Google’s Spam Update Just Completed: Here’s What Happened

Occasionally, Google rolls out their spam update which just ensures that the results on Google aren’t filled with spam.

Because if a user clicks on a spammy result, and if this continually happens, it creates a terrible experience and people would stop using Google.

They don’t give much detail on the spam update on their website, but luckily for you, we have two things that help us determine what the changes were.

The first thing we have is we track over 900 million domains on the web, so this allows us to see patterns.

The second, which is more relevant for this update is at our agency, NP Digital, we have 100 experimental sites that use AI-written content. The purpose of those sites isn’t to “game” Google, they are more so to figure out how Google perceives AI-written content. And I will go into more detail on what happened with those sites later in this post as the results were interesting.

Purpose of the update

As in the name, Google’s main goal is to reduce spam. Now they have multiple types of spam updates, such as in July 2021 they had a link spam update.

This update didn’t specify if it was link spam-related or just overall spam.

But when we look at the 900 million plus domains we track, here are the categories that got affected the most in a negative way globally.

As you can see from the chart above, news and sports sites got affected the most. Followed closely by arts and entertainment and technology and community sites.

Most of these sites are heavy content-based and not product oriented.

When we looked at the sites affected here’s what we found:

Thin content – most of them didn’t have amazing content… a lot of them had thin content. And to clarify that, by thin content, I don’t mean low word count, I mean content that really didn’t provide much value. In essence, the content was surface level and once you finished reading it you didn’t get many insights or any actionable points or value.
Poorly created meta tags – a lot of the websites affected had pages with duplicate meta tags or ones that were obviously written for search engines and not humans.
Keyword stuffing – shocking people are still keyword stuffing. Of the affected sites most of them didn’t keyword stuff, but roughly 3.89% of them did. Whether it was in their content on meta tags, they were using keywords in an excessive way that made the reading experience not ideal.

As you know there are many other factors in SEO. We just couldn’t find any other major patterns. From a surface level, some of the things they looked at seem kind of similar to the helpful content update.

We also looked at the backlinks of the sites that lost the most traffic we couldn’t find any patterns. Now, this doesn’t mean Google did or didn’t look at links as a factor of spam in this update, more so we just didn’t see any patterns.

Now here is where it gets interesting…

AI-generated content

Remember how I mentioned that we have 100 AI-generated websites? They are in a variety of industries, and they all have over 60 pages of content if not more that are all AI-generated, and of course, we manually built links (didn’t buy them, and you shouldn’t ever buy links) so that it would help the sites rank.

And in reality, we actually have over 681 AI-generated sites, but most of them don’t get enough SEO traffic. For example, when a site only gets 1,000 visitors a month from Google it is too hard to see patterns as visitor counts drastically change from day to day.

But 100 of the AI-driven sites generate at least 3,000 visitors a month from Google.

None of the sites sell anything or collect leads, they are just informational sites in different industries.

Now of the 100 AI content-generated sites, 53 have their content created purely through AI. And they also have their meta tags and even the headings within the article all created by AI.

Those pages don’t link out to other sites or even internal pages as AI content generation tools don’t really add links.

One thing to note is that most of the AI tools don’t really create content over 500 words unless you start adjusting the content or have the AI writer create content a paragraph at a time.

But for the first batch of AI sites (53 of them), we didn’t have humans modify or change up any of the content. We purely used the content that was created by AI in the form it was created including the meta tags the AI writer created.

Now in the second batch, we had 47 sites, on these sites we used AI to create the content, but then we had a human modify the content to ensure it was better and provided more value. Humans also added internal and external links, they modified the meta tags to be more user-friendly, and they added images and embed videos within the article when it made sense.

The one thing we didn’t do was increase the length much. Because from what we see from our Ubersuggest AI Writer most people just use AI-written content and don’t modify it much. When they do modify it, it tends to be slightly, and people really aren’t adding much in word count.

With our sites, we wanted to replicate what most marketers are doing with AI to get a sense of what Google is trying to solve.

Can you guess what happened to those sites?

The first group of AI-written content, which had no human intervention when it comes to modifying the content didn’t perform as well as the ones that had human intervention.

In essence, they saw on average a 17.29% drop in traffic and their keyword rankings dropped on average by 7.9 positions. Keep in mind that may seem like a lot but none of them really had number 1 rankings for any popular term.

The second group saw a 6.38% drop in traffic and on average a drop in ranking position by 3.3 positions.

But then when we dug deeper because I was curious to see the results for each site, we noticed that not all the sites were hit by the update.

Of the first group of 53 sites, in which the content was NOT adjusted by humans, 14 of them were hit by the update and saw traffic dips between 31.44% and 73.18%. On average the 14 sites lost 51.65% of their traffic.

From the second group, which had humans slightly modify the content, 8 sites were hit. They lost between 29.52% and 81.43% of their traffic. On average those 8 sites saw a 42.17% drop in traffic.

Now what’s funny is some of the other sites in both buckets saw smaller traffic drops such as a few percentage points and a few even saw slight traffic increase from SEO traffic by up to 4% when you compare pre-update and post-update traffic as it took 48 hours for the update to roll out.

But here is where it gets interesting, in the first group of the 14 sites that were affected, 13 of them also saw traffic drops from the helpful content update. And from the second group, all 8 of the sites were hit by the helpful content update.

One thing to note is that there weren’t tons of days of data post update from when Google finished rolling things out to when I released this blog post. And I didn’t want to compare Sunday traffic with Wednesday traffic. As you need to look at Sunday versus last Sunday to remove biasedness. Nonetheless, the above stats are what we saw and the ranking drops also confirm that these sites were hit by the update.

Conclusion

From what we are seeing, the majority of this update focused on content, meta tags, and keyword stuffing. It doesn’t mean Google didn’t look at other factors such as links or duplicative content, but we saw the biggest patterns related to the factors I mentioned above and AI-generated content.

If you want to do well in the long run focus on the user, it really is the way to win. In the short run, you may not come ahead but in the long run, you will.

Just ask yourself questions like is this piece of content going to be helpful to users? Is using the same meta tags on all pages helpful? Is my website providing enough value that people will want to link to me?

In essence, you are just spot-checking yourself and doing what’s best for users.

What did you see from the Google spam update?

How Google’s Search Engine Really Works (A Peek Under The Hood)

Google’s search engine is technically complex.

There are hundreds (maybe even thousands) of different factors taken into account so that the search engine can figure out what should go where.

It’s like a mysterious black box, and very few people know exactly what’s inside.

However, the good news is that search engines are actually pretty easy to understand.

We may not know every single factor (out of a hundred or thousand), but we also don’t need to.

I’ll bring it down to the basics with a simple method to please Google, rank higher, and bring in more website traffic.

I’ll also introduce some of the latest developments, like RankBrain, that help Google guess what you’re actually looking for (even if you don’t type it in).

First, I’m going to walk you through exactly how Google’s search engine really works so that you can see that it’s not as difficult to understand as you might think.

How Do Search Engines Crawl the Web?

Google’s first job is to ‘crawl’ the web with ‘spiders.’

