Bruce Clay's Blog, page 26

The SEO Scoop with Enge & Traphagen: New Stats on Direct Answers, Google+ Changes & ‘The Art of SEO’

The SEO Scoop with Enge & Traphagen: New Stats on Direct Answers, Google+ Changes & ‘The Art of SEO’ was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Do you want the latest research on Direct Answers from Eric Enge? Want to hear early-adoption evangelist Mark Traphagen‘s thoughts on the newest video chat technologies like Blab.im? Then you’ve come to the right place. The impressive Stone Temple Consulting duo took a break from their busy schedules to join me for a live Hangout on Air. (It was the latest in a series of interviews with key speakers as we gear up for SMX East and Pubcon; we’ve been joined by Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan and Ginny Marvin, and we have Google’s Gary Illyes joining Monday — RSVP here!)

What hot topics did we talk about? In addition to Direct Answers and Blab.im, Enge and Traphagen shared their insights on:

Personal brand building and how to use individual trust to boost brand trust
The future of Google+ now that hangouts and photos stand on their own
What’s different about the latest edition of “The Art of SEO”
What content should do, and why marketers can’t afford to be afraid

Watch the entire interview and/or read along below!

Kristi Kellogg: Can you give us a glimpse into Stone Temple’s latest research on Direct Answers?

Eric Enge: Back in February, we published a study of 850,000 search queries that we looked at to see how many of them would generate rich answers in search. These queries were designed to be things that might trigger a rich answer or some kind of knowledge box. A simple example would be “How many quarts are in a gallon,” and Google will come back and tell you four (I hope).

We did that back in February and at the time 19% of the queries casted responded with a rich answer, but we’ve since done a second study in which we’ve looked at 1.4 million questions. So we’ve expanded it, and we’ve compared the data from the original 850,000 queries to see how it changed. So I have a tidbit for you that has not yet been publicly revealed before this moment. Of the 850,000 queries we studied, it went from 19% to 27% showing a rich answers.

The other thing I’m going to talk about at SMX East is basically how you can go about getting rich answer boxes for yourself, and show some data of a bit of work we did where we were able to generate some rich answer boxes.

KK: Mark, you’re speaking on personal branding and social strategy at Pubcon. What advice do you have for a digital marketer looking to build their personal brand?

Mark Traphagen: Personal branding  (matters) for all kinds of companies who are willing and able to take this step. Personal brands power business brands. Bruce Clay has proven the power of that — his name is on the business, but you see Bruce out there. He’s speaking, he’s online, he’s doing seminars, he’s writing content. That’s true for Eric and I, as well, at Stone Temple …

People come to trust our organizations and believe we’re worth doing business with because they’ve gotten to know us and come to trust us. That personal connection can lead to business. At Pubcon I’ll be giving examples and case studies of brands from all types of verticals who do this.

As for individual digital marketers, here at the Inbound conference I’ve been talking about that and encouraging some of the young people I’ve met who are just getting started in the business to be out there creating content and being active on social media and finding forums where they can get engaged. Get to conferences and meet people face to face. Not only does that have obvious ramifications for helping you build your own career, but you can be part of an international mastermind group online. You get to learn and engage with incredible people who can really help you and then you, in turn, pass on that knowledge and expertise from your own experience.

If you happen to be working for a particular brand and that brand is relevant to what you talk about and are trusted for, that trust gets transferred to the brand.

KK: You’re both long-time active Google+ users. With Hangouts and photos splitting out of Google+, Mark, you said that Google+ isn’t dead but it will change. What do you see for the future of Google+?

MT: Eric and I have been on Google+ for a long time, since the second or third day of the platform. We find a lot of value there in the community, despite people saying it’s dead and no one’s there, millions of people use it every day. They tend to be in niche communities. It’s no secret to say marketers are one of those communities, and we’ve found a lot of people there who are mentors and who we’ve become mentors to.

It looks like what Google has decided to do is tighten it up and give Google+ a more specific purpose. It used to be like Facebook on steroids; it was designed to be everything that anyone would want in a social network.  Now they’re saying people don’t really need that. That’s not what they’re looking for. They love the hangouts and the photo products, so it made sense to make those accessible apps on their own.

What about Google+ itself? Obviously it’s still around. Earlier this year they added the collections feature which is like Pinterest on steroids … Bradley Horowitz, who is head of Google+ and the photos and hangouts, said that Google+ wants to now center itself around shared interests. Eric and I picked up that the head of Google’s Deep Mind project, which is their investigations in artificial intelligence, said in an interview back in January 2015 that the first place we’d see any implementation from that project would be in Google+ and it would come before the end of the year. There was no more detail — it was one paragraph. But I’m putting this together and wondering if they’re working on coming up with some amazing way to bring people together based on their interests rather than having the same social graph (friends, etc.). Maybe, rather, we’d come together because we’re both interested in Star Trek or airplanes or whatever it might be.

EE: The original Google+ launch was flawed in one sense. In this case, the Google+ team made every Google account login tie into having a Google+ account. A large part of the community resented that, like it was being forced down their throat whether they wanted it or not. That was bad PR and there are people who still hate the platform today because of it.

KK: With all the new technology platforms coming out, like Blab.im, for instance, how do you decide where to invest your efforts? The tried and true? The new and novel? How do you identify what’s going to work? How do you judge the value?

MT: Blab.im is a live-streaming video chat platform. It’s tied to Twitter, more public, seems to be easier to use and more intuitive than Hangouts for a lot of people. I’ve been experimenting with it a couple weeks now and find it very intriguing. I’m particularly intrigued by how quickly it appears you can grow an audience.

Eric and I are both early adopters — we have that FOMO (fear of missing out). A large part of what we do at Stone Temple Consulting involves social media and we have to at least be aware, but we also have to have some wisdom about it. We look at it, assess, and say this has some value for our clients for their audience. One platform as an example that we haven’t used is Ello. When Ello was introduced, I jumped on it and wrote an extensive guide to it, but Ello, while I love it and what they’re doing, it’s not something I can spend a lot of time on is because what it’s become is a great place for artists and creatives to hang out. People are posting beautiful images and poetry, and I love that but it’s not where our customers hang out.

EE: On the walls in our cafeteria there’s a huge decal of a wave that is meant to remind us that our job is to be in front of the wave. We do that for our clients — we’ll jump in and test things out and make sure that we understand how they work. We want to know if it’s good for us to use, but we also have to understand if the latest technology will be effective for our clients.

KK: The third edition of “The Art of SEO” just came out — Eric, how long were you, Jessie Stricchiola and Stephan Spencer working on that edition? What’s in store for readers?

EE: I think I was working on it for 27 years, although that’s probably an exaggeration. To be honest, I don’t remember when we started. It’s a very long process, and we started working on it last year. It grew from nearly 800 pages to nearly 1,000 pages. There’s a whole new section on Panda, Penguin and penalties and that part of the algorithm. The linkbuilding chapter was completely rewritten into a content marketing chapter. The technical SEO chapter was completely updated — lots of things changed. From our perspective, we’re trying to provide people with a comprehensive resource designed for everyone from beginners to the more advanced people. It really covers a lot of ground and there’s a lot of cool new stuff in it. But, to be honest, the best part of every book writing project is when it’s done.

KK: Eric, you recently wrote a blog post for Moz about the value of interactive content. How do you  implement interactive content in your own digital marketing (or plan to?)

EE: There are lots of people who are cranking out content. I don’t see a situation where there’s too much content – I see a situation where there’s not enough high-quality content. Most people who are starting ‘content marketing’ are pushing out a lot of poor quality content and that’s not what it should be about. This is where the interactive aspect comes in. Create content that people are going to want to share, tell others about, write about, and link to. These are all things you should really be attempting to do with your content.

Create content people are going to want to share, tell others about, write about & link to….
Click To Tweet

Seth Godin used a great word for this: a need to be remarkable. If you look candidly at most content marketing efforts that people put together, they’re not remarkable. It’s garden variety, who cares kind of stuff. So the focus needs to be how can we something a little deeper and a little different. A lot of people get scared. Put aside the fear, take a close look at what others are putting out there and think about what your potential customers need and what kind of help they could use … I don’t know of a market space right now, including SEO, where you can’t come up with new ideas of things that are not being addressed. You can come up with lots of good ideas that people are going to want to engage with and can benefit from. And that’s how content marketing is done right. No content shock for me — to me, it’s all opportunities. Let’s go out there and get it and produce some great content.

KK: This is a fun question — how did each of you get into SEO and digital marketing?

EE: As with nearly everything in my career, I stumbled down a dark alley and found myself doing SEO. It wasn’t literally a dark alley. I was consulting in business development. I was putting companies together, putting partners together. A good friend of mine hired me to do business development for a DVD e-retailer.

I told my friend, “I think we should try to get traffic from search engines” … I just started doing it, trying to figure out how to do it, and a year later, they were doing millions of dollars of sales and I kind of scratched my chin and said, that felt pretty good — maybe I oughta do more of that.

