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SIA Skype Chat March 28-30, 2018

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SEO Intelligence Agency

Skype Chat Summary

March 28-30, 2018

 

TOPIC: Google Algorithm Changes on Local Results?

  • Bill Hartzer: Anyone care to check a Google search result for me? Seo consultant. I’m seeing my LinkedIn on 1st page
  • Clint Butler: showing local results
  • Holly: ps://www.entrepreneur is my 1st
  • Bill Hartzer: yeah I see local results also… But main results I’m seeing sites from all over… Washington, houston, Michigan. First time I’ve seen Google identify a LinkedIn profile as “local”.
  • Holly: this is just a huge mess. U cant gauge anything
  • Bill Hartzer: yes, it is a mess. Seems as though it’s more personalized than before. Especially with more results not even showing or being indexed in certain data centers
  • Holly: yup I have people in a private group from bootcamp, 6 of them see a certain serp from a test, but I don’t. And its all over the place, phoenix, NC, LA, WI. It’s like I’m hitting old data centers. My phone pulls it too which is connected to my wifi
  • Bill Hartzer: Maybe they’ve tagged your IP? I’d reset all the modems/routers in the house to see if you can get a new IP.
    • Holly: i checked on 3 vps too same
    • Bill Hartzer: logged in?
    • Holly: no i never log in on them
    • Bill Hartzer: definitely something going on.
    • Devotech services: even if I search in google.com “seo consultant ” local results take precedence. Without login as in private window
      • Bill Hartzer: yes, it looks like that way, even in incognito mode. But what I’m seeing is LinkedIn profiles starting to show up for local phrases. This is the first time I’ve seen a LinkedIn profile show up for a local search keyword. So Google is seeing the location of the person’s LinkedIn profile and associating that with a location. I have not looked to see if LinkedIn is using any schema to try to influence that.
      • Devotech services: I don’t see any result from LinkedIn.
      • Bill Hartzer: any cities will show that… New york seo consultant, dallas seo consultant, etc.
      • Devotech services: i am seeing now results are little tricky. They track ip. Even if i search in Google in different country. They show the local result only. Does not show me any result from usa cities. I tested with 2-3 different ip. Earlier it was not like that. 
      • Bill Hartzer: OK, it must be more local then. All major cities in USA showing the LinkedIn contractors page, and some LinkedIn profiles.
      • Devotech services: which city?
        • Bill Hartzer: dallas but new york also showing this
        • Devotech services: I am not seeing the same result. One question does browser version also has any role to display result ?
        • Bill Hartzer: not unexpected, as you are probably seeing another data center. Some locations just don’t show the same results. It’s the data center you access.
        • Devotech services: so user can not control which datacenter they choose? In one city do they have different datacenter or only one?
        • Bill Hartzer: there are lots of data centers, you don’t know which one you are connected to. Sometimes it changes
        • Devotech services: seems global seo going to be very challenging. Is it not the Google can display data based on this by default settings in search ?
        • Bill Hartzer: I am not sure what they are doing now, it has changed in the past few weeks.

 

TOPIC: Quick Tips – GMB Listing, Adwords, Post Category Naming, Maps

  • William Twiner: for ranking is it better to have /service/service-name or would /services/face/service-name bother. I think I remember a test in e-commerce where it’s better to have to so many deep categories?
    • Ryan Hough: Based on our early tests if people use service or services when they search then its best to have it in the url – if not its best to just have the name
  • Bill Hartzer: you can now add your business description to your GMB listing… Another chance to keyword stuff it. YAY!
  • Devotech services: just saw they have added messaging system as well
  • Kyle Roof: off topic and not sure if it was mentioned the other day, but adwords announced that starting April 29th they will put ads into your ad groups “to make them better”. You’ll have 14 days to review the suggested ads, if you don’t opt out, they will put them in for you. Just a heads up for you adwords folks. I’m confident that their interest is in making your campaigns better and has nothing to do with them making more money.
  • William Twiner: when you link to GMB, what are you linking too? The URL Google gives you when you want to share your map?
    • Michael Chrest: i use a variety, shorted link from share button, review links form share on reviews. Driving directions link. All kinds.
  • Michael Chrest: How is a post treated compared to page? Is there a difference in terms of SEO?
    • Jeff Lenney: If you’re not doing a silo with it, no. Both need the same on-page treatment. THOUGHT – pages tend to be more dominant (about us/ contact/ faq’s etc) so make sure you add internal links FROM those as well, as they can be quite powerful
  • Michael Chrest: My competitor is using an interesting map trick. Http://zrr.ca/apple-app-site-association. His hundreds of parked domains all have his NAP and link to his site on them
  • Bill Hartzer: are those embedded maps or just links NAP and links? Sorry, didn’t look at the site
  • Michael Chrest: no just NAP and Bare URL. Parked. Not sure the SEO value but for unstructured citations it woks well.
  • Michael Chrest: How can you tell if Gshortener is a 302. Https://goo.gl/maps/caibcypprmv. Like this
    • Bill Hartzer: do a server header check or use Google developer tools to see it
    • Michael Chrest: Google added share buttons to all url links on GMBS. There are so many links to share on a GMB
    • Jeff Lenney: it’s both. Http://redirectdetective.com/