These are little automated programs or bots that scour the net for any and all new information.

The spiders take notes on your website, from the titles you use to the text on each page to learn more about who you are, what you do, and who might be interested in finding you.

how search engines work nutshell spiders

That may sound simplistic on the face of it.

Which is no small feat, considering there are more than 1.8 billion websites online today — with thousands of new sites popping up every day.

The first massive challenge is to locate new data, record what it’s about, and then store that information (with some accuracy) in a database.

Google’s next job is to figure out how to best match and display the information in its database when someone types in a search query. Scaling becomes a problem, though.

Google processes over 3.5 billion searches a day, and that number increases every year.

how google works number of searches done per day

That means the information in its database needs to be categorized correctly, rearranged, and displayed in less than a second after someone expects it.

Time is of the essence here, because speed wins, according to Marissa Mayer back when she worked for Google over a decade ago.

She reported when they were able to speed up Google Maps’ home page (by cutting down on its size), traffic leaped 10 percent within seven days and 25 percent just a few weeks later.

Google won the search engine race because it’s able to:

Find and record more information
Deliver more accurate results
Do both of those two tasks faster than any other search engine

One of the reasons Google is the front of the pack comes down to the accuracy of its results.

The information it displays is more likely to match what users are actually looking for.

Think about it this way.

When you type something into Google, you’re expecting something. It might be a simple answer, like the weather in your city, or maybe a little more complex, like “how does Google’s search engine really work?”

Google’s results, compared to other search engines, tend to answer those queries better. The information was the best of the best.

This breakthrough came from an initial theory Google’s co-founders actually worked on in college.

Why Do Links Matter to Google?

Google’s co-founders were still at Stanford in 1998 when they released a paper entitled “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.”

Check it out — you can read the whole thing right here!

The PageRank breakthrough was simple.

Academic papers were often ‘ranked’ by the number of citations a paper received. The more they received, the more authoritative they were considered on that topic.

Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to apply the same ‘grading’ system to the web’s information. They used backlinks as a proxy for votes. The more links a page received, the more authoritative it was perceived on that particular topic.

Of course, they didn’t just look at the number of links. They also factored in quality by considering who was doing the linking.

If you received two links, for example, from two different websites, the one with the more authority on a topic would be worth more.

They also considered relevance to better gauge the ‘quality’ of a link.

For example, if your website talks about “dog food,” links from other pages or sites that talk about things related to “dogs” or “dog food” would be worth more than one talking about “truck tires.”

External links (links from other sites) are also more valuable than internal links (links to different pages on your own site.)

how google works external vs internal links.

Before we go any further, please understand these concepts are over two decades all.

PageRank may have mattered years ago, but it’s evolved tremendously since then. So don’t worry about it explicitly today.

One of the reasons is because of newer algorithm developments, including RankBrain.

What is ‘RankBrain’ and How Does It Work?

RankBrain was first acknowledged in 2015 by Google engineer Greg Corrado:

RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query.

Google’s been working on this technology for years to help the search engine handle the massive increases in volume without losing accuracy.

The RankBrain secret sauce is that it uses artificial intelligence to continually learn how to improve.

So the more it processes new information or new search queries for users, it actually gets more accurate.

For example, in 2010, Google’s algorithm “might have up to 10,000 variations or sub-signals,” according to Search Engine Land. That’s a lot!

As you can imagine, somehow managing all of those on the fly would be incredibly difficult (if not impossible).

That’s where RankBrain comes in.

Generally, the two most important ranking factors are:

Links (and citations)
Words (content and queries)

Note: this changes over time, and these aren’t the only factors that matter. Speed plays a major factor in Google ranking, as do Core Web Vitals.

RankBrain, however, is still a main component. It helps analyze or understand the connections between those links and content so Google can understand the context behind what someone’s asking. This is often called semantic search.

For example, let’s say you type in the word “engineer salaries.”

Now think about that for a moment. What type of engineer salaries are you looking for?

It could be “civil,” “electrical,” “mechanical,” or even “software.”

That’s why Google needs to use several different factors to figure out exactly what you’re asking for.

Let’s say the following events played out over the past few years:

You’re getting a degree in computer science.
Your IP address puts you on the campus of Stanford University.
You follow tech journalists on Twitter.
You read TechCrunch almost every single day.
You Googled “software engineer jobs” last week.

Google’s able to piece all of these random bits of data together. It’s like a bunch of puzzle pieces suddenly coming together.

So now Google knows what type of “engineer salaries” to show you, even though you never explicitly asked for “software engineer salaries.”

That’s also how Google is now answering your questions before you even ask them.

For example, do a generic search right now for anything, like “pizza.”

Now, what do you see?

You see the typical ad spaces up at the top.

However, the local results below the ads are assuming that you’re asking “where to get pizza.”

The Knowledge Graph on the far right-hand side is serving up almost every fact and figure about pizza imaginable.

RankBrain process and filters all this data to give you answers before you even ask them.

Change your search up a little (like this one for “pizza hut”) and the search engine result page (SERP) changes with new information.

Now you know how Google’s search engine really works.

While you don’t need to be an expert, understanding the basics like this can help you better figure out how to give your prospects exactly what they want (so you get better rankings and more traffic).

Here are a few of the big things to keep an eye on.

How to Rank Higher in Google: Solve People’s Problems

People type searches into Google to get an answer to whatever question they’re facing.

If they’re looking for an answer, it means they have a question.

If they have a question, it means they have a problem.

So your primary job is to solve someone’s problem.

In theory, it’s really that simple. If you solve someone’s problem better than anyone else, you’ll get better rankings and more traffic.

Let’s take a look at a few examples so you can see how this works in real life.

Someone comes home from a long day at work. All they’re looking forward to doing is grabbing something to eat fast and hanging out with their family or watching a new show on Netflix.

Before they’re able to throw a meal together, they try to run the kitchen sink and discover that it’s clogged.

Bummer.

It’s already getting late, though, so they don’t want to call a plumber. Instead, they head over to Google and start typing in “how to unclog drain” as their search query.

Then here’s what they see:

how google works SERP example for how to uncolog a sink.

See?!

Way up at the top is an ad for a plumber (just in case you want to call in a professional).

Next up is an Instant Answer box that contains step-by-step instructions that Google believes has helped other people. So you might already be able to fix your sink without ever leaving this page!

Below that are related questions that other people commonly ask (along with their answers).

So all of this begs the question: How do you create something that can help solve a user’s problem?

I’ll answer that in one second, but here’s what you don’t do for the record:

how google works example of keyword stuffing

“Keyword density” used to be an old-school tactic that was once relevant when Google’s algorithm was dumb and static. With RankBrain, Google has become a borderline genius.

So keyword stuffing like it’s 1999 will hurt you in the long run. As you can see, this is a terrible “answer” or “solution” to someone’s problem.

After saying that, there are a few places on a page that you want to pay special attention to.

For example, the Title Tag and Meta Description are used by Google to provide an official answer for what this page is about.

Those are the two elements that will also show up on a SERP when someone types in their query.