MT: Somebody one day threw me in the deep end of a pool and said see if you can swim. A number of years ago I was working for a small independent bookstore in Philadelphia. It was in the early days of Amazon when Amazon was all books and they were killing us. Literally, just killed. The manager said, ‘You know about this Internet thing.’ He sat me down in from of the computer and said figure out how to take us online and see if we can somehow compete and getting a bigger audience for our books. I had no idea what I was doing but over the next two years I figured it out.

It was fun. We were doing outreach and working with bloggers and linkbuilding and I started seeing the organic traffic going up — the bug bit. I loved it and it became my passion and I wanted to learn everything about it. I got hired by a small agency and sucked everybody’s brains dry there. I’m an ex-teacher, so when I learn something or know something, I’ve got to share it — that’s why blogging and videos and speaking at conferences just flows through my blood. And now I get to do it with one of the best people in the business, Eric Enge.

Many thanks to Eric and Mark for joining us for this special hangout! Catch them speaking at SMX East and Pubcon Las Vegas. Haven’t registered yet? We have some exclusive discount codes for you. For SMX East, save 10% with this code: SMXW15BRUCECLAY. For Pubcon, save 15% with this code: ex-2072615 (only good for the first 10 to use it!) or 10% with this code: ex-6104410 (unlimited).

And if you’re unable to attend, no fear! Virginia Nussey and I will be liveblogging choice sessions throughout both conferences. Check out the liveblog schedule for a sneak peak at what articles to be looking for! Our liveblogs are the next-best thing to being in the audience.

We’re Headed to SMX East & Pubcon Las Vegas to Bring You Live Conference Reports

We’re Headed to SMX East & Pubcon Las Vegas to Bring You Live Conference Reports was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

In two weeks, your feeds and streams will be enriched with new technical SEO tricks, digital marketing case studies and inspiring, big picture pep talks. That’s because attendees of digital marketing conferences SMX East and Pubcon Las Vegas will be blogging, tweeting and ‘gramming the most quotable and memorable takeaways. I’ll be at both conferences as a reporter on the scene so that, even from your office, you can attend the conference. Jump straight to the liveblog schedules below to see the sessions and speakers to expect on our blog, or read on to discover the many opportunities to connect with the Bruce Clay, Inc. team in the coming weeks.

SMX East 2015 liveblog schedule
Pubcon Las Vegas 2015 liveblog schedule

Founder and president Bruce Clay will speak at both conferences, along with BCI’s VP of Search Marketing David Szetela and Director of Training Mindy Weinstein. Meanwhile, Virginia Nussey and I will keep ourselves very busy liveblogging choice sessions as they happen to bring you coverage of as many speaker presentations as possible.

Where to Find Bruce & Co. at SMX East 2015

Bruce Clay will lead his acclaimed One-Day SEO Workshop on Sept. 28.
When night falls, have a drink on Bruce! As always, he’s sponsoring the open bar at the SMX Meet & Greet, held at Social Bar . See you there on Sept. 28 at 6 p.m.!


Bruce takes the stage on Oct. 1 at 10:45 a.m. to explain how we’ve helped clients recover from linking penalties.
David Szetela will share his search marketing insights during the SEM Tune-Up Clinic with the SMX Mechanics at 1 p.m. on Oct. 1.
Catch Bruce again on Oct. 3 at 11:40 a.m. in the SMX Theater as he talks about DisavowFiles.com (this game changer, by the way, is up for the Innovation Award at the U.S. Search Awards!).
Throughout the entire SMX East conference, you can stop by booth #414 in the Expo Hall to meet our team.
Virginia Nussey and I will liveblog key sessions all day, everyday, throughout the conference! Read the coverage as it happens right here on the Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog, and check out our liveblogging schedule below.
If you haven’t registered for SMX East, save 10% with this code: SMXW15BRUCECLAY.

SMX East 2015 Liveblog Schedule

Day 1: Sept. 29, 2015

Time
SMX East Session
Blogger


9 a.m.
Eye Tracking Update: How Users View & Interact with Contemporary Google Search Results
Kristi


9 a.m.
Sherlock Goes Local: How We Solved 3 Local Ranking Mysteries
Virginia


10:45 a.m.
Content, Keyword Research & The Art of Audience Engagement
Kristi


10:45 a.m.
Local Search AMA: A Roundtable Q & A with Top Local Experts
Virginia


1:30 p.m.


Content, Your Brand and the Battle for Customers
Dark Search, Dark Social & Everything in Between
SEO for E-Commerce: What You Need to Know


Kristi


1:30 p.m.
Getting the Most Out of Google AdWords & Bing Reporting Tools
Virginia


3:30 p.m.


Perfect Starts: How to Get More of the Right Traffic
The Brave New World of Programmatic Media
Optimizing Pinterest for Maximum Engagement


Kristi


3:30 p.m.


Google Now, Microsoft Cortana & the Predictive Search World
How Apple’s Changing Up Search: From Siri to Safari to Spotlight


Virginia


6 p.m.
Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan
Virginia

Day 2: Sept. 30, 2015

Time
SMX East Session
Blogger


9 a.m.
Keynote Conversation with Brad Bender, VP of Product Management @ Google Display Network
Virginia


10:45 a.m.
The Growth of Direct Answers: How Should SEOs React?
Kristi


10:45 a.m.
Getting Mobile Friendly to Survive the Next Mobilegeddon
Virginia


1:30 p.m.
Finding Actionable Insights with AdWords & Google Analytics
Kristi


1:30 p.m.
Beyond the Web: Why App Deep Linking is the Next Big Thing
Virginia


3:30 p.m.
Winning at Mobile PPC (Beyond mCommerce)
Kristi


3:30 p.m.
Essential Steps for Performing at Effective SEO Audit
Virginia


5 p.m.
Empowering your Organization with a Search Culture
Kristi


5 p.m.
Personalized Ad Experiences Through Retargeting
Virginia

Day 3: Oct. 1, 2015

Time
SMX East Session
Blogger


9 a.m.
Being Found on the World’s Second Biggest Search Engine: YouTube
Virginia


9 a.m.
The Most Valuable Analytics Reports All SEOs Should Be Running
Kristi


10:45 a.m.
Link Auditing and Best Practices for Acquiring Authoritative Links
Virginia


10:45 a.m.
 Getting Images Right in Paid Search
Kristi


1 p.m.
 Meet the Search Engines
Virginia


1 p.m.
Better Together: Search & Social
Kristi


2:30 p.m.
Meet the SEOs
Virginia


3 p.m.
Best of Show: Top SMX Takeaways
Kristi




Where to Find Bruce & Co. at Pubcon Las Vegas 2015

Stop by booth #312 in the Expo Hall to meet our team throughout the conference.
Bruce Clay is a panelist on the session “Keywords and Keyword Research” on Oct. 6 at 2:30 p.m., and again at 3:55 p.m. during “Site Review: Focus on Organic SEO.”
You can also find David Szetela speaking in “The Top Major AdWords Mistakes and How to Prevent Them” on Oct. 6 at 2:30 p.m.
Catch Mindy Weinstein speaking in “Search and Social Content Strategy” on Oct. 6 at 3:55 p.m.
If you haven’t registered for Pubcon, save 15% with this code: ex-2072615 (only good for the first 10 to use it!) or 10% with this code: ex-6104410 (unlimited).

Pubcon Liveblog Schedule

Day 1: Oct. 6 2015

Time
Pubcon Las Vegas Session
Blogger


9 a.m.
Keynote: Guy Kawasaki
Virginia


10:15 a.m.
Beyond SEO: Market Intersection Optimization
Virginia


10:15 a.m.
Building Great Content
Kristi


1:15 p.m.
Personal Branding and Social Strategy
Kristi


2:30 p.m.
Keywords and Keyword Research
Virginia


2:30 p.m.
The Top Major AdWords Mistakes and How to Prevent Them
Kristi


3:55 p.m.
Search and Social Content Strategy
Virginia

Day 2: Oct. 7, 2015

Time
Pubcon Las Vegas Session
Blogger


9 a.m.
Keynote Conversation with Google AdSense
Virginia


11:35 a.m.
Content Promotion Strategy: Including Pay-to-Play
Kristi


11:35 a.m.
Social and Mobile PR Secrets
Virginia


1 p.m.
Keynote: Rand Fishkin
Virginia


2:45 p.m.
Lead Generation
Kristi


3:55 p.m.
Scaling Content Creation
Virginia


3:55 p.m.
Social Media in a Mobile World
Kristi

Day 3: Oct. 8, 2015

Time
Pubcon Las Vegas Session
Blogger


9 a.m.
Keynote: Duane Foreester
Kristi


10 a.m.
Keynote: Wil Reynolds
Virginia


11 a.m.
Reputation Management: How to Un-trash Your Brand
Kristi


11 a.m.
Building an SEO/SEM Agency Team
Virginia


1:35  p.m.


