Video Transcript – Where Most SEO Goes Wrong

Where Most SEO Goes Wrong – original post here

Hey, welcome back rankers. Having a good week? I just want to start off by asking a favour this week. There’s potentially a new exploit out there for Google and there’s been a bit in the, I guess the SEO news set, about this particular exploit. I just want you to test it for me and I’m gonna bring you a full report next week. I’m going to bring you an interview with a couple of guys that have been working on it. One’s a local guy. One’s from Toronto. Hi guys, Nick and Anthony, and they’ve done quite a, I would say a chilling exposé, but I need to talk to them first. I just want you to test this for me.

If you type in “SEO Melbourne”… We haven’t been on the front page for quite a while. I’m not concerned about that because it’s not a great phrase for us. We’re at about anywhere from, depending on where you do the search, we’re anywhere from about 12 to 14. Something like that. If you can, do th

at search. Maybe go to page two and click on that for me. That’s all you have to do.

You can browse around the site and look at a few blog posts if you want. That’d be great, but you don’t have to. Just do that and I’ll monitor how many people click on that during the week and bring you results if any, if there’s been any change or a negative change. I don’t want to do this on a client’s site, just in case it hurts the client site because this is sort of, this exploit’s in the news bit. Anyway, check it out for us.

What I wanted to follow up on from last week though, is cause we got a lot of interest on that post that I did last week about, you know 25 minutes of work and then the client jumps up 35 spots to get on page 1. Now, Karen, I called the client Claire, but she added herself on Facebook. Karen is still on page 1. She’s got a few other phrases that are starting to come up and everything’s actually coming up around all the things that we weren’t even monitoring, but search console is monitoring.

So, people have asked, “Well how? What did you do? When you say clean up the index, what do you mean?” Well, I’ll show you another one. As you know, I’m producing this course, this online course for bloggers on SEO. It’s a system for bloggers on how to do SEO for WordPress and a couple of things have come out which relate to last week’s video, in that pretty much every blogger’s site I’ve looked at, including some of the big ones, all suffer from the same issues. If you just clean all of this stuff up, you can get a boost straight away. There all quality issues, duplication… Duplication, as we’ve said before is a killer. I’ll put a link in the notes about that, but … This is Trevor Young. Trevor is a content marketer, professional speaker, author, podcaster. Anyway, what Trevor doesn’t know about content marketing isn’t worth knowing and I’m using his site as one of the sites. I’m using about 3 or 4 sites as part of the course as I go along to show different areas of problems that people can easily fix up.

So, the first thing I do, you do, is your site and your website name. Now, I usually start with the base, or the root domain, as we call it, so no W’s as you can see there. You can see we’ve got 195 results. Then I go www, now I’ve got 238 results, which is a little odd. Normally when you do that, the root domain will have more than the www version. Okay, so that doesn’t match for starters. If you’re not using the WWs in your web address, then that should show nothing when you do the www search, so if you show your route domain, it should show you all the pages that Google has crawled. Then you go into the . . . I’ve just submitted a sitemap recently for Trevor and you can see here we’ve got a category sitemap. We’ve got a page sitemap. We’ve got a podcast sitemap, post tag sitemap. This one shouldn’t actually be in here. See it’s got 222, so we’ll be taking that out. This is all just configurable in the host. Basically 130, sorry 43 plus 28 is 72. What’s that 83? And then we’ve got this one here which is his post sitemap. 83+119, so say 203, and then we’ve got this one and this one. So we’re pretty close. It’s about 210 or something like that. I should have added these up before I started recording. So that’s not bad. Then what you wanna see is . . . I’ve got to get rid of these before I . . . Google’s already indexed one of those.