It only makes sense, then, that you should use the main topic in those areas so that everyone knows exactly what your page is discussing.

how google works title tag and meta description

Do you want to see where that text is getting pulled from?

Simply right-click on a website to view the source code. For example, my homepage looks something like this:

You can see the title tag and meta description at the top of the code.

I’m also using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin to help add these extra fields on the backside of WordPress.

That way, all you have to do is write out the specific title and description in plain text (as opposed to getting your hands dirty with code).

Otherwise, the actual page content should be written for humans (as opposed to keyword stuffing to tricks or fool the search engines).

Instead, here’s how your page content should look:

how google works example of good content

I wrote an in-depth response to help someone figure out a solution to a complex problem (keyword research).

Even though it’s a complex subject, I was trying to give them a simple, step-by-step solution so they could fix that problem ASAP.

Google even takes website usage data into account now to determine how helpful your content is.

For example, let’s say that someone clicks on your website from Google and is turned off by the poor design or hard-to-read content. So they ‘bounce back’ to Google immediately to find a different result.

That’s a bad sign! Google determines you weren’t a happy searcher. So maybe Google will try to find a few other results to swap out with that one to hopefully make everyone happy.

That’s why I also break up the paragraphs and include a lot of images. The goal is to help people quickly find what they’re looking for.

I want them to read the page faster and digest the information more easily so that they’ll stick around longer instead of bouncing away.

That’s the key to ranking well in search engines. Give the people what they want, keep them around or coming back for more, and Google will be happier as a result.

Let’s go back to our clogged drain example to see how this works in another context.

Those are all pretty good results!

In each case, the person who crafted each page provided a detailed answer to a common problem.

Let’s zero in on that second SERP result, “7 Brilliant Ways to Unclog a Drain (Photos)” from Yahoo, to discover what they’re doing so well to hit number two on a big, popular search query like that.

This seems like it might be a good result because it gives us multiple methods to try, along with photos so we can see exactly what’s happening.

Let’s click on that to see what they provide.

how google works good content example: include images and easy to read text

Pretty good overall!

It provides the user with good, quality content to help solve a problem. The better your content does that, the more links or ‘upvotes’ it will receive when other people find it useful, too.

Links and other citations or social signals help alert Google. They tell the search engine that your page is on the rise and to start paying attention to your website for these topics.

Your page will get better treatment, move up in the rankings, be exposed to more people, get more links or votes as a result, and continue that upward trend.

That’s where the genius of Google’s process comes into play.

It makes people happy by giving them exactly what they’re looking for. When you do it right, it gives you compounding benefits that can take off all of a sudden, expanding your website traffic as a result.

How Google Search Engine Works: Conclusion

Google’s search engine is one of the most complex technologies in the world.

It crunches a mind-numbing amount of data at lightning speeds to give people exactly what they’re looking for in seconds.

When you boil it down to the basics, search engines are actually pretty easy to understand.

They want to help people find what they’re looking for.

People use Google to find answers and solutions. They have something on their minds, and they want to find an answer that helps them clear the issue to move on with their day.

How Google finds and delivers that information is the building blocks of SEO, making it crucial to growing your business online.

Now that you know how Google works, how are you going to use this information?

How to Adapt Your SEO to Google’s Core Web Vitals and Core Update [FREE WEBINAR TODAY]

Confused about Google’s core web vitals update? Not sure what it means for your SEO? Join my free live webinar on June 29th at 8 a.m. PST to learn more. I’ll cover what core web vitals are, why they matter, and what changes you need to make to your website.

Sign up for the core web vitals webinar free here.

When Google updates roll out, there are usually a few people who think that SEO is dead and the sky is falling.

The good news about the core web vitals update (and the core update) is the sky isn’t falling. However, there are a few changes you’ll want to make.

What Are Google’s Core Web Vitals?

If this is the first you’re hearing about the core web vitals update, here’s a quick rundown:

In May 2020, Google announced user experience would become part of their ranking criteria. The factors they’re looking at include:

Mobile-friendly: Sites should be optimized for mobile browsing.
Safe-browsing: Sites should not contain misleading content or malicious software.
HTTPS: The page is served in HTTPS.
No intrusives: No popups or other features that block the main content.
Core Web Vitals: Fast load times with elements of interactivity and visual stability.

The goal, according to Google, is to deliver a better user experience, which is crucial to the long-term success of websites.

There’s a good chance you’re already doing most of this. However, the core web vitals gets a bit more complicated than just improving page speed. It also looks at things like the largest contentful paint, the first input, and cumulative layout shift.

core web vitals google webinar neil patel

These sound complex, but they aren’t.

These features look at how long it takes for your page to start displaying the most important elements, how quickly your site responds to user interactions, and how often layout shifts impact the user experience.

Essentially, Google wants to reward sites that are easy for users to use — which is nothing new. How Google decides which sites are easier to use has changed slightly, which is why marketers are paying attention.

What You’ll Learn in the Google’s Core Web Vitals and Core Update Webinar on June 29th

In this webinar, I’ll cover what you need to know about Google’s core web vitals and the core update, including:

What core web vitals are and how to prepare your site for the upcoming changes.
Why most users leave your website in just seconds, and what to do about it.
Methods that SEO agencies will never tell you because they’d rather sell their own solutions.
Three simple tweaks you can make to your site that can boost your sales by 300 percent or more.

Sign Up Now: Core Web Vitals Live Webinar

I’m really excited to talk about this topic and what it means for the future of SEO. I hope you’ll join me at 8 a.m. PST. Remember, it’s free!

How to Use Google’s Disavow Tool For Better Rankings

Recently, I had a friend ask me for help because her website rankings were tanking.

Always willing to lend a helping hand, I asked her what she had been doing to build links and improve SEO.

Everything she was doing checked out OK. So, I fired up Ahrefs and took a look at her backlink profile. That’s when I saw it.

Tons of spammy links were pointing to her site. These links were killing her rankings.

Then I took a look at her Google Webmaster Tools account and saw that she had a manual actions report stating that her website had been penalized for low-quality links.

Here’s an example from linkresearchtools.com that shows what that report looks like.

manual action unnatural links to your site message google disavow tool

I asked her if she tried using the disavow tool to remove these spammy links. She looked at me like a deer in headlights.

Here’s the deal:

It’s no secret that spammy links can penalize your site’s rankings.

Knowing how to build links is a cornerstone of SEO. But the flip side is knowing how to avoid having harmful links point to your site.

If you don’t know how to protect yourself from bad backlinks, you could be setting your site up for epic failure.

The good news is that you can audit your link profile and use Google’s disavow tool to prevent or reverse any penalties.

If you use it the wrong way, you can do more harm to your site than good. You’ll want to make sure you’re careful when using the tool.

This article will teach you how to use the tool well.

What is Google’s Disavow Tool and When Should You Use It?

Before we go into using the tool, let’s dive into the concept of disavowing links.

Good backlinks can raise your Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) scores, increase your visibility in search engines, and help you rank better.

Bad backlinks do just the opposite. They harm your SEO and cause you to lose ranking.

With that said, you shouldn’t go disavowing links left and right.