Hacking Art History Will Make Your Content Stand Out
Relationship Building: The Secret to a Great Pitch


Kristi


1:35 p.m.
SEO and SEM Lessons from the Competitive Automotive Space
Virginia


3 p.m.
Keynote: Gary Illyes
Virginia

(Phew.) That’s it for now. Looking forward to bringing you lots of conference coverage in the weeks to come!

An Interview with Moz’s Rand Fishkin: Up Close and Personal #TAGFEE

An Interview with Moz’s Rand Fishkin: Up Close and Personal #TAGFEE was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

We’re off to see the Wizard — the Wizard of Moz, that is: Rand Fishkin! He’s keynoting Pubcon Las Vegas 2015, and he’s the latest guest in our distinguished speaker series.

(Last week we spoke with Search Engine Land editors Danny Sullivan and Ginny Marvin about what to expect at SMX East later this month. Watch it here.)

Rand illuminated topics including:

The ROI of giving away information via content/Whiteboard Friday
What he’ll be addressing at Pubcon
Google’s new logo and rebranding
The war between time, energy and budget inside marketing teams
How he brings the values of TAGFEE to life and work

Kristi Kellogg: Whiteboard Friday is hugely popular. How does Moz measure the ROI of giving information away?

Rand Fishkin: That’s a tough one. That’s something obviously you folks at Bruce Clay, Inc. do really well — and many of us in the industry have started to find value in that. But there’s not a clear and immediate ROI calculation (for giving information away).

For us it starts from a place of a core value: we want to be transparent and we want to try to make the operations of search engines, social media platforms and content transparent.

That’s almost bigger than an ROI calculation. It’s more of a mission, for us. That being said, we do have some pretty cool metrics that we’ve built up over time. Moz has this dashboard … called 1Metric. Basically it lists all the posts we’ve put out, including Whiteboard Fridays, and has a lot of metrics beside it, including: social shares, new links coming in, the total number of linking root domains, as well as onsite metrics such as time on page, engagement rate, browse rate, etc.

From all of those things, our data science team built an algorithm that correlates with visitors who eventually end up taking a free trial. We look at whether someone eventually, after many, many visits to Moz — takes a free trial and whether or not that particular piece of content was part of that path and then this algorithm provides the best correlated combination of all of those different metrics into a single metric. Then you can sort the posts by one metric each month and see which one did the best.

KK: It works for everyone – people get great content and you guys eventually get people to sign up for free trials. Everybody wins!

RF: Hopefully! We promote tools from our competitors and all that kind of stuff. It’s about doing the best we can for our community and the marketing world. We’re not exclusively focused on how to turn content into leads.

We do a lot of sharing even though we know it won’t necessarily lead to free trials. @RandFish #SEO
Click To Tweet

KK: Well, that sounds very TAGFEE (we’ll get to that later in the chat). But, for now, let’s talk about what your Pubcon keynote will focus on.

RF: I’ve been deciding between a few things, actually, but I suspect what I’ll be focusing on is a look at the ranking elements that Google is using today along with some specific deep dives into experiments that I’ve been running at Moz and as part of the IMEC Lab group. The Pubcon audience tends to be a more technical, advanced group and they like to see interesting and new things they haven’t seen before in the SEO world.

At #Pubcon Las Vegas @RandFish will share his latest #SEO experiments. Watch him here
Click To Tweet

KK: What do you think are the biggest trends in digital marketing that we should be watching out for?

RF: I think we’re experiencing a little bit of tension in the digital marketing world between the desktop/laptop world and the mobile world. And I mean that in terms of:

Where content is hosted (web or app)
Whether I should be putting things on my platform vs. other people’s platforms
Where should I spend my time and energy? Should I be spending my time in the classic inbound marketing avenues like we’re doing today with this Hangout — creating content, hopefully sharing that social and earning traffic, emailing subscribers, etc. — or the paid media platforms, especially now that there are so many content amplification platforms that exist

All of these different tensions are warring for time and energy and budget inside marketing teams. And some of those decisions are being made very strategically by companies that have tested and invested in these things, and some of these decisions are being made from a place of less intelligent analysis.

I think it’s up to marketers like you and I to help everyone who’s investing in digital marketing understand the trade-offs, balances, wins and losses that are inherent in all these different platforms and mediums.

The biggest #digitalmarketing trend according to @RandFish? Just watch
Click To Tweet

KK: When you rebranded SEOMoz to Moz, what to you did that say about the notion of SEO being dead?

Totally honest, it has nothing to do with SEO being dead. I will say that when we made this change I had an assumption about what the digital marketing world was going to do, that did not come true.

My assumption, which turned out to be wrong, was that people who did SEO would shift to focus on not just SEO but content marketing and social media and other forms of non-paid, organic digital marketing channels. That turned out not to be the case … There’s some overlap, but it tended to be the case … that SEO continued to be its own practice. One of the reasons we made that switch was that we thought SEO was going to grow to be bigger than just SEO, and that has not tended to be the case.

Another big reason we made the switch was we wanted to be able to do things that aren’t just SEO. For example, we knew that we were going to be buying FollowerWonk. We knew that we wanted to be able to offer social media tools. We knew that eventually we were going to launch a content product (which I think will happen later this year or next year). So, in order to launch something that centered around content, for example, it’s weird to have that come from something called SEOMoz and it’s much more natural to have it come from a company called Moz.

KK: That’s definitely more inclusive to take SEO off – and now you get to be the Wizard of Moz instead of SEOMoz.

RF: For sure. I forgot — it was mostly about the pun-iness of my title.

KK: Speaking of rebranding, Google unleashed its new logo today. What are your thoughts on the new, sans serif Google?

RF: I suspect that it has more to do with Google’s internal teams wanting an update and a fresh feeling, especially going forward around brand unity now that they’re separate from Alphabet. I don’t think they looked at a bunch of tests and said ‘Oh man, nobody on the Internet likes serif fonts anymore and so we need to go flat.’ I suspect it’s a little more of Google under Sundar Pichai, their new CEO, saying, ‘This is our Google now.’

KK: Well, it’s a fresh look.

RF: You’ll be able to tell very easily if a slide deck or screen share was taken before Sept. 1 2015.

KK: Let’s talk about TAGFEE. TAGFEE represents the core principles of Moz: Transparency. Authenticity. Generosity. Fun. Being the exception. And empathy. How do you live out those principles on a daily basis?

RF: No one, myself included, is perfect at exemplifying or living TAGFEE. It’s an aspirational value set. For me, a big part of being TAGFEE means sharing who I am, what I’m learning, what I’m thinking and even how I’m feeling, very publicly. I think that another big element of my job is continually pushing teams inside Moz — our marketing, our hiring and recruiting, our on-boarding, our intra-company meetings and the way we get things done internally — to represent those values and to try and identify when people have done a great job with representing TAGFEE and rewarding them with praise and recognition, and when people are doing not so great a job representing TAGFEE to quietly nudge them and say, ‘hey, this could use some work and here’s why.’

It goes deeper too, right? I’m working very specifically with two teams at Moz that are working on a keyword research product and a big part of TAGFEE there is trying to balance out things like generosity with revenue. How much can we afford to give away this tool for free and how much can we afford to make these API calls to various services, and what margins do we need to make this a scalable business?

And then, in terms of transparency, how do we make a keyword density score that’s more transparent, more honest, and more realistically represents how difficult it would be to rank for a given keyword? Is it more transparent or less transparent to factor in CTR, for example?

KK: In your latest Whiteboard Friday video you talk about the importance of creating content that is outstanding and highly relevant, and then nudging influencers to notice it. The question of influencer marketing made me wonder who you consider the top five influencers in digital marketing.

RF: I’ve been trying to identify influencers who I think bring a particularly excellent and new perspective:

Amber Naslund, SVP of Marketing at Sysomos. She shares some great stuff, that’s often outside of the box that I am in and that’s great.
Marie Haynes. She’s all things google penalties and penalty recovery. She has tremendous insight.
Cindy Krum, CEO of Mobile Moxie. She’s terrific. Really, really impressed with her.
Gabriel Weinberg, founder of Duck Duck Go. He shares a surprising amount of marketing information. He recently wrote a book called “Traction.”
Joanna Wiebe. She does a lot writing, content, editing, marketing and analysis. Very data-driven and opinion-driven — very very smart.

Bruce Clay, Inc. has a special discount code for our readers: 15 percent off Pubcon 2015 registration with the code: ex-2072615. This code is good for 10 registrants. If those spots are already full, you can still use our 10 percent discount code (good for unlimited registrants!): ex-6104410. Register here. See you at Pubcon!

Backlink Analysis: How to Judge Good Links from Bad

Backlink Analysis: How to Judge Good Links from Bad was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

“Please share a post about how to classify good and bad quality links.”

–blog commenter Mike Jone, July 25, 2015

Backlink analysis is a much-needed skill today. Our SEO analysts spend hours analyzing backlinks for clients — whether they come to us specifically for help removing a Google penalty or not.