 

TOPIC: John Mueller AMA on Reddit

  • Bill Hartzer: BTW, John Mueller is doing an AMA over at Reddit today. I’ve asked a few questions. Ted, I’m sure you have some technical questions, as well 😉 https://www.reddit.com/r/techseo/comments/87pxsu/i_am_john_mueller_webmaster_trends_analyst_at/?St=jfbfew1h&sh=41f08063
  • Ted Kubaitis: It will sound like a stupid question but I think “How important is repeat visitation for ranking well?” Its a loaded question and if he gives any detail at all it may be quite important as to why human CTR influences rankings but CTR bots do not. In the past he has expressed knowledge in this area too… So if he plays dumb on the topic it will contradict his past tweets. He may squirm a little when you ask it.
  • Clint Butler: Dropped a question on the AMA for John. Https://www.reddit.com/r/techseo/comments/87pxsu/i_am_john_mueller_webmaster_trends_analyst_at/dwfouo3/
  • Bill Hartzer: well yeah… Just ran into it today where an SEO disavowed only on the current resolving version of the site. But when I looked at the other versions there were different old disavow files for other versions of the site. Had the SEO updated the disavow on all versions he would have seen the old disavow files on the other versions
  • Clint Butler: In my opinion, I pull the links from all the versions and then go through them.  The disavow is built, then I only put it up on the true version of domain in SC. I don’t upload to all of them.
  • Bill Hartzer: I pull all links–then upload same file to all of them. I’m more thorough, I guess but then again I just deleted my disavow file on my site so what do I know.
  • Bill Hartzer: From John Mueller today: (yeah, he answered MY question):

Q: Regarding disavow files: Do you need to verify all versions of your site (http, https, httpswww, httpwww) in Google Search Console and upload the disavow file to all versions of the site?

A: No – a disavow is between two canonical urls essentially. If the https://www version is the canonical for your site, that’s the one where the disavow is processed. (Caveat – sites with bad canonicalization can have pages on various versions, so if that’s the case for you, I’d just upload the same file on all of the indexed versions while you get those rel=canonicals fixed :-)).

  • Clint Butler: John’s response to my question: “I’d generally focus on the more scalable & normal ways of getting content indexed & updated, rather than submitting them manually. TBH I’m kinda surprised so many people do that manually when the normal processes should work just as well – save your time, just make sure your CMS uses sitemaps & pings them properly.

Regarding datacenters: yes, we have a bunch of them, and sometimes you can see differences across them. That’s kinda normal and has been like that since pretty much the beginning. Usually that settles down on its own though.”

Kind of what of what I expected, its the same “if you build it, they will come, eventually” mentality.

 

TOPIC: Changes in SERPs Behavior – Google Algorithm Update?