When you disavow a link, you’re telling the search engines not to factor in a specific link when crawling your site.

There are a few categories of bad backlinks you might consider disavowing:

Sites set up just for links
Obviously spam sites
Links in spam comments
Backlinks from sites in your non-target country/countries (e.g., a backlink from a German site when your audience is in the U.S.)

If you don’t have control over the spammy links, use the disavow tool so Google disregards them.

Google’s Disavow Tool Warning

According to Google, using this tool the wrong way can have a negative effect on your rankings.

That sounds pretty intense, but don’t worry; Google just wants to make sure you’re not disavowing the wrong links. You should request removals first, and I’ll talk about that later.

Just make sure you use the tool when you have a lot of low-quality backlinks pointing to your site and when you’re sure they’re causing problems.

The good news is that if you use it the right way, you can improve your rankings.

Disavow Tool Best Practices

There are a few important rules of thumb you should follow when using the disavow tool.:

Try Removing Links Via Email First

Google prefers that you try removing links on your own before using the disavow tool.

You can do this with a link removal request.

A link removal request occurs when one site owner emails another to request the removal of a link.

Moz shows an example of a link removal request here.

Unfortunately, link-removal requests get a bad rap. Oftentimes they’re ignored, missed, malicious, and even spammy. There’s an art to sending successful link-removal requests.

Use It When You Need It

Matt Cutts (former head of Google’s Webspam team) gives the green light on using the disavow tool:

You may be worried about negative SEO or a bunch of spammy links pointing toward your site. In this case, it would be a good move to disavow. It’s OK to disavow links even if you don’t see a message in your webmaster console.

If your removal-request emails aren’t effective, feel free to use the disavow tool whenever you need.

Use It Like a Shotgun, Not a Rifle

Instead of picking out bad links one by one, you should instead use the domain operator to disavow all bad backlinks from a whole domain instead. This is also a faster method for improving rankings. It may take longer to see results if you handpick bad links one by one.

How to Use the Disavow Tool: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now it’s time to dive deep into how you can use the disavow tool — step by step

Create a List of Backlinks

There are lots of different tools that you can use to get a list of your backlinks.

These services often try to automate the auditing process. While it does save time, you won’t get as clean of a result as would if you manually reviewed each link.

To create your own backlink list manually, here’s what you do.

Download Your Links From All Sources

First, go to Google Webmaster tools. Click search traffic, and links to your site. Download both the latest links and sample links.

google webmaster tools links to your site disavow guide

If your site has a large number of domains linking to it (over 1,000), you can find more links by downloading the sample link list every day for a few days.

You can also download links from other sources:

Open Site Explorer: A great tool from Moz, one of the largest brands within the advanced SEO community.
Ahrefs: One of the most accurate and largest databases of live backlinks
Majestic SEO: Breaks down a lot of information into digestible, granular pieces. This tool is great at preventing overwhelm.
Ubersuggest: View your backlink profile, see content suggestions, and more.

Put Your Links into One Spreadsheet

Once you have gathered the spreadsheets from your sources, find the URL column of the sites that link to you and copy this column into a new spreadsheet. Feel free to use Google Docs or Excel — whichever you prefer.

Now you’ll have a master list of every link that leads to your site. You will see some duplicates, but don’t worry because we’ll fix that later.

Break the URLs into Subdomains

Make a new column that is to the immediate left of your URLs. At the top of the spreadsheet (A1), type this formula:

=left(B1,find(“/“,B1,9-1)

Now, highlight the entire column and hit CTRL+D on your keyboard. This will fill in each cell in the row with the formula.

Once that’s done, highlight the whole column again and convert the results of the formula into values. This will allow you to copy and paste data into the column.

Do this by hitting CTRL+C to copy, then press Edit, Paste Special, and Paste Values Only.

Next, let’s use the Find & Replace tool to break everything down to its subdomain.

With column A highlighted, click edit, then find and replace. Type “HTTP://“ (without quotes), don’t put anything in the replace field, and hit “Replace All.”

Repeat the same steps with these two phrases

https://
www. (Remember the period after www)

After you’re done, column A will now have the subdomains or domains of each URL that points back to your site.

Get Rid of Duplicate Links

You’ll likely have some domains with several links. What we want is to only have one link from each domain. Sort column A into alphabetic order and then insert a new column to the left of the domains. Put in this formula:

=if(B1=B2,”duplicate”,”unique”)

Copy this down the entire spreadsheet again (you can also click the little plus sign in the lower right-hand corner of a highlighted cell — also known as the “fill” button).

Next, filter this column to only show the duplicates. Finally, delete each duplicate URL.

Now you’ll have one URL for each domain that’s giving you a backlink.

Audit Your Backlinks

Now, click on each URL on your spreadsheet and decide if you want to keep all the links from each domain or disavow them.

audit backlinks example disavow tool guide

If you’re unsure, you can always mark links as “maybe” and come back to them later after you’ve looked at all your links.

Sometimes, you can pick up patterns after looking at all of your links that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

If you’re not sure whether or not you should disavow a link, think through these questions:

“Does this link help me?” i.e., “Could I actually get business and/or traffic from this link?”

“Was this link made 100% for SEO only?”

“If a Google employee saw this link, would I be worried?”

Remember that Google only penalizes sites that are trying to game the system. Every site has its share of unnatural links.

You’re not going to get hit with a penalty if you’re playing by the rules. So if you see some unnatural links, don’t sweat it.

Make a Disavow File

Once you’re done reviewing each link, filter the column so you only see the links that you want to disavow.

Next, make a new spreadsheet and copy and paste your domains into the new sheet.

Next, you want to add “domain:” (no quotation marks) in front of every domain name.

When you disavow on the domain level, you’re doing a clean sweep of all the bad links on that domain. When you disavow by URL, you’re more likely to miss bad links.

You’ll want to always disavow at the domain level.

Type the following formula into B1 to add “domain:” to the front of every domain name.

=“domain:”&A1

Use the fill button to paste the formula down the entire column. Once again, highlight the column and then select paste special, paste as values.

Now, column B will be full of disavow directives.

Make a Text File

Your disavow file must be in 7-bit ASCII or UTF-8 format. You can do this a couple different ways.

On a Mac, open TextEdit, copy and paste column B into TextEdit, and then hit Format and make plain text.

On Google Docs, open a Google Doc, copy column B into a document and then click File, Download As, and Plain text.

Add Comments

Feel free to add comments to your disavow file by starting your comment with a #. But remember, Google employees don’t look at your disavow file.

The disavow tool is 100% automated. Any comment you add is for your own records. You can insert them to jog your memory on certain things when revisiting the file in the future.

File Your Disavow

Go to the disavow tool and pick your file from the dropdown list. Click disavow links twice and then select “choose file”. Then you’ll want to upload the .txt file you made.

Here’s what a successful disavow looks like:

Top Disavow Tool Mistakes

You may run into errors when you attempt to disavow links.

Luckily, it’s very common for an error to pop up when disavowing links. In this video, Matt Cutts talks about common mistakes that people run into when using the disavow tool.