These days, all webmasters need to keep an eye on their backlink profiles to identify good links to count as wins and bad ones to target for link pruning. Here we’ve outlined our internal process for analyzing SEO client backlinks to judge which links to keep and which to get rid of.

Understand your goal . Approach backlink cleanup differently when working to remove a penalty vs. performing regular backlink maintenance.
Create your master list . A spreadsheet is your tool for keeping track of your research and backlink analysis activities.
Check your site’s backlinks against any previously submitted disavow files . If you’re inheriting a website that has had search engine optimization management, you may find that a Google disavow file has been submitted. It’s always a good idea to confirm that the previously created disavow file was accurate and did not prune links unnecessarily. Once you’ve confirmed that the disavowed links are low quality, you can continue to include them on future disavow files.
Score backlinks (keep, request removal, disavow) with tools . Tools including DisavowFiles, Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz can indicate quality of backlinks.
Visit the pages linking to your site . While you can get some idea of backlink quality with tools, nothing can evaluate topical relevance and overall appropriateness like a human visitor.
Choose to keep, request removal or nofollow, or disavow each link . Then take action.

At the end of the article you’ll find additional backlink cleanup resources:

Criteria for judging backlink quality
How to nofollow links
Backlink Evaluation Flowchart

Backlink Analysis

Analyzing backlinks is a messy and time-consuming business. When we perform SEO penalty assessments and link pruning services for our clients, the most tedious part is manually evaluating the individual backlinks. It’s like sorting laundry, or weeding a lawn, or separating trash into recyclables and, well, garbage. But all of these tasks must be done.

Have the Right Attitude for Your Goal

Keep in mind that backlinks are necessary and good to help a website rank. Don’t go waving your machete around too wildly or you might hurt your website more than help it. Still, as Bruce Clay says, every site has its weakest link — and depending on the site, you may have a lot of spammy links that need removing.

Have a penalty? If your site has been penalized for unnatural links, then you should be harsher in your backlink analysis. Your site is already bleeding traffic and revenue. Find the bad links and cut them off! Websites not in a penalty situation can be more lenient in their backlink analysis. Adjust how strict you are in your attitude towards backlink cleanup based on your site’s situation.

Create a Spreadsheet to Track Your Findings and Decisions

Backlink analysis is a process that has many steps that may not be happening linearly or along the same timeline. Every one of your thousands of backlinks could be in a different stage of the process. Use a master list to combine the data from several different sources in whatever spreadsheet program you’re using (Excel or Google Sheets). Basically, you want to take the different spreadsheets you created doing the various downloads and combine them into one.

We recommend downloading your backlinks in bulk from Google Search Console and at least one of these additional sources:

Bing Webmaster Tools (free)
SEOToolSet Link Analysis (free, limited)
SEOToolSet Pro Link Reports (fee-based)
Majestic Site Explorer (fee-based)
Moz’s Open Site Explorer (fee-based)
Ahrefs Site Explorer (fee-based)

In your spreadsheet, use the linking URL as your key identifier in one column, the root domain in an adjacent one, and get the various other data fields lining up. Merge and delete your duplicates to create a workable list of backlinks.

Your spreadsheet may have hundreds or thousands of web pages that link to yours. Here’s an example of how you might set up the combined list, with columns for Source, URL, Root Domain, Action, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Nofollowed, Not Found, Notes, and Whois.

Example backlink analysis spreadsheet (click to enlarge)

Check for Disavowed Links First

Save yourself some work and find out right away whether the website has ever submitted a disavow file to Google, which is the list of links a website asks the search engine to ignore. Get a copy of the most recent disavow file that was submitted (because each new disavow file submitted to the search engine supersedes any previously submitted versions for that site).

If either the specific URL or the domain of the linking site (which is the main site name, such as badsite.com) have been disavowed, consider the link disavowed also. The good news is that, once you are satisfied with the disavow file’s accuracy, you won’t need to do any more backlink analysis on those links! You’ve already asked the search engine to ignore them, so you can, too.

Find Out More about the Linking Sites

With the remaining (non-disavowed) backlinks, you need a way to tell the good from the bad. Can you tell just by looking at the URL? With practice, sometimes you may be able to. But usually, you’ll need some extra information in order to evaluate them.

The tools below provide quick intel for backlink analysis. They can help you judge the quality of websites linking to yours. Which ones you choose depends on your budget, time and tool preferences.

Majestic: Trust Flow and Citation Flow

Majestic’s metrics top our list because our SEO analysts think this tool gives the most accurate, up-to-date link information available. In fact, we integrate our SEOToolSet Pro software with link data pulled from Majestic to provide link reports for subscribers. So if you gathered your original backlinks list using either your own Majestic account or an SEOToolSet Pro Link Report, then your spreadsheet should already contain columns for Trust and Citation Flow. Briefly …Citation Flow is a number from 0 to 100 that shows how much link juice the site has (based on how many sites link to it). So this number roughly shows how influential a backlink from this site may be, whether for better or worse.Trust Flow (also 0 to 100) shows how trustworthy the site is based on how close those links are to authoritative, trustworthy sources. In other words, this number shows whether a backlink from this site could be helpful or not.
Moz: Page Authority and Domain Authority

Moz’s Open Site Explorer product shows you scores (on a 100-point scale) estimating the authority of a specific web page and of the site as a whole.
Ahrefs: URL Rating and Domain Rating

Ahrefs’ proprietary scoring system can help you judge backlink quality. Ranking scores attempt to measure the authority of a URL (page) and its domain based on backlinks, similar to Google’s PageRank.
DisavowFiles.com (a free service of Bruce Clay, Inc.)

DisavowFiles compares your backlink profile (pulled from Majestic) against disavow files others have submitted into a crowdsourced database, telling you how many times a particular linking site has been disavowed by others in the database. Knowing which of your backlinks have been disavowed by others can help you easily identify sites you might want to disavow, too. There’s no stronger red flag for backlink cleanup than knowledge that a site is a frequently disavowed suspect.

Visit the Linking Sites

Once you’ve combined download sources, merged duplicates, removed already-disavowed links, and added trust metrics and intel, it’s time to review your master list. Now’s when you roll up your pant legs and prepare to wade through a little mud.

Just kidding. (Not really.)

Unfortunately, there’s no substitute for going to look at most backlinks manually to determine whether they are OK to keep. Since you may be working with thousands of backlinks, prioritize the work so you find the worst offenders first. You may not have to wade far before you’ve discovered and removed the links that are hurting your site the worst.

To prioritize your backlink analysis, sort your spreadsheet by the metric you feel shows trustworthiness the most clearly. For example, you could sort by Trust Flow (with Citation Flow and Root Domain as second and third sort levels). Invert the order if necessary (by clicking on a column heading) so that the lowest trust metrics appear at the top.

Make Decisions and Take Action

Create columns for where to put the results of your research. In the spreadsheet example we showed above, there were columns for Action and Notes. Use these to mark whatever you find out and what you decide to do, if anything, with each link.

There are several possible backlink cleanup decisions you can make from your backlink analysis.

Ignore (keep the link)


Request that the site remove or nofollow your link
Request that the site change the anchor text of your link
Disavow the linking page or domain

What Makes a “Good” vs. “Bad” Backlink

Unless the site engaged in illicit link-buying in the past and accumulated a slew of spammy links, most links are probably beneficial or at least neutral in their impact. You should be able to ignore the majority of backlinks in your spreadsheet for most non-penalized sites.

Good backlinks come from a trustworthy site, not a spam site. So look at those trust metrics you gathered. For example, a Trust Flow of zero could mean the site is new and hasn’t gotten any link love yet — but it also could indicate a problem. Watch out especially for a site with low Trust Flow and high Citation Flow — that means it’s getting a lot of link juice from all the sites linking to it, but they may all be spam! A link from that type of site could be poison.

Good backlinks come from web pages that are relevant to your page’s topic, as well. One or two links to your auto insurance site coming from a local dog groomer might be innocuous. But beware of patterns of unnatural linking. If every dog groomer in the state is linking to your auto insurance page, it could cause an eyebrow raise or even a penalty from Penguin.

Similarly, beware of global links to your site. For instance, if every page on a site has a followed link to your auto insurance quote page, that looks really suspicious to the search engines. If you see hundreds of links all coming from a single root domain, you should look to see what’s going on there.

Nofollowed Links Are Okay

Besides ignoring the good links you find, you can also ignore links that are nofollowed. Google won’t tell you which ones are and aren’t followed links to your site, meaning that they pass link value (for better or for worse). So it’s up to you to know how to tell the difference.

Look at the HTML source code of a page to see if either of these are true. If so, the link is harmless to your site:

The attribute rel=”nofollow” is contained in the link tag itself.
The head section of the linking page has a meta robots nofollow tag.

Backlink Evaluation Flowchart

Here’s a handy diagram you can refer to when doing backlink analysis and cleanup. Click to open the full size image.