  • Ted Kubaitis: Seeing 20 place swings in Google rankings on my calibration sites. I don’t change my calibration sites in any way… For years… Either I rolled a Google experiment server or something big is going down.
  • Clint Butler: are they mobile friendly lol
  • Bill Hartzer: yeah that’s my first thought
  • Ted Kubaitis: Yup… They were ranking 11 for very high value keywords… Used to shifts of 1 or 2 spots. Now bottom of page 3.
  • Bill Hartzer: Then there’s definitely something that G doesn’t like about those sites. 😉
  • Ted Kubaitis: Sigh… This is the site I don’t SEO…. It’s just for calibrating my tools. LOL … That’s a big fail on Google’s part if all my spammy shit passes and these fail.
  • Joel Mackey: We’ve seen the same with one of our top sites. It was ranking #1 – #3 on many high value keywords and we’ve dropped 20 – 40 positions this last week. It’s in the edu area. Pretty wild as we’ve held these rankings for nearly 10 years. :E
  • Clint Butler: old sites, never updated, Freshness maybe?
  • Bill Hartzer: Shouldn’t you be able to isolate the factors that are affected, Ted? Seems as though Cora should be able to do that fairly easily. Unless they’ve introduced new factors that you’re not tracking?
  • Ted Kubaitis: Hopefully, but again I don’t SEO these sites… I need them to remain constant so I know future builds of Cora are counting things correctly. More important than rankings…. Just shocked they took a hit. I guess I shouldn’t be… They are the most white hat sites I operate. OF COURSE those are the ones that tank. LOL. 🙂
  • Bill Hartzer: True, but can’t you just run cora again and look at the numbers to get any indication of what changed?
  • Ted Kubaitis: Probably also means that the before and after update analysis we did last week was premature. Google probably wasn’t done rolling things out. I plan too… But I am coding currently. 🙂
  • Holly: did it move or they are just tinkering with the data centers. If u refresh it I bet it will come in somewhere else
  • Ted Kubaitis: Cora nukes cache and history on every run. Some believe that if you get drafted into an experiment it recalls you by canvas fingerprinting to keep you in the experiment.
  • John Owens: This type of stuff has been happening to me for the last 6 months or so. Capture.JPG. I have plenty of examples of this. We didn’t make any changes…we just waited it out and it came back. Seems to be on a 30 day cycle when it happens
  • Ted Kubaitis: Maybe they are hunting for seos… Trying to trigger a response.
  • John Owens: those are always fun calls because they are in a panic and I say there is nothing we can do but wait. That really puts their trust in us to the test. I have tried making a bunch of changes and it made no difference
  • Joel Mackey: Complete flux across the board. These rankings are today vs last night at the DMA level on mobile. First column for each DMA is current rank, second column is change compared to last night.

  • We normally see extremely stable positions and if anything moves it’s 1 – 2 positions. Things are getting a bit whackadoodle.
  • Ted Kubaitis: My ranking is only messed up in the US… Ranking if fine in Canada.
  • Holly: did you guys figure out why something is ranking in some locations while its not like in seattle. When I’m in the wis. Is it data centers?
  • Bill Hartzer: John Mueller answered that yesterday on his AMA. Question: We are seeing evidence of data centers not consistently reporting sites in the index. While not an issue for a local site, a national site could negatively be impacted by this. What is happening, as an example, is a page is getting indexed in the East coast data center and the west coast data center is showing it not in the index. We have seen examples of this consistently. Again, what is happening with indexing and crawling the internet that is causing this new behavior on Google?

Answer: Regarding datacenters: yes, we have a bunch of them, and sometimes you can see differences across them. That’s kinda normal and has been like that since pretty much the beginning. Usually that settles down on its own though.

  • Holly: yeah but how do we don’t what is right and what isn’t. I see the results on my phone but I see completely different on my laptop. Laptop are the same as 3 vps. So which fricken ranking is right?
  • Bill Hartzer: yeah that’s the mobile first at work. I ‘d be the mobile is “right”
  • Ted Kubaitis: More on my ranking situation… The sub page is not ranking anymore and the homepage is now ranking at the lower position…. A clue there.  And here are the correlation diffs from the past two days:

It is like Google just revved up the juice for emds/pmds and people tuning headings. I’m doing neither on my calibration site. Or maybe some sort of legacy limit has been removed?

  • Jeff Lenney: so add MORE header tags etc now? Interesting  results for 2 days span
  • Ted Kubaitis: well… More keywords in header tags… Two days ago was bottom of page 1… Now middle page 3… Over the years this website has moved +– 5 spots… First big dip I’ve ever seen on this page. Every keyword is different and if you are heavily tuned in headings now adding more might not be beneficial. Best to measure.
  • Holly: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-march-28-update-25488.html

TOOLS/SERVICES MENTIONED:

  • Devotech services: nice plugin. Https://wordpress.org/plugins/fitvids-for-wordpress/
  • Rex Freiberger: is there a tool or software someone recommends to rebuild the content from an expired domain? I have a lot of Google cached content I want to pull and rebuild… I was looking at waybackmachine but not a lot of content was snapshotted it seems…

 

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