You should only upload a regular text file. No sorting, fonts, or syntax should be added to this file. People try to upload spreadsheets, Word docs, and other file formats. Only upload a text (TXT) file.

Start out by using the domain: command when disavowing links so that you disavow all links from the entire site. Many times, users will try to disavow specific URLs with a fine-tooth comb. Don’t do this.
Incorrect syntax is another issue that pops up a lot. Make sure you use a TXT file with the proper syntax.
If you want to provide commentary on why Google should disavow certain links, save that for the reconsideration request. Don’t write it in the text file.

When you comment using the disavow tool, make sure that you use tags. If you don’t, it will cause syntax errors. In fact, it’s best to limit your commenting.
The disavow tool is not a magic wand that will fix every URL. You should clean up your link profile manually in addition to using the tool.

Frequently-Asked Questions

Still got questions? Here’s a few of the most-asked questions

How Often Should I Use the Disavow Tool?

This all depends on your link profile. For example, if your site has a track record of unnatural links, you may need to do a monthly disavow.

In other cases, it’s best to do a link audit first and then a disavow.

By spacing out every disavow, you give yourself time to spot recurring problems and trends. This will help you make better decisions with your link-building strategies.

But if you have an average website that doesn’t have a history of low-quality links, and if you aren’t in a super competitive space where negative SEO isn’t much of a factor, you’re good with disavowing only once or twice per year.

When Should I Remove a Link Manually and When Should I Use the Disavow Tool?

Removing a link manually should always be your first option.

But, if you’re hit with an algorithm penalty, say from Penguin, there’s no need to go on a long, drawn-out process of emailing site owners to ask them to get rid of links.

In that case, you should disavow. But, if you’ve been hit with a manual penalty, you should definitely try to manually remove links first.

Can I Reavow a Link if I Make a Mistake?

To reavow, modify your disavow file by removing the directive and re-upload it. Matt Cutts has stated that it takes “a lot longer” to reavow a link than to disavow it.

Google purposely builds in this lag time to discourage spammers from trying to game the system.

How Long Will It Take to See Better Traffic and Rankings?

Google applies your disavow directives to your links as soon as it crawls your site.

After you’ve uploaded your directives, Google applies an invisible nofollow tag to the disavowed links that point to your site.

This means that those links will be thrown out of the equation when the Google algorithm considers your website.

You’ll need to wait until Google needs to run the algorithm again, so you won’t see changes right away. Most links only take a month to be removed.

Quick Guide to Using the Disavow Tool

The Disavow tool is a powerful tool to clean up your link profile. Here’s how to use it.

Download All Links From All Sources
Head to Google Analytics, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs to view all your links.
Sort The Data
Pull all the lists together, then remove duplicates and sort.
Audit Your Backlinks
Check to see which links are problematic, remove the ones that are okay.
Attempt Manual Removal
Send emails to sites asking them to remove the links.
Create a Text File
Your disavow file must be in 7-bit ASCII or UTF-8 format. You can do this a couple different ways.
Add Comments
Use # to add comments or notes as needed.
Submit the File to Google
Send your file over and wait for Google’s decision.

Conclusion

Whether it’s from hiring a shady SEO agency or being the victim of negative SEO, you’ll need to disavow bad links before you get penalized.

However, be careful and don’t abuse the tool. Disavowing the wrong links can hurt your rankings the same way bad backlinks can.

If you carelessly disavow links, your backlink profile may look unnatural and can cause you to get penalized.

You must review individual backlinks before you submit your disavow file. There’s no getting around it.

When you get things right, though, and your traffic and SEO will improve.

The disavow tool is not the end-all-be-all magic button that will send tons of traffic your way.

However, it is a great SEO tool to have in your arsenal and one that every site owner should be familiar with.

What results have you experienced from using the disavow tool?

How to Use Google’s Call-Only Ads to Send Profits Soaring

For service businesses everywhere, the noise of the telephone is often the sweet sound of sales.

But maybe your phone isn’t ringing much anymore. The internet has made it easier than ever for customers to get in touch with businesses without picking up the phone.

That’s great for introverts, but it’s not always good for business owners and service providers who’d rather chat with potential customers on the phone than respond to a slew of emails.

While being accessible in more than one way is a good idea, you don’t have to restrict yourself to emails or online chats. Google’s call-only ads make it easy for customers to call your business.

This article explains what these useful ads are, how they could benefit your business, and how you can start running them today. Let’s get that phone ringing again.

What Are Call-Only Ads?

Call-only ads, officially called “call ads” by Google, lets customers call you directly from Google. You’ve probably seen them if you’ve ever searched for a local business on your phone. The giant telephone icon makes them hard to miss.

When users click on the ad, Google automatically brings up the business’ phone number on their keypad. The user can be on the phone with someone in two taps, reducing friction in the customer journey because they don’t have to try to find the number on the brand’s website. As the ad is designed to make the user take action, there’s also less space dedicated to copy and more dedicated to your business’ information.

Call-only ads only appear on mobile devices. When their sole aim is to get users to make a call, it would be a waste of money to show them on desktop and tablet searches.

The Benefits of Call-Only Ads

Call-only ads come with a ton of benefits that make them stand apart from other ads you can run on AdWords.

Call-Only Ads Bring in High-Quality Leads

These ads filter out many time-wasters and other low-quality leads. If someone is willing to pick up the phone to speak to you, chances are they have a problem that needs to be solved.

The research backs this up. Invoca found calls have a 30 to 50 percent conversion rate, while clicks convert at one to two percent.

Call-Only Ads Are Easy to Create

Google Ads aren’t always the easiest things to create, but call-only ads are different. They’re quick to set up and designed for even the least tech-savvy creators.

They Leverage the Best Sales Channel

Not only are phone call leads high quality, but the phone is also statistically the best sales channel for most businesses. HubSpot’s State of Inbound report found phone calls to be the best channels for sales reps to connect with prospects.

Call-only ads - HubSpot State of Inbound

People Like Calling Businesses

You might not know it from the number of leads your website generates, but many people still prefer calling businesses over filling out online forms or speaking via email. Invoca’s State of Mobile Experience found 65% of people called a business within the last month.

With these ads, there’s no need for users to hunt around on your site for your phone number. With two taps, they’re on the phone with you.

When Should You Create Call-Only Ads?

There are many circumstances when it makes sense for businesses to create call-only ads. Here are some of my favorites.

Local Businesses

Call-only ads are great for local businesses and national businesses operating on a local level. A local dentist would be the perfect fit, for example, but so would a nationwide chain of motels since every individual motel has its own phone line.

Plenty of other businesses make great candidates for call-only ads, including:

doctors
lawyers
restaurants
home repair workers
specialty grocers

Urgent Services

Customers clicking on call-only ads know what they want. They usually have a specific issue and are looking for someone to help them quickly. If you provide urgent next-day or same-day services, these ads could be a fantastic marketing tool. The more urgent the customer’s need, the more likely a call-only ad will be effective.

For instance, if someone’s basement is flooding, chances are they don’t want to spend a lot of time browsing the web, comparison shopping, and shooting off emails trying to find someone to fix the problem—they need someone at their home now. Having this call-only ad option allows them to find that person quickly.