Danny Sullivan & Ginny Marvin Video Speed Interview: What’s Trending at SMX

Danny Sullivan & Ginny Marvin Video Speed Interview: What’s Trending at SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

If you’re in digital marketing, chances are you’ve attended (or read reports from) Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference. Yesterday morning, Danny Sullivan — a key SMX organizer and founding editor of Search Engine Land — shared his thoughts on SEO, the digital marketing industry, how he keeps SMX at the top of its game, and his own journey into SEO in a live interview with his fellow Search Engine Land editor Ginny Marvin. This rare opportunity to hear why SMX matters and what the year’s SEO trends are from Danny himself is not to be missed!

This was the first in a series of interviews, many planned as live video hangouts, that Bruce Clay, Inc. presents all month long. In advance of SMX East and Pubcon, we’ll be chatting with Google’s Gary Illyes, Moz’s Rand Fishkin, iPullRank’s Michael King and Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge. Check out the video interview or read the transcript below!

Kristi Kellogg: What are the top things that SEOs should be focusing on for the rest of the year?

Danny Sullivan:

Mobilegeddon has come and gone, and it wasn’t as strong as some people thought, but it’s going to continue to ramp up.

Get your mobile house in order. #Mobile is going to continue to ramp up. – @DannySullivan
Click To Tweet

Continue to look at structured data and find ways to make use of it.
Consider a mobile app. The search engines seem to be so into apps these days it’s almost makes me wonder if people need to have apps because that’s an important area that they need to be part of.

What’s trending in #SEO? @DannySullivan says: Search engines are so into apps these days.
Click To Tweet

Focus on your content. Figure out ways you can make great content. Repurpose and refresh good stuff that you’ve done before. As always, I think content is a great success factor.

KK: What are the top things that paid search marketers should be focusing on for the rest of the year?

Ginny Marvin: I’m going to echo Danny’s comments on mobile. Mobile is a big source of traffic now that more clicks are coming through mobile than desktop. We’re also seeing Google adding three text ads to mobile search results rather than the typical two. I would suggest you’re really watching what your click-through rates and costs are doing.

Then I would segue into mobile and say the reason why Yahoo Gemini is on the scene is because of that loophole with the deal with Microsoft and Bing search. Yahoo Gemini is still a very small part of the overall search landscape but that’s something that people are going to need to be paying attention to, especially now that Yahoo is adding desktop inventory to Gemini. We’re back to a three-platform search marketing landscape so there’s more work to do.

What’s trending in #SEM? @GinnyMarvin says: With Yahoo Gemini we’re back to a 3-platform landscape.
Click To Tweet

I would add automation. We’ve seen Bing Ads come out with more automated alerts and bidding rules. We’ve also got AdWords Reports Editor. That’s something people need to be looking at. We’ve also got revamped dynamic search ads and automated extensions. Obviously, we’re heading into the holidays, so also make sure feed data is looking good and you’ve got your product numbers set. Look at what you can do with remarketing lists for search ads, as well.

KK: I’m lucky enough to go to at least one SMX conference every year as a reporter for the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog. I know I’m not the only repeat attendee. Is there anything people who have been to SMX before will find different or new at SMX East next month?

Danny: Mobile, of course, has gotten even bigger than it was last year. We’ll talk about mobile more. And we have new tools that have come up and of course Google is making much more use of it in a big way than they had before. The direct answers aspect we’re exploring in more depth than we have before. We’ve had changes that have happened on the technical SEO side with the Ajax depreciation so we’ll be covering that sort of stuff as part of the session that we do on technical SEO. And then there’s just always lots of little changes that are going on.

Trending topics @SMX East? @DannySullivan says: direct answers, new tools, mobile & technical…
Click To Tweet

GM: We have a whole session on AdWords reporting tools. We’ll have John Gagnon from Bing Ads, and then we also have a whole session on how to do a deep dive into the new Reports editor.

We have a session called Battle of the Match Types – we’ll have the boxing gloves on and be ready to hash out different approaches to whether or not you’re going to break out match types in your ad groups campaigns and how you’re going to do that. I’m really excited about that!

KK: Danny, I know that you were a reporter and then in 1996 you founded Search Engine Watch, and you’ve been reporting on it ever since! Can you tell us how you originally got into SEO?

DS: I used to be a newspaper reporter and then I went into web development with a friend of mine. We were building websites for people and somebody questioned why they weren’t ranking at the top of search engines at the time for particular terms, and there weren’t any really good answers. No one had a lot of information so I started doing some research and developed what I called a “Webmasters Guide to Search Engines” that I published which had a lot of tips and advice and also talked about the search engines that I thought people should be paying attention to because there were so many and it could be so time consuming figuring out how to submit to different places. That grew into what I’m doing today, and doing all the reporting with a huge team now out of Search Engine Land.

KK: What about you Ginny?

GM: I started in marketing on the magazine side of publishing and went through several iterations; it was an interesting but challenging industry at that time so I was ready to switch gears and wanted to get into digital marketing and came across search. I started in SEO and admittedly reluctantly discovered and fell into PPC and found that I loved it. I have been on the PPC side of things for about ten years now.

KK: You guys interact with a lot of digital marketers running SMX and Search Engine Land – how do you think young people today get into SEO?

DS: That’s certainly a mystery to me! There’s lots of ways people come into the space. Some people have been doing it kind of on their own and then they join up with an agency. Some people are at a company and that becomes an opportunity that they can join up into. You have some people who come over from the technical side because they’ve been doing development and they get interested in it. But these days you have a growing number people who just want to be an SEO. That’s their career choice from the beginning, which is interesting for me because when I was growing up we didn’t have SEO.

Another example of the “Book an Appointment” feature in the wild, this time powered by Secure-booker.com.

KK: Last week, Ginny, you wrote an article on Google’s new “Book an Appointment” feature. As the name suggests, it allows you to book an appointment straight from the search results. Is Book an Appointment and other types of direct answer features good for businesses or bad in your opinion?

GM: I think it’s mostly a good thing. Unlike direct answers, the objective here is to still help a business meet their direct business objectives, so in the Book an Appointment case, the function is to appear in the knowledge panel so if someone searches for your local service, say a dentist, the searcher can see the information about your business on the knowledge panel and then there’s a call to action on the bottom called “book an appointment” and you can see the service is basically backending that capability … Intuit Local is powering it.

This is not an ad product like we’ve seen with Buy on Google or Google Compare or even the Home Service ads that are all in variations of beta. So for the Book an Appointment feature, you enter in what kind of appointment you want to make and then you click over to the website. You enter in all the normal information you would enter into that feed gen and that gets directly inputted into that database on the site. I think it’s a positive.

DS: On the SEO side, it’s kind of mixed. If you have a website that’s all based around facts and common information – what’s a celebrity’s birthday, etc. – direct answers are going to be kind of crippling to you, especially if they decide to pull direct answers and not cite anyone.

We’ve done this session at SMX West and Ehren Reilly at GlassDoor was talking about how they love it. (Editor’s note: read liveblog coverage of this session). They love it so much they’ve done all this work to show up there. They get traffic from it and they want to show up in that spot. I’ve had a couple other brand owners saying the same thing. That session is coming back at our New York show at SMX East. We’ll look at some of the latest changes, and Ehren will be back.

KK: Danny, you’re going to be doing a keynote with Gary Illyes and you’re going to ask him all kinds of questions. That’s one of my favorite sessions. Can you give us a preview of what you’re going to ask him?

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes.

DS: We’ll probably start off with some of the simple things like what are the secret ways of ranking well on Google? Can you tell us the insights to all of the Google algorithm. Just teasing. That session is largely driven by the questions the audience has. It’s an opportunity for people to put their questions straight to Google that have turned up and, in some ways, put Google on the spot. A lot of it comes down to what the audience wants to hear.

I imagine we’ll certainly want to talk about the changes going on with Panda where we’re in this ever-flux mode where it’s still perhaps rolling out even though it already rolled. It was a big shift. I’m always curious if they can do more to show site owners more about the algorithmic penalties or actions that have hit their sites. They’ve been a great job of showing you if you’ve hit by something manual but I think understanding algorithmic things is important, as well. Maybe we can get some hints if they’ve got new ranking factors that they’re planning to bring in.

Ready to buy your ticket to SMX East 2015? Save 10 percent with this discount code good on all passes and workshops: SMX15BRUCECLAY.

Free SEO Tool Alert! Keep Your Server Running Its Best with the Check Server Page Tool

Free SEO Tool Alert! Keep Your Server Running Its Best with the Check Server Page Tool was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’s time for another Free SEO Tool Alert blog post! In this educational miniseries we share our free SEO tools – the complimentary samples you can use without registering or downloading software. Today’s tool is the Check Server Page tool.

The Check Server Page tool reports a page’s server header response codes to help you spot any server-level issues that might be affecting your site’s performance in search engine rankings.

It’s a simple diagnostic tool that helps you keep your server running its best. Dive in to learn exactly what it shows about your server and how to use the data to improve your organic search engine optimization strategy.

