I believe that they are wasting their time.  This is telling everyone to "mimic your competitors".  My advice would be "do something superior".</p> <p>In my opinion, this type of analysis is arbitrary and has nothing to do with the real quality of the content from the editors perspective and nothing to do with the quality of the content from the reader's perspective.  Put the same effort into kicking up the editorial content instead of trying to take great content, run it through a word counter and then change pieces of it to match standard that you don't even know that Google is using.</p> <p>Term frequency and content quality are two different things.</p>

<p>If I was the boss at a publication like the The New York Times, National Geographic, or another that is generally thought to have high quality content, I would not be asking my content production team to do anything different.  </p> <p>I think that the impact of their content stands for itself and if they tried to "tweak the text" to so that it fits a mathematical formula, the result will either be a degradation of the product or a cost that is not recovered.</p> <p>Rewording great writing to meet a formula is really hard, time-consuming and a great way to bust the morale of the writer (which I believe is something worth preserving). </p> <p>Google has a ton of factors that they use to rank a web page.  I am betting that the points awarded for converting a "natural language" document to one that is "formula correct" is quite small - especially when you are guessing at the formula. </p> <p>So, all of my money is still being bet on the great natural language writer. </p>

<p>Thank you, Rand.  Marie's comment is very good.</p>

<p>In other Moz products, the user is given a prioritized list of things to "look at for improvement".  The same could be done here.  </p> <p>Flags such as "small number of pages" could be given a small flag as <br />"opportunities for improvement".  These folks might receive a link to an article that would explain that "Increasing the number of pages on your site and the number of keywords that they target can increase the traffic pulling power of the site.  Also, adding more pages of customer support about how to use your product, how to select the product, etc, will increase the engagement of your visitors and their satisfaction with your brand if you do a good job.</p> <p>Flags for "thin content" and "bad links" could be given big flags as a "high probability of causing problems". These diagnoses would be accompanied by links to articles about Panda and Penguin so the visitor can understand them fully.</p> <p>I think that the tool has potential as a multiphasic website analysis that flags potential problems, explains them, and then links to content resources and other tools on Moz to help the user learn more and improve the website.</p> <p>I think that it would be a great way to help webmasters and an even better way to introduce webmasters to the great content library on moz.</p>

<p>The problem that I see with this tool is that some of the 17 "flags" are rather meaningless (in my opinion)....</p> <p>"You don't have contact info across your site."</p> <p>"Your domain is MothersFantasticSpaghettiSauce.com"</p> <p>"Your site has 3 pages."</p> <p>"Your domain is Route66Guide.com"</p> <p>"Small site mark up."</p> <p>These are either determined by the topic your site or your way of doing business.  They have nothing to do with spam or low quality.  The five of them combined should never be a problem.   If it is a problem then Google is really messing up.</p> <p>Several other flags could exist on a site for no bad reason at all.</p> <p>However, if you have a bunch of cookie cutter pages... BAM!  The Panda is likely to get you.</p> <p>So, I can easily imagine a site with 7 or 8 flags being A-OK, but a site with one flag taking a heavy hit. </p>

<p>I think the Pope's site should be 1/17 or higher because he doesn't have contact info. :-)</p>

<p>The Pope's site gets a report like that.</p>

<p>Thanks Rand, you are right.  I found a really good one by Isla <a href="http://moz.com/blog/are-mind-blowing-titles-credible" rel="nofollow">here</a>.</p>

<p>Wow.  This was a great wbf.   </p> <p>Sticking with this theme I would like to see the "Viking Stuff" done out to other topics and products.  Maybe some actual wordsmithing methods for the title tag.   There is just so much to learn here.</p>

<p>Google has been doing this stuff for ten years and keepin' their mouth shut about it.</p>

<p>Awesome.  Thanks for the templates.  Much appreciated.  Most useful WBF so far this year.    :-)</p>

<p>Thank you, Martin.</p> <p>I didn't know that this was possible.</p> <p>I used to use Clicktracks and highly valued their "what's changed report".</p> <p>Now I have that data back in GA.</p>

<p>Thanks for that info.   I guess if I was going to spend serious money on this type of content promotion, I should be running a few of them simultaneously and juggle my spend between them based upon performance "by article".    From your description, it might be possible that Article A might perform better than Article B on different networks.</p>

<p><strong>I must admit one thing: No matter how good the ROI, I'm not sure that I'd ever use distribution networks.  </strong></p> <p><strong>I feel like I've waded into a putrid swamp, and I would not want my brand -- or the brands of any clients -- to be associated with that.</strong></p> <p>Samuel,  here are a couple thoughts about that....   </p> <p>I was running these types of ads on my website - at the bottom of the content page as they recommend.  I was amazed by the number of people who clicked these ads.   I was getting paid as lots of visitors left my site,  but the pay rate was not very good.   </p> <p>What bothered me the most was...  I was showing these stinky ads to the most valuable people on my website - the people who read one of my articles to the end or at least scanned the entire article.  Then I sold these visitors for pennies each.</p> <p>My decision was to stop running these ads and instead promote my own best content at the bottom of the articles.  Keep those most valuable visitors on my own site.</p> <p>From the advertisers viewpoint.  Yes, their content can be positioned between stinky stuff.  On the other hand they are getting their ads in front of the premium premium visitors for not a lot of money.</p> <p>I am not advocating these services.   Just saying that they are smartly positioned to steal very high quality visitors.</p>

<p>I have a question.</p> <p>Comparisons are being made "by network".</p> <p>I can't understand how that can be meaningful.  </p> <p>Wouldn't the more important variables be the domains that provided the traffic and where the content promotion units were placed upon the page?</p>

<p>Thank you, Ronell !</p>

<p>Hello Ronell,</p> <p>I really enjoyed this post.  Thank you.</p> <p>What advice do you have for the people who prepare the content?  Maybe that's a post for next month?</p>

<p><strong>If you are a major brand with the advantage of almost unlimited resources and losing to a mom and pop, you need to start firing people because obviously they have no clue how to do the job they were hired for.</strong></p> <p>lol.   That's probably true.... and the thumbs down that you got probably came from someone who is gonna be fired as soon as his boss reads your comment. </p> <p>To quote my friend Sorjova:  "SEO is a battle of resources".    </p> <p>Resources can be "money", but even if you got money you still need another resource...  "people with smarts".</p>

<p>Oh... thank you Gianluca.  I now have a better understanding of disruption.  :-)</p>