A few urgent services that could benefit from these ads include:

plumbers
electricians
handymen
locksmiths
veterinarians

Any Business That Sells on the Phone

As per the HubSpot report above, phone calls are the best sales channel for many businesses. If you make sales on the phone, even if you don’t offer the types of services listed above, I recommend you try call-only ads.

You’ve only wasted a couple of hundred bucks if they don’t work, but you could discover an untapped gold mine of sales leads.

Call-Only Ad Examples

Before we get into creating your ad, let’s look at some of them in the wild. Here’s a selection of call-only ads for a variety of businesses and why these work.

Emergency Locksmiths

If you’re locked out of your house, you need someone who’s going to respond fast. That’s what makes this ad so good. There are three references to how quickly this company will get you back in your home.

First, they’re “Speedy.” Second, they’re available 24 hours a day. Third, they work across all of New York City. It doesn’t matter where I am or what time I’m searching; this business can clearly solve my immediate need if I’m in NYC.

A Roofing Company

You may or may not need a roofer urgently, but you’ll want to hire the best person either way. This ad’s copy does a great job of persuading the reader that the contractor is one of the best in the area by using phrases like “high-quality” and “master elite.”

A Pest Control Company

Do you know what’s great about this ad? It’s simple, concise, and gets straight to the point. Unlike the other two, this company has carefully tailored its ad copy, so nothing gets cut off. In just two short lines, we know what they do and how well they do it.

This ad is also a solid example of how non-urgent businesses can use call-only ads. Pest control is sometimes an emergency, but often, customers are just dealing with something annoying that needs to be handled soon, not right now. You don’t need to offer an emergency service to succeed with these ads, but you do need to write great copy.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google

Creating an ad is easy. Just follow the step-by-step process I outline below.

1. Open AdWords and create a new campaign.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - New Campaign

2. Set your goal as “Sales.”

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - Select Sales Goal

3. Choose “Search” as your campaign type.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - Search Campaign Type

4. Tick the “phone calls” box, then enter your number.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - Phone Call Box

5. Change your campaign settings.

Rename the campaign.
Untick the “Include Google search partners” box.
Click “Show more settings” and set the “Ad schedule” to your office hours.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - Schedule

6. Set your target locations.

In this example, I’ve set my ad to target all of San Diego. But you can be as broad or as specific as you like.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - Location Targeting

7. Set your daily budget and focus the bidding on clicks.

You can also choose to set a maximum cost per click.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - Bidding

8. Create ad groups for your ads.

Enter a relevant web page or service, and Google will spit out a list of related keywords you can group together.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - Creating Ad Groups

I recommend creating very specific ad groups, each targeting a different customer need. If I’m targeting searchers looking for an emergency locksmith, for instance, I only include a handful of very specific keywords. That makes the list above a lot smaller.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - Emergency Locksmith example

9. Create your ad

There’s a lot to do at this stage, so follow my checklist below:

Verify your phone number is correct.
Include a URL users can visit instead of calling.
Add the URL of a page on your site that includes your phone number. This allows Google to confirm the number.
Create a vanity URL if you don’t like how your final URL looks.
Add a 30-character headline. This will be displayed next to your business name.
Add a 30-character secondary headline.
Enter your business name.
Add two descriptive lines. Keep these short, sweet, and enticing.
Make sure to include a call-to-action.

How to Create Call-Only Ads on Google - URL Set Up

The vast majority of these fields are optional. Google’s call-only ads are flexible and appear differently on different mobile devices. Even if you use every field when creating an ad, it doesn’t mean it will always be shown to the end-user.

10. Review your ad and hit publish!

Nice work. You’re done.

Google Call-Only Ad Best Practices

Let’s look at how you can make sure your ads are as eye-catching, clickable, and profitable as possible.

Create a Killer CTA

There are dozens of businesses each user can choose when they search, and you need to make them click on you with the perfect call-to-action (CTA). Copy is even more important in call-only ads where you have two lines of text instead of the usual three.

Keep your copy focused on the user and their urgent need. Phrases like “call now,” “act fast,” and “quick quote” can persuade searchers you’re able to provide the fastest solution to their problems. Create a sense of urgency.

Make it clear users will speak to a human. Including phrases like “We answer immediately” or “speak to a rep today” will relieve any fears the user has about having to sit through a long hold time or deal with an automated phone system.

Set an Ad Schedule

There’s no point running a call-only ad when you or your team can’t answer the phone. Yet, I see so many business owners who forget to set an ad schedule.

Make sure you use the ad schedule to only run ads during office hours. Of course, if you have a 24/7 hotline, you don’t need to worry about this. You may even find the cheapest clicks and most profitable calls happen in the middle of the night.

Use a Link to Your Website As a Catch-All

In April 2020, Google added the ability to include links in all call-only ads. It’s an optional ability, but I recommend most businesses use it. Not only does it make your ad slightly bigger (and therefore more noticeable), it also adds a level of authenticity from the user’s perspective and gives them the option of finding out more about your business before they call.

Opt for a No-Headline Call-Only Ad

When Wordstream’s in-house team compiled research on the conversion rates of call-only ads, they found those without headline copy—that is, they focus on the phone number and not other information—converted at a significantly higher rate.

No-headline ads had a 17 percent higher average conversion rate than standard call-only ads. The cost per action of no-headline call-only ads was 28 percent lower, too.

Test your ads if you have the budget. Otherwise, stick to no-headline ads.

Localize Your Ads As Much As Possible

The majority of searchers clicking on call-only ads will be looking for local businesses. Make your business’ location as obvious as possible by:

using a local phone number
including your town or city in ad copy
targeting localized keywords

This ad for a roofing company in Dallas is a great example. They use a 214 number, name themselves Dallas’ number one roofing company, and use DFW in the copy. Searchers should pick up on at least one of these references with just a glance.

Google Call-Only Ads - Example of Dallas roofer

As a side note: notice they opted for the no-headline option while still getting local information in there.

Conclusion

Phone calls are the lifeblood of many service businesses. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a handyman or a lawyer; you need that phone to keep ringing to stay in business.

Call-only ads are one of the best ways to generate more calls, especially if you’re a local business that solves urgent needs. Follow my step-by-step instructions above to create your ads, follow my best practices and continue to optimize them once launched.

How many calls are you aiming to generate from call-only ads?

How Core Web Vitals Affect Google’s Algorithms

While we spend a lot of time focusing on keyword optimization, mobile-experience, and backlinks, Google pays a lot of attention to the on-page experience. That’s why they’ve rolled out a new set of signals called Core Web Vitals.

These signals will take into account a website’s page loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.

In this guide, I’ll explain what Core Web Vitals are and help you figure out how it could impact your rankings.

Core Web Vitals: What Are They and Why Should You Care?

Is this simply another scare tactic by Google to make us revamp everything and get all nervous for a few months?

I don’t think it is; I think this will become a serious ranking factor in the coming years — and for a good reason.