Today’s Free SEO Tool: Check Server Page Tool

Tool type: diagnostic tool, header check, server health

What you’ll learn: the “crawlability” of your site and if there are any issues that might be blocking your site from showing up in search results.

Why this matters: The data you get from this tool shows you the header response codes for any page on your site, which gives you the opportunity to fix any errors. Fixing server-related errors makes your site easily crawlable for the search engines and provides a pleasant user experience.

This is the Check Server Page tool; try it now.

Check Server Page Tool

Please submit your URL; one URL at a time:

 

URL:

 SEOToolSet® Page Cloaking Report




URL











= No cloaking found, = Cloaking found. You may need to check the site for the specific user-agent.

 

How to Use It

Submit a URL and click the Check Response Headers button. You can only enter one URL at a time.
The Check Server Page tool produces a report that features information about the response codes for the URL you entered, including the server’s response headers, tags like the content type, expire date, and other important information like the server type, DNS IP & average ping time.

The HTTP response headers in the Check Server Page tool report vary depending on the type of server and the website you have. But a typical report gives you information about the following response headers:

Status: where you will find HTTP status codes, or a list of your redirects and any errors
Content length: this is the size of the resource in bytes
Expires: the date after which the resource will be outdated
Server: the type of server
Connection: typically “keep-alive” or “close”

In addition to HTTP response headers, the report also provides other information about the page, including:

The original URL
DNS IP address
Ping

How to Use This Data

When you run your key pages through this tool, you’ll learn server-level issues that might be affecting your site’s performance in search engine rankings.

Use the information provided in this report to:

1. Identify server-related problems with a web page

Are you concerned about a recent falling out or a drop in rankings? The first place to check is your server. Apart from using it as a regular maintenance check, the Check Server Page tool should be your go-to diagnostic tool when there’s problem with your website’s ranking or visibility. To see potential problems, pay attention to the server status codes in the report.

To see the service status codes, run the tool and look at the Value column next to the Status header. Within that column the report will give you the server status codes for that URL the way search engines see them. What you do next depends on what you find.

A Healthy Server: 200

If you see the number 200, then you know the page is normal and healthy. If you’re doing a regular maintenance check, you should be satisfied with the results. However, if you’re trying to discover the reason for a fluctuation in your rankings, a healthy server means that you can now move on from this tool and focus your diagnosis on other SEO factors to find the cause of a drop or fall out.

Red Flag Error Codes: 302? 404?

There are many different server status codes and each one gives the search engines specific information about your web page. Some status codes should be seen as red flags, letting you know that there’s a real issue with how your site is being crawled by the search engines.

For example, a 302 server status code, which tells the search engine that a web page has temporarily moved from one URL to another, can cause serious problems with your sites rankings. This is mainly because the redirect does not pass the accumulated link equity (“link juice”) to the redirect destination. It is almost always better to use a 301 redirect in these instances.

Another common server status code that could raise a red flag is the 404 error code, which basically tells search engine spiders that the web page they are requesting is not there. Similar to the way human visitors react when coming across such a page, search engine spiders have no choice but to leave your site which could stop them from indexing all of the pages on your site.

Common Error Codes

It’s also possible to find error codes that might not be responsible for a fall out or a drop in rankings. Nevertheless, an error is an error. Even if it doesn’t raise a red flag, an error server code should be fixed in order to have a healthier server (and site).

2. Fix server error codes

As mentioned above, the Check Server Page tools shows you any errors that might be stopping a search engine spider from properly indexing the web page. Now that you’ve used the tool and have identified these obstacles, it’s time to use the data you got from this tool to repair the damage.

For example, as we mentioned earlier, if you found a 302 redirect code, change it to a 301 status code. Unlike the temporary 302 redirect, a 301 means that the web page has moved permanently. This code allows a spider to travel easily from the old page to the new one without any problems and has the added benefit of transferring link juice to the new destination.  Repairing these errors can be a quick and easy way to improve the health of your server and boost your website rankings.

3. Check the page speed

While the server header section of the report gives important information about your server, there’s a lot more to the report than the page status. Another valuable piece of data you will find in the report is the average Ping time. This information is located at the bottom of the report in the category Other Info. Average ping time can often reveal network latency or overall site speed issues. You can expect an average ping to be anywhere from 30 – 100ms. Anything longer than that and you may have an issue. While ping time is not enough to confirm that there is a problem, it can signal a potential issue that can be revealed by performing a more thorough check of site speed and performance.

When to Use This Tool

The Check Server Page tool is a free diagnostic tool you can use to find potential URL level server issues. Keeping your server healthy allows search engine spiders to react to pages on your site the way you want them to. Bookmark this Free SEO Tool Alert to use this tool as often as you need, including:

After a site migration, to make sure that you’re using the proper redirect rules (using as few jumps as possible) and that those redirects are traveling through a 301 redirect instead of a 302.
Before you manually submit your site to search engines to index new content
Regularly, as part of your ongoing maintenance to ensure that your server is clean and healthy, especially for important landing pages

Discover More FREE SEO Tools

If using free SEO tools works well for you, take advantage of this miniseries to learn how to use all 10 of our free tools. They are imbedded within this miniseries as well as in our SEO tutorial, which provides detailed context and education about the tools within our time-tested search engine optimization methodology.

If you like the complimentary tools, start using the SEOToolSet. Use the lightweight, free version of the tools, SEOToolSet Lite, to save your projects and analyze your site for free. The full SEOToolSet Pro includes our Ranking Monitor for $89 a month. If you’re serious about SEO, SEOToolSet is designed to give you the data and reports you need to grow your business through organic search engine optimization.

Free SEO Tool Alert! How Strong Is Your Competition? Compare at a Glance

Free SEO Tool Alert! How Strong Is Your Competition? Compare at a Glance was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Search engine optimization tools — kind of our specialty. Bruce Clay’s suite of SEO power tools gives our own SEO specialists the data and analysis they need to service our clients and we’re pretty sure that these SEO tools can help you work through your search marketing to-do list a little faster.

SEOToolSet is now in its sixth incarnation, bringing users new features and rich data. Over the years we developed free versions of some of the tools to extend their usefulness and let everyone use them without signing up. Who doesn’t love free samples?

Bruce Clay, Inc. offers 10 stand-alone, lightweight versions of our SEO tools that run instantly without download or registration required. You can use them from the Free SEO Tools page on SEOToolSet.com, when you want, as often as you want, and without logging in.

So far we’ve posted about five free SEO tools in our Free SEO Tool Alert Miniseries. (You can see the entire miniseries here, including a lightweight backlink analyzer and the free version of the powerful on-page content analyzer, the Single Page Analyzer.) Today we introduce you to the Domain Indexing Report, which lets you compare your site and up to five competitors to see how the strength of the pack stacks up at a glance.

Today’s Free Tool: Domain Indexing Report

Tool type: competitor research, content analysis

What you’ll learn: Important domain-level statistics including PageRank and the number of pages indexed in the search engines about your own website and your competitors.

Why this matters: You want to know how your website optimization compares to your high-ranking competitors. The domain statistics you get from this report let you see if you’re in the same weight class as them when it comes to certain elements of your on-site content. By comparing this data you can discover the quality and quantity of content you need for your niche and fine-tune your own website accordingly.

This is the Domain Indexing Report:

Domain:

(e.g. www.domain.com)

Domain:



(optional)

Domain:



(optional)

Domain:



(optional)

Domain:



(optional)

Domain:



(optional)

SEOToolSet® Domain Indexing Report

Domain
PR
Total



Pages Indexed Chart




How to Use It

Submit up to six domains(one domain per box) and select “Get Info.”

Tip: Enter your main competitors’ domains according to each of your important keywords.

The lightweight Domain Indexing Report produces a chart that includes the following domain-level statistics:


The number of pages each domain has indexed broken down by search engine, for Google, Bing, and Yahoo
PageRank of each site

Click on the number of indexed pages provided for each search engine to see the pages that have been indexed in that search engine.

Once you click on the number of pages in Google, for example, you will be taken to the pages indexed in the actual search engine.

Note: The Domain Indexing Report gives you a number of pages that might be different than the numbers of pages you see when you actually click on the link. This happens because for the actual report, we use the custom search API for each search engine; however the link sends you to results for a web search in the browser. Here’s Google’s explanation as to why that happens.

Ways to Use This Data

Now that you know the PageRank of your competitors as well as the number of pages they have indexed in the search engines, it’s time to learn how to use this information to boost your own website optimization efforts. Here are three ways you can harness the data:

Compare the number of pages you have indexed in the search engines with your competitors. The Domain Indexing Report lets you see if there is a significant difference between your indexed page count and the number of pages your competitors have indexed in the search engines. Why is this important? A significant gap could be the reason why you’re not ranking as well as your competitors.

For example, if you discover that your competitor has a thousand more pages indexed than your website, this insight can help you ask the right questions, such as “Are they writing about topics that you’ve overlooked?” Or, the Domain Indexing Report might reveal that you have a large number of pages indexed, while your most successful competitors are ranking well with less content. Why is this the case? Identifying the issue will allow you to ask the right questions and get to the bottom of your SEO issues.

