Video Transcript – 2 SEO Elements To Check Weekly

2 SEO Elements To Check Weekly – original post here

Welcome back, Rankers! Back on Periscope this week. They’re over here. Hi, everyone on Periscope! If you want to join us on Periscope for the live recording, you just go to follow Jim Bird [SP] on Periscope. That’s it, basically. We’re not doing Meerkat anymore. I don’t think anyone’s using it. I could be wrong. But it was pretty boring when I was doing it. So maybe it was just me.

I wanted to talk to you this week about AFL football. No, not really. I’d love to but I’m not going to.

I want to talk to you this week about the importance of monitoring a couple of things. Number one, monitoring the index, and number two, monitoring your rankings.

So I went away recently. And one of the sites that I’ve done a little bit of work on for the blogger’s product that we’re bringing out, which basically it’s a digital training product for bloggers on WordPress for their SEO. Niche, I know. And we’ve used two sites in that direction of that product, showing step-by-step on how to do things getting SEO done.

And then I went away, you can see it on the graph. It’s quite stark, in fact. I went away on this day when we were ranked number 12 for a key phrase. And this is the one that a few weeks back I did a show on to say I did 15 seconds of work and we went up to number 10 or 11 or 12 or whatever it was. So the day I left the country that we’re 12, and then this is what happened when I was away. It doesn’t show it here in this graph, but they actually fell out of the top 100 for this key phrase, which was “healthy Thermomix recipes.”

And the reason was that they fell is because they changed their entire site and didn’t tell me. So in that process, they got rid of that 15-second change that I did. Fortunately, it only took me another 15 seconds to put that change back. But they didn’t know they had fallen for that phrase and that’s why it’s so important to check your ranking. So with our normal clients, we’ll check rankings every day.

So what we do is you look at that and think, “What the hell is going on?” So the first thing you do is you go and check the index. In fact, the third thing I do is go and check the site, because I like to have my mind made up about what’s going on before I actually go and look at the site. I like to go and look at all the data first before I get distracted with what’s actually happening on the site. And I went to the site and it just looked completely different.

So we moved that, fixed that. And you can see here, the day after I fixed that, bang! It’s sitting back at number 13. Now if we weren’t tracking the keywords, no one would’ve picked that up. So that’s why it’s important. And in this course that I’m creating, I’m telling people you got to check them at least once a week. Me, I prefer to check them every day. And for our clients, it’s certainly what we do.

The other thing that you need to be checking on a regular basis, just to get a feel, is how many pages are indexed by Google. And the reason why that’s important is a case in point, and it’s becoming more and more prevalent in these days, and that is, of course, hacking. So for instance, if I go to… Let me just grab a page here. Well, here it is. Let’s do this search, “site:” and we’ll put in “com.au.” And then we’ll have “in url.” What will we have in URL? We’ll have “cheap” and maybe “ugg.” And Google wants to make sure I’m not a robot, so I have to type in the captcha.

So what have we got here? We got an accountancy firm here, right? They’ve been hacked. So if we type in this dsaccountants.com.au and then I click on that website, it’s going to take me to topofcheap.com. So they’ve been hacked, right? That one’s been hacked. These are all hacks. Obviously, eBay is not but all those other ones are. I think this one might be shruthiadelaide. There and you can just do any brand in here. Just put any brand. We’ll put “Kors.”

So David Jones, Iconic, they’re all correct.

So one of the keywords you can add in this is “cheap,” because none of these big retail brands wants to have the word cheap on their site. So if you’re putting in cheap, you’re excluding probably some legitimate…

So here we go, myivfclinic.com.au. They’re selling Michael Kors’ handbags outlet. Well, if you’re an IVF clinic, typically you’ll have some of the appointments that might be part of that target market. I’m kidding, of course. If we go to this page, myivfclinic.com.au, and it’s not even going to load. And we have this traumainstitute.com.au. These are all sites that have been hacked.

Obviously, I’m not a security expert, but a couple of things that you can do is have double password or login authentication on your WordPress site. So you don’t just have the WordPress login. You have another little popup that comes before you get to the WordPress login.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff. Anybody in Periscope got any WordPress, for instance, security tips? Sucuri is another plugin that you can use to see if anyone’s tampered with the code or tinkered with the code. When you went there, it would pick many of these things up. One of the easiest things you can do is just type in “site:” and your web address and just see how many pages Google has indexed.

This the Trauma Institute page here. And you can see that it’s not looking too good. Yeah, completely hacked. But why that will tell you whether you’ve been hacked or something strange is happening is because let’s just take this one, the traumainstitute.com.au. They look like a reputable body. They got a coat of arms and everything except they’re selling Michael Kors handbags.

So if we go to the Trauma Institute and see here, we’ve got 83 pages, which is a small site. But then we look down here and we go, “Oh, the Trauma Institute is actually selling glass tobacco pipes. Interesting. And they’re also selling courses in addiction straight above the glass tobacco pipes, which, I think, it’s thoughtful, right? They’re thinking of their audience. They’re also selling cheap NFL jerseys and a bunch of other things.

So if the webmaster of the Trauma Institute were to do this search on a weekly basis, they would find out that maybe some of these pages possibly shouldn’t be in here. If I go and have a look at the glass tobacco pipes, which is just below the addiction and trauma page, yes, it actually exists, “How to clean a glass tobacco pipe.” And bongs, nice, on the Trauma Institute.

Yeah, you’ve got to have a look at the traumainstitute.com.au, people on Periscope. You will be able to see all of these lovely hacks as we speak. Of course, I hate those hacks, right. It’s just people selling counterfeit stuff out of China.

So what can happen in that situation is that your rankings will drop, not necessarily because of the hack itself although that can be the case if Google detects that there’s some sort of malicious injection of code that could hurt their users. Google will keep their users away from that. But the reason why this sort of hack can hurt, apart from your brand, is that all of a sudden you get thousands and thousands of pages that Google finds. And I’ll show you a case in point. This is a client of ours. We don’t handle the hosting. We don’t handle their security. It’s the web developer that does that. Hello to all our web developers watching. I love them.

Okay, so if we have a look here, you can see we have this massive spike here where Google, all of a sudden, crawled 24,000 pages on this site, which only has 60. And then if I go and have a look at the Google index… Well, not the Google index because we’ve caught this and fixed it straight away as soon as we found it. And what then of course happens is that Google; it’s seen all these new pages. And then you go into your crawl errors, and all of a sudden, we’ve got 11,221 pages not found. And you can see that spike there corresponds with the ones where it was hacked. So we now have to go through and get rid of all those pages that have been injected into this site.

So if you are a site that is suffering from a hack like this where all these pages are injected into your site, you actually need to obviously fix the security problem that you have but then you’ve got to try to get rid of all of those pages and fix all these errors in the Google search console.

So the two things you need to be monitoring on a regular basis are your rankings. So you’ve got a phrase that’s very steady and all of a sudden it drops, then you know something’s up. Something is going on.

If then, you go and check your “site:” Don’t check your colon. Get a proctologist to do that. But if you go and check “site:web address,” then you will find that if the number of pages is massively different… And some days you might check it and it might say 100. The next time might be 110. And the day after that, it might be 90. Don’t worry too much about that if it’s within 10 to 20%. But if it’s fluctuating like this client, they have about 80 to 100 pages. So 11,000, that’s probably too many. If you see spikes like that, start scrolling through those results in Google because you will find it’s probably hacked, and it’s probably pages being inserted into your site to link to or redirect users to spammy counterfeit sites.

Hopefully that’s helpful. Hope to see you next week on Periscope. Thank you everyone for joining us today. And we’ll see you next week! Go Roos! Bye!