The good news is you may not even have to do anything differently because you’re already providing a high-quality on-page experience for your visitors.

This is essentially what Core Web Vitals are. It’s a page experience metric from Google to determine what type of experience visitors get when they land on your page.

For example, Google will determine if your page is loading fast enough to prevent people from bouncing. If it’s not, you could face a penalty in ranking and be replaced by a website that’s loading correctly.

So, now we have the following factors determining the quality of a “page experience” on Google:

Mobile-friendly: The page is optimized for mobile browsing.
Safe-browsing: The page doesn’t contain any misleading content or malicious software.
HTTPS: You’re serving the page in HTTPS.
No intrusives: The page doesn’t contain any issues that cover the primary content.
Core Web Vitals: The page loads quickly and focuses on elements of interactivity and visual stability.

Many websites are providing these factors already, and if you’re one of them, you have nothing to worry about.

Google’s Announcement about Core Web Vitals becoming a Ranking Factor

I took a look at Google’s press release to see if there was anything that stood out. Google announced that over time, they’d added factors such as page loading speed and mobile-friendliness, but they want to drive home the importance of on-page experience.

They’re looking at upcoming search ranking changes that factor in-page experience. Google says they’ll incorporate these page experience metrics for the “Top Stories” feature on mobile and remove the AMP requirement.

Google also says they’ll provide a full six months notice before rolling this out, so it does look like we have some time to think about it and get ourselves on track.

Core Web Vitals Metrics

As a website owner, developer, or builder, you consider a million different factors when putting together your website.

If you’re currently working on new sites or making updates to existing ones, you’ll want to keep these three factors in mind going forward.

Loading: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint or LCP refers to your page loading performance. It covers the perceived loading speed, which means:

How long does it take for your website to start displaying elements that are important to the user?

Do you see how this differs from regular page loading speed now?

There’s a huge difference here.

For example, it’s common practice to keep the most important information and eye-catching content above the fold, right?

Well, that’s no use to anyone if it takes all the interesting “above the fold” six seconds to load.

We see this all the time when sites have images or videos above the fold. They generally take up a lot of space and contain important pieces of context for the rest of the content, but they’re the last to load, so it leaves a large white space at the top of the screen.

Google is paying attention to this because they realize it’s causing a lot of people to bounce.

The general benchmark for Google is 2.5 seconds. This means that your website should display everything in the first frame (above the fold) in 2.5 seconds.

Keep in mind that webpages are displayed in stages. So when the final elements of the top of your page loads, that would be your LCP. A slow LCP = lower rankings and penalties and a fast LCP = higher rankings; it’s as simple as that.

Interactivity: First Input Delay (FID)

The First Input Delay or FID is the responsiveness of your webpage. This metric measures the time between a user’s first interaction with the page and when the browser can respond to that interaction.

This web vital might sound a little complex, so let’s break it down.

Let’s say you’re filling out a form on a website to request more information about a product. You fill out the form and click submit. How long does it take for the website to begin processing that request?

That’s your First Input Delay. It’s the delay in between a user taking action and the website actually moving on that action.

It’s essentially a measure of frustration for the user. How many times have angrily hit a submit button over and over because it’s taking forever?

This is a huge UX metric because it can also be the difference between capturing a lead or a sale.

Chances are, someone is taking action because they’re interested in whatever it is you’re offering. The last thing you want to do is lose them at the finish line.

Visual Stability: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift refers to the frequency of unexpected layout changes and a web page’s overall visual stability.

This one is straightforward, and I have a perfect example.

Have you ever scrolled through a website, saw something interesting, went to click on it, but right at the last second, a button loads, and you end up clicking that instead?

Now you have to go back and find what you were looking for again and (hopefully) click the right link.

Or, where you’re reading a paragraph, and buttons, ads, and videos keep loading as you’re reading, which keeps bumping the paragraph down the page, so you have to keep scrolling to read it.

These are signs of a poor on-page experience, and Google is factoring these issues as they strive to provide the best experience for users.

Going forward, the focus is on mimicking an “in-person” experience online. As more and more stores shut down and e-commerce continues to boom, it’s up to store/site owners to provide that in-store experience to their users.

For CLS, the goal is to have a score as close to zero as possible. The less intrusive and frustrating page changes, the better.

The Effects of Core Web Vitals on Content Strategy and Web Development

Now let’s talk about how to improve core web vitals and where you can get this information.

Head to your Google Search Console, where you’ll see the speed test was replaced with “Core Web Vitals.”

When you click it, it’ll bring up a report for mobile and one for desktop.

You’ll see a list of poor URLs, URLs that need improvement, and good URLs.

Remember that Google is factoring in the three things we discussed previously to determine the URL’s quality.

So, if you have many poor URLs, it means that they’re slow to display the most critical content, slow to process actions, and continually offer a poor experience by shifting layout too frequently.

If the URL “needs improvement,” it may have a slight combination of two or three of these. A good URL checks out clean.

If you open the report on mobile, for example, you’ll see a page that might look like this.

It’s an example of a website that needs improvement, and the issue here is LCP or page loading performance.

The goal is 2.5 seconds on mobile, and this URL has an average LCP of 2.9 seconds, so this shows clear room for improvement.

If we hop over to the desktop report, here are some examples of poor URLs.

This one has a CLS issue, which means that the website is loading in a way that changes the site’s physical structure too often.

The goal for this is 0.25, and this webpage has a CLS of 0.55. It also says that 472 URLs are affected by this same issue, so this website owner has a lot of work ahead of them to get this fixed.

I’m a big fan of these reports’ transparency because Google makes it easy to locate the problem and fix it.

You can even click the “validate” button when you think you’ve fixed the problem, and Google will verify your progress and update the report.

How to Track Your Website’s Core Web Vitals

Tracking your Core Vitals is as simple as going into the search console and looking at each web property on a case-to-case basis. You’ll want to go in and play around with this to see where you stand.

How to Improve Core Web Vitals

Once you’ve pulled your report, it’s time to make some changes.

You’ll be able to improve the LCP by limiting the amount of content you display at the top of the web page to the most critical information. If it’s not critically important to a problem that the visitor is trying to solve, move it down the page.

Improving FID is simple, and there are four primary issues you’ll want to address:

Reduce third-party code impact: If you have a bunch of different processes happening simultaneously, it will take longer for the action to start working.
Reduce JavaScript execution time: Only send the code your users need and remove anything unnecessary.
Minimize main thread work: The main thread does most of the work, so you need to cut the complexity of your style and layouts if you have this issue.
Keep request counts low, and transfer sizes small: Make sure you’re not trying to transfer huge files.

Improving CLS requires paying attention to size attributes and video elements on all media. When you allow the correct amount of space for a piece of content before it loads, you shouldn’t experience any page shifts during the process.

It also helps to limit transform animations because many of them will trigger layout changes, whether you want them to or not.

Conclusion

Core Web Vitals and SEO go hand-in-hand, and we all know that we can’t ignore any single ranking factor if we want to beat out our competition and keep our rankings.

Do we know exactly how much of an impact core web vitals have on our ranks? No, we don’t. But Google is paying a lot more attention to the on-page experience.