Along with revealing any disparities, comparing this data offers another benefit: It gives you an idea of the average or normal website page count for your type of business or industry. This information allows you to see where you stand and whether you need to add more content to your website to be seen as a trustworthy expert in your field.

Examine the way search engines consider your site. Using the Domain Indexing Report, you will get a good idea of whether the search engines are crawling your site the way you want them to. If you see that there’s a big difference across each search engine, it’s time to look deeper into why that might be the case. For example, you might find that the difference is due to the fact that some search engines index faceted search pages and others don’t. If search engines find pages with filters on them, they may or may not include them in their index. So if you discover that this is the reason for the difference you can then take the necessary steps to fix the problem.

Compare your PageRank with your competitors’. PageRank is a score Google calculates using the number of inbound links and other factors (you can learn more about What is PageRank here.) Google has said that it doesn’t update the PageRank score anymore, but it’s still a metric that can be considered in SEO analysis. How does your PR compare to your strongest competitors? The Domain Indexing Report will tell you. Learning the PR of your competitors gives you a clear idea of the weight class you have to fall under in order to compete in the ring. If you find that you’re in the same weight class, great. You can now focus your SEO efforts on beating your competition in that ring. But if you find that you’re way off, it’s time to start working out — or getting your website on par with your strongest competitors.

Domain Data Beyond the Free Sample

You can access the same domain data featured in the Domain Indexing Report by subscribing to SEOToolSet Pro. The only difference is that the information in this report is featured in a different tool, the Multi Page Analyzer. To see the domain data in SEOToolSet Pro, run the Multi Page Analyzer and select the “Off-Page Ranking Factors” tab.

Take Advantage of 10 Free SEO Tools

The Domain Indexing Report is a free and simple competitive analysis tool that allows you to see whether you’re in the same weight class as your competitors. Sample the Domain Indexing Report and the rest of the lightweight tools we offer to test, analyze, and improve your strategies, for free. If you’re happy with the results, we invite you to sign up for our forever-free SEOToolSet Lite or the SEOToolSet Pro for $89 per month for two site projects. You can learn about the two subscription choices here.

Google Local Search Results Now Dominated by Ads. Is It the End of Organic Local SEO?

Google Local Search Results Now Dominated by Ads. Is It the End of Organic Local SEO? was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

UPDATE: The format of Google Local search results on desktop and mobile has continued to change since this post was published on August 10. We’ve updated the post with more recent evidence that Google Local search results are now dominated by sponsored (paid) results:

Originally published August 10: The number of organic local listings on desktop and mobile has shrunk from seven to three. The new three-result Local Pack replaces what was previously a Local 7-Pack.
Also from the original post: A new ad type in beta, Home Service ads, could squeeze out organic listings for home service providers from the Google first page.
Added August 24: Google mobile results are ad-dominant. Sponsored listings take up all above-the-fold space for many location-specific and non-location-specific queries.

Taken together we see a series of changes that eliminate truly organic local listings on Google’s first page. The remainder of this post has been updated to reflect three recent changes rather than the two originally included in this report.

In the last weeks, Google local results shifted in three significant ways in which local businesses should take note.

Fewer local organic results display on the first page.

Where last week seven local results were shown next to a map for a local-intent query, this week we see only three organic local listings by a map. As a result, local businesses ranked beyond the top three have no organic visibility.

Google is testing a new search ad format for home service providers that could ultimately replace organic local listings.

Google is beta testing Home Service ads. To be included in this coveted space, service providers must meet the most stringent qualifications for advertisers yet, including background and license checks, online reputation checks and mystery shopping checks. Home service providers are primarily made up of local businesses, so organic local listings are getting the SERP real estate squeeze.

On mobile SERPs, above-the-fold (ie., before-the-scroll) results are all ads.

Google confirmed that it will display three text ads above the fold of mobile results. For some local-intent queries, Google is testing a local SERP layout with three sponsored (ad) results and a map. Mobile searches have more of a local-intent lean than desktop searches. Displacing organic listings from the first view of a mobile SERP significantly downgrades the visibility of local organic results.

1. Local Results Pack Shrinks from 7 to 3 Results

With fewer organic local results displaying in the local pack format on Page one, businesses with store locations will be strongly impacted. We started seeing the new results consistently across all SERPs for all clients with brick-and-mortar locations late last Thursday night (August 6). Google hasn’t made an official announcement regarding the change, but considering the speed of the rollout and its permanence in all our test queries, we’re certain the change is a permanent one.

The immediate impact here is obvious. If a business ranks outside of the top three local results organically, visibility will be substantially impacted. The top three results are all that matter now when it comes to Google My Business (GMB) local listings.

The New Look of Google Local Organic: Before and After

Previously, Google would display Google My Business information in a 7-Pack with seven local results on a Page 1 SERP:

A local 7-Pack for “real estate olean ny” featured by Mike Blumenthal on his blog in May 2015.

The 7-pack has been replaced by a new local pack that contains only the top three results.

Here’s what the new local pack looks like:

A new local pack for the query “hardware store” published in Search Engine Land on Friday, August 7.

On desktop and mobile, the phone number and full address for businesses are no longer displayed on the SERP. The street name and hours now appear on the new local pack as well as “Website” and “Directions” buttons.

This should impact the number of people who visit local business websites from local SERPs, as previously there was no direct link to the website from the local pack. It also eliminates the ability of the potential customers to dial or visit the store without interacting with the local listing in some way.

This is a very deliberate change by Google; there was a substantial amount of store calls and visits that they could never attribute to their SERPs prior to this change. Now if a searcher wants the information, they have to click through to get it.

It’s also important to note that clicks on the business name itself no longer take searchers to the business’s Google+ page, but instead take them to a “local finder” page that shows the expanded listing information for the result they clicked on, along with an expanded set of local results. Clearly here Google is cutting ties between Google+ and local, choosing instead to feature a hybrid of their maps products and removing any paths to the Google+ business pages that they previously required businesses to create in order to be listed in local search.

On mobile devices users get the same type of experience :

A new local pack result for the query “hardware store” snapped on an iPhone on August 10.

On mobile, the website and directions links that appear on the desktop SERP have been replaced by a single “Call” button. The phone number is hidden, and we suspect that this is also intentional.

Again, the upshot of the shrunken local listings is reduced visibility for any local business ranked beyond the top three. Not displaying core information like phone numbers and addresses in SERPs allows Google to directly attribute searcher conversion behavior (like getting driving directions or making phone calls) to local search results ━ a major requirement if Google hopes to monetize local search, which leads us to …

2. Sponsored Home Services Listings (Beta) Could Replace Organic Local Listings

A brand new type of local sponsored listings began showing up at the end of July. For SERPs that provide home services, Google is testing a stack of ads called Home Service ads that dominate the top of the page.

In July, Google acquired Homejoy, an online service connecting customers with house cleaners. At the time we reported on speculation that a new feature may be in the works to connect home services providers (house cleaners, plumbers, roofers, etc.) with people searching for home improvement terms, right in the results. That feature is certainly what we’re seeing today in the beta test available in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The New Local Search Ad We’re Seeing in San Francisco SERPs

In the home services ad stack we see three sponsored listings deemed “qualified,” and a call to action to “connect with trusted and experienced professionals in your area.”

Here’s Moz’s Dr. Pete’s snap of the SERP, one of the first reports:

New paid local entity in testing on Google last night (search for “plumbers”) – potential game-changer, IMO — pic.twitter.com/ehlLfs9MOw

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) July 29, 2015

That same day, a Google rep explained what we’re seeing via the @adwords account:

@BryantGarvin No, not the ad that @dr_pete had a screenshot of. This is a beta Home Service ad, not a location extension ad format. -Grace — Google AdWords (@adwords) July 29, 2015

The support page on home service ads has more details about how businesses qualify for home service ads:

“To help provide peace of mind when booking a professional through home service ads, Google requires all locksmiths, plumbers, cleaning services, and handymen to undergo a series of screening procedures, including background, insurance, and license checks, interviews, online reputation checks, and mystery shopping.”

While home service ads are currently only available for businesses in the Bay Area, we see a connection between them and the larger changes to Google’s local space. On the SERP for San Francisco plumbers, there are no local organic listings on the page. Is the end goal of all the changes to Google’s local search results monetization of local across the board?

3. Mobile Local Results Test All Ads Above the Fold

Previously our post closed with the question above: Is the end goal of these changes to monetize the local SERP? As if in response, Google appears to be testing nearby business ads — three sponsored listings and a map — in local-intent SERPs.

 

With the local pack shrinking organic SERP real estate, there will be businesses that find they are knocked off Page 1. For business that meet the qualifications and have enough budget to pay to play, ads may be their best and only option to get back that Page 1 visibility.