The other thing you can go and see is, once you’ve looked at that, then go into your Google Index areas. And because this sitemap’s only been set up last week, we don’t have anything in there yet. But we know that Google’s already indexed say around two hundred pages. So, if you can get that, when you do that site colon search, if that’s, say within 10 to 20 percent of either the products that you have or the size of your blog, a number of posts that you have, that’s pretty good. Most cases, though, it’s not. We’ve got one of the sites I’m looking at. Hi Michelle. Google has indexed something like 1300-1400 pages and she’s only got about 300 posts. Right, and it’s a blog alright? So, there’s no big shopping cart or catalogue or anything like that. So that’s bad. Typically when that happens, it’s because Google has gone and indexed things like tags, categories, archives, and these all tend to be pretty much duplicates.

What the process is, is just trying to get that number, when you do the site colon search, when you look at the index status in Google search console and when then you look at your sitemap as well, they should all be about the same. If your sitemap’s way higher, like Trev’s is here because his has 222 tags that shouldn’t be in that sitemap. When that’s higher than your actual posts or your products, then that kind of means that there’s something wrong with the sitemap configuration as there is in Trevor’s situation. So then you go and fix up that. If you know that the sitemap number is about right, based on the number of products or pages or posts that you have on your site and the site colon search is way over or way under, that’s what you need to fix and what I tend to do is then go and crawl it with a crawler like Screaming Frog or something like that and go and find out what are the pages that are being indexed.

It can be all sorts of things. In an e-commerce site, it’s going to be far more complex than say a straight WordPress or flat HTML site. In an e-commerce site the duplications or the extra pages tend to be different views, so, search by, you know you may have a function where you can look at all blue products or something, so, different ways to view the content and Google will index every one of them unless you tell it not to. Also in an e-commerce site, I was looking at a Magento site this morning. I was doing an audit on it for someone and they had a weird wish list plugin and when you clicked on that, you actually got temporarily redirected.

The problem is, Google is crawling all those temporary redirects as well, and it sees it as a potentially low-quality site because it doesn’t want to get its users all temporarily redirected. When I talk about cleaning up the index, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about getting the actual number of pages or products on your site matching what’s actually in the Google index and the sitemap. You get all those three matching, you will get a boost straight away like Karen did last week. Hugh, who commented on the blog last week, who’s also bought one of those products for the end of the financial year, you’re on the front page today. So, that’s from page two. I haven’t looked on at what work’s been done on Hugh’s site yet, but it would only be a similar amount. Look, once you see rankings move, like in the case of Karen’s, then you wait and watch, because what could happen is that it might jump up a bit further, but if you go in after that initial jump and go and do something and it doesn’t jump up a little bit further or it drops a bit, you won’t know if it was going to jump up or not. So you’ve got to wait. You’ve got to, what I tell people is you’ve gotta wait for it to stabilize, the rankings to stabilize, the rankings to settle because what can happen sometimes it can go like that and it can go like that. Sometimes, the thing here is, don’t panic. Alright? Don’t panic when you’re making changes like cleaning up the index, which does have a monumental impact if your site is a mess, on your rankings overall. What tends to happen then is once you get that right, every piece of content you’ve got on the site starts contributing to your overall ranking.

When you are looking at one and you want it to stabilize, what tends to happen is it will jump up a lot, then a little bit, then a little bit, a little bit and then it might drop back a bit and sort of just bounce around and that’s the way it happens. When it’s doing that sort of bouncing around, then you know, bang, okay, next set of work. A lot of people say, “Ah, Google wouldn’t do that. Google would be aware of exploits,” or, you know, “Google wouldn’t let that happen to a ranking.” Last week, they advertised, wait for it, and I had a bunch of people send me this, Lucio was one of them. It was on the SEO Round Table blog, so in case you that Google knows everything about SEO, knows what we’re up to and all the rest of it, they’re hiring SEOs to help them rank better. Google is hiring SEO employees, to help their own products and properties rank better. So, I maintain that a lot of the things that happen in Google, when you make a change, there is no employee in Google who will know why that particular thing happened, because the algorithm is so complex. What you have to do is know your site well and know the competition around the phrases that you’re targeting really well. Then you can start to get a feel for it and understand that the change that you made had an impact or didn’t have an impact.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully, that’s helpful. Leave a comment. Ask a question. Send us your site to review and we’ll see you next week.

Thanks very much.