Local Search Game Changers: New Organic & Paid Google Local Results Affect Local Businesses

Local Search Game Changers: New Organic & Paid Google Local Results Affect Local Businesses was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Google local results shifted in two significant ways that local businesses and home service providers should take note of.

Fewer local organic results display on the first page.

Where last week seven local results were shown next to a map for a local-intent query, this week we see only three organic local listings by a map. As a result, local businesses ranked beyond the top three have no organic visibility.

Google is testing a new search ad format for home service providers.

Google is beta testing home service ads. To be included in this coveted space, service providers must meet the most stringent qualifications for advertisers yet, including background and license checks, online reputation checks and mystery shopping checks.

3 Results in a ‘Local Stack’ Replace Local 7-Pack

With fewer organic local results displaying in the local-pack format on page one, businesses with store locations will be strongly impacted. We started seeing the new results consistently across all SERPs for all clients with brick-and-mortar locations late last Thursday night. Google hasn’t made an official announcement regarding the change, but considering the speed of the rollout and its permanence in all our test queries, we’re certain the change is a permanent one.

The immediate impact here is obvious. If a business ranks outside of the top three local results organically, visibility will be substantially impacted. The top three results are all that matter now when it comes to Google My Business (GMB) local listings.

The New Look of Google Local Organic: Before and After

Previously, Google would display Google My Business information in a 7-Pack with seven local results on a Page 1 SERP:

A local 7-Pack for “real estate olean ny” featured by Mike Blumenthal on his blog in May 2015.

The 7-pack has been replaced by a new local pack that contains only the top three results. Mike Blumenthal, a local search and Google My Business SEO specialist, is calling it the local stack.

Here’s what the new local stack looks like:

A local stack for the query “hardware store” published in Search Engine Land on Friday, August 7.

On desktop and mobile, the phone number and full address for businesses are no longer displayed on the SERP. The street name and hours now appear on the new local stack as well as “Website” and “Directions” buttons.

This should impact the number of people who visit local business websites from local SERPs, as previously there was no direct link to the website from the local pack. It also eliminates the ability of the potential customers to dial or visit the store without interacting with the local listing in some way.

This is a very deliberate change by Google; there was a substantial amount of store calls and visits that they could never attribute to their SERPs prior to this change. Now if a searcher wants the information, they have to click through to get it.

It’s also important to note that clicks on the business name itself no longer take searchers to the business’s Google+ page, but instead take them to a “local finder” page that shows the expanded listing information for the result they clicked on, along with an expanded set of local results. Clearly here Google is cutting ties between Google+ and local, choosing instead to feature a hybrid of their maps products and removing any paths to the Google+ business pages that they previously required businesses to create in order to be listed in local search.

On mobile devices users get the same type of experience :

A local stack result for the query “hardware store” snapped on an iPhone this morning.

On mobile, the website and directions links that appear on the desktop SERP have been replaced by a single “Call” button. The phone number is hidden, and we suspect that this is also intentional.

Again, the upshot of the shrunken local listings is reduced visibility for any local business ranked beyond the top three. Not displaying core information like phone numbers and addresses in SERPs allows Google to directly attribute searcher conversion behavior (like getting driving directions or making phone calls) to local search results ━ a major requirement if Google hopes to monetize local search, which leads us to …

Sponsored Home Services Listings in Beta

Organic local listings aren’t alone in Google’s remodel; a brand new type of local sponsored listings began showing up at the end of July.

In July, Google acquired Homejoy, an online service connecting customers with house cleaners. At the time we reported on speculation that a new feature may be in the works to connect home services providers (house cleaners, plumbers, roofers, etc.) with people searching for home improvement terms, right in the results. That feature is certainly what we’re seeing today in the beta test available in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The New Local Search Ad We’re Seeing in San Francisco SERPs

In the home services ad stack we see three sponsored listings deemed “qualified,” and a call to action to “connect with trusted and experienced professionals in your area.”

Here’s Moz’s Dr. Pete’s snap of the SERP, one of the first reports:

New paid local entity in testing on Google last night (search for “plumbers”) – potential game-changer, IMO — pic.twitter.com/ehlLfs9MOw

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) July 29, 2015

That same day, a Google rep explained what we’re seeing via the @adwords account:

@BryantGarvin No, not the ad that @dr_pete had a screenshot of. This is a beta Home Service ad, not a location extension ad format. -Grace — Google AdWords (@adwords) July 29, 2015

The support page on home service ads has more details about how businesses qualify for home service ads:

“To help provide peace of mind when booking a professional through home service ads, Google requires all locksmiths, plumbers, cleaning services, and handymen to undergo a series of screening procedures, including background, insurance, and license checks, interviews, online reputation checks, and mystery shopping.”

While home service ads are currently only available for businesses in the Bay Area, we see a connection between them and the larger changes to Google’s local space. On the SERP for San Francisco plumbers, there are no local organic listings on the page. Is the end goal of all the changes to Google’s local search results monetization of local across the board?

With the local stack shrinking organic SERP real estate, there will be businesses that find they are knocked off Page 1. For business that meet the qualifications and have enough budget to pay to play, service ads may be their best and only option to get back that Page 1 visibility.

Infinite Scroll & SEO: Do They Mix?

Infinite Scroll & SEO: Do They Mix? was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

At a recent SEO training, I met a webmaster who excitedly told me that he was going to soon be implementing infinite scroll on his website. LATimes.com’s indefinitely scrolling articles immediately popped into my head and I told him that was awesome … and then I wondered why we don’t use infinite scroll on our own blog or site. So I sought out our SEO Manager Robert Ramirez’s search engine optimization advice when I returned back to the office.

He agreed that there are benefits to infinite scrolling, noting that it may improve:

User experience, as it can lead users to content they might not have otherwise discovered
Time on page, as users theoretically read longer
Load time of above-the-fold content

However, infinite scroll carries risk for content indexing and ranking, and may even decrease user interaction on the site.

Read on to discover what infinite scrolling is, the potential SEO hazard it poses, the problems Etsy encountered when it added infinite scroll, and why our recommendation is to proceed with caution.

What Is Infinite Scroll?

First, a definition. Infinite scrolling is the process of loading content when the user brings it into view — an image, a video, or content won’t load until it needs to load, i.e. when the user scrolls or clicks.

Note: Technically, infinite scrolling is not actually infinite — it’s seemingly infinite. Take Twitter for example — spend a day or two continually scrolling, and you’d eventually reach the end of tweets.

Infinite Scroll in the Wild

Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest all use a variation of infinite scrolling. Infinite scrolling is also used on media sites such as LATimes.com and ESPN.com — when one article ends the user literally scrolls right onto another one. Infinite scrolling is also used on product pages for some ecommerce sites.

How Infinite Scroll Can Hurt SEO

Any time you implement JavaScript-enabled features, you run the risk of making it harder for search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, to crawl your site’s content.

Last year, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller summed up the problem on the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

“With infinite scroll, crawlers cannot always emulate manual user behavior—like scrolling or clicking a button to load more items—so they don’t always access all individual items in the feed or gallery. If crawlers can’t access your content, it’s unlikely to surface in search results.”

In order to be crawled, each article or page of products must have its own natural crawl path, i.e. an individual URL that is linked to within the site.

For those who are sold on infinite scrolling, the ultimate search engine optimization advice comes from Mueller’s must-read “Infinite Scroll Search-friendly Recommendations.” Here he outlines the steps for how to implement infinite scroll while still having content that stands to be indexed.

Infinite Scroll Is Good for User Experience … But Not Always

In theory, infinite scroll will keep your users scrolling through content on your pages, but sometimes the infinite scrolling backfires. Because people aren’t necessarily conditioned to scroll rather than click, they might find the experience awkward and/or overwhelming. Consider this takeaway from a recent Nielsen study:

“There are psychological consequences to endless scrolling that can hurt the user experience as well. For task-driven activities, infinite scrolling can feel like drowning in an information abyss with no end in sight. People who need specific types of information expect content to be grouped and layered according to relevance, by pages. Web users don’t mind clicking links (e.g., a link to the next page) if each click is meaningful and leads them closer to the desired goal.”

Etsy: A Cautionary Tale

The popular handmade and vintage item marketplace site Etsy implemented infinite scroll in 2012 and the results were less than positive. Users clicked and favorited fewer items. They also bought fewer items from search. Etsy users didn’t like the change, and, accordingly, Etsy removed infinite scroll from the site. Etsy’s formal principal engineer Dan McKinley held that infinite scroll can have a positive impact, but that site owners should work to understand the people using their websites before making such a big change.

Bottom Line: Proceed with Caution

While we acknowledge that infinite scroll can provide a fresh user experience, we don’t use infinite scrolling on our own website because we don’t think it’s worth the potential SEO risk. If you or your client are interested in implementing infinite scroll, we’d advise you to make sure your pages are indexable and point you toward Mueller’s clear-cut guidelines. Pay close attention to your KPIs after implementation, perhaps survey visitors about website satisfaction, and always track the effect of major design and user experience changes.