Is your website following best practices for Core Web Vitals? Let us know!

The post How Core Web Vitals Affect Google’s Algorithms appeared first on Neil Patel.

Google’s New Algorithm: Page Experience

Don’t worry… your traffic hasn’t gone down (or up) because of the Page Experience algorithm update hasn’t rolled out yet.

But it will in 2021 according to Google.

Due to the coronavirus, they decided to give us all a heads up on the future algorithm update and what it entails… that way you can adjust your website so your traffic doesn’t tank.

So, what’s the Page Experience update and how can you prepare for it?

Page Experience

In Google’s own words, here is what it means…

The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.

In other words, they are looking for how usable your website is.

Here’s an example of what they don’t want…

As you can see from the graphic above, the user was trying to click on “No, go back”, but because an install bar popup up at the top, it pushed the whole page down and caused the user to accidentally click on “Yes, place my order.”

The purpose of this update is to make sure that sites that rank at the top aren’t creating experiences that users hate.

The simplest way to think about this update is that user-friendly sites will rank higher than sites that aren’t user friendly.

But this change is the start of a big shift in SEO.

Why is this update so important?

What sites do you think that Google wants to rank at the top?

Take a guess…

Maybe sites with the best backlinks?

Or sites with the buttoned up on page code?

It’s actually none of those.

Google wants to rank the sites at the top that users love the most.

Here’s what I mean…

When you want to buy athletic shoes, what brand comes to mind?

If I had to guess, I bet you’ll say Nike.

And if you were to get a credit card… I bet Visa, American Express, or Mastercard will come to mind.

This is why brand queries (the number of users who search for your brand name on Google and click on your website) impact rankings, which I’ve broken down as one of the most important SEO lessons I learned.

Just look at how the Neil Patel brand has grown over time… the graph below shows the number of people searching for my name over time:

And here is my SEO traffic over time:

As your brand grows so will your SEO traffic.

But that is old news, that’s been part of Google’s algorithm for years now.

Here is the thing though, most sites don’t have large brands and Google knows that. So, if you don’t have one, you can still rank.

At my ad agency, when we look at our clients and their growth over time, only 4% have large well-known brands. The other 96% are still seeing traffic growth.

What Google is doing is adapting its algorithm to more closely align with the mission of showing the sites first that users love the most.

And yes, brand queries are one of the ways they can do this, but user experience is another metric.

Over the next few years, I bet you will see many algorithm updates focusing on user experience.

So how do you optimize your user experience?

It’s starts with each page

If you look at the original article Google posted about the future algorithm change, they emphasize “page experience” or “website experience.”

It doesn’t mean that your whole website shouldn’t have a good user experience, but instead, I bet they are going to focus on their algorithm from a page-level basis.

Because if you have a few pages on your websites that have a poor experience, but the rest are good, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to reduce the rankings of your whole site, especially if many of your pages provide a much better experience than your competition.

Here’s how you optimize your user experience:

Step #1: Optimize your speed and reduce 400 errors

The faster your website loads, the better experience you’ll have.

Go to this page and enter in your URL.

You’ll then see a report that looks like this:

You’ll notice two important aspects of that report that impact user experience that I’ve highlighted in the screenshot above.

In the health checkbox, you’ll want to make sure there are no broken pages. Broken pages create bad experiences.

In the site speed box, you’ll see the load time of your site. The faster your site loads the better. Try to get your website load time for both desktop and mobile under 3 seconds.

Ideally you should be in the 1-second range if possible.

Step #2: Compare your experience to your competitions’

You may think you have an amazing user experience, but how does it stake up to your competition?

So go here and type in your biggest competitor.

I want you to go into the navigation and click on “Top Pages.”

You should see a report like this:

The Top Pages report shows the most popular pages on your competition’s site from an SEO perspective. The pages at the top are the ones with the most SEO traffic, which means they are doing something right.

I want you to go through their top 50 pages. Seriously, their top 50 pages, and look at the user experience of each of those pages.

What is it that they are doing? How does their content quality compare to yours? What are the differences between their website compared to yours?

For each page that ranks, I also want you to click on “View All” under the “Est. Visits” heading. This will show you all of the keywords each page ranks for.

When evaluating your competition’s user experience, keep in mind how they are delighting people who search for any of those keywords. This will give you an idea of what you need to do as well.

But your goal shouldn’t be to match your competition, it should be to beat your competition.

Step #3: Analyze your design

Remember the graphic I showed above of what Google doesn’t want? Where the user tried to click on “No, go back” instead of “Yes, place my order” due to design issues.

In most cases you won’t have that issue, but you will have other usability issues.

The way you find usability issues is through heatmaps. Just like this one:

What you can do to find usability issues is run a Crazy Egg test on your site.

Once you log into Crazy Egg, you’ll see a dashboard that looks like this:

On the top right, I want you to click on “Create New” and select “Snapshot.”

Then select “Multiple Snapshots.”

From there, you’ll want to add at least 3 popular URLs on your site. Over time you’ll want to do this with all of your popular pages.

Then you’ll see settings like the image below, you don’t need to do anything here. Just click “Next.”

You’ll then be able to review everything. If it looks good, you can click the “Create Snapshots” button in the bottom right.

Last but not least, you’ll have to install your tracking script.

So, click on “Install Tracking Script.”

Select the option that works for you and then you are off and to the races. For example, for NeilPatel.com I use WordPress so I would select the WordPress option.

Once you are setup, it will take at least a day to see results, if not a bit longer. It depends on your traffic.

If you get thousands of visitors to your site each day you’ll see results within a few hours.

After you set up your test and it has been a few days, log back into Crazy Egg and click on Snapshots in the sidebar.

Once you are there you will see a list of snapshots you have created.

Click on any of your snapshots and you’ll see a heatmap of how people are engaging with your web page.

What’s cool about snapshots is they show you every single click, or even scroll that people take. Just look at this example from the NeilPatel.com site.

As you can see, people are clicking on those images above the text. But there is an issue… can you guess what it is?

If you click those images, nothing happens. But for all of those people to click on those images, it means that they believe they are clickable and that something should happen when they click on them.

An easy fix for me is to make them clickable and when a user clicks maybe I would take them to a page that goes into detail on each of those features. Or maybe I could expand upon each feature right there on that page.

Once you make the fixes to your page, you will want to re-run a new Crazy Egg snapshot on the same page to see if the changes helped improve the user experience.

Step #4: Install the Ubersuggest Chrome extension

If you haven’t already, install the Ubersuggest Chrome extension.

Here’s why…

When you do a Google search, you’ll see data on each ranking URL.

When you are naturally using Google throughout your day and searching for keywords related to your industry, I want you to look at 2 main metrics in Ubersuggest:

Domain score – the higher the number, the more authority a website has.
Links – the more links a website has, usually the higher it will rank.

So, when you are doing searches, look for sites that have a lower domain score and fewer backlinks than the competition, but yet still rank high.

Chances are, they rank high because of things like user experience. Maybe their text is more appealing than the competition, maybe their bounce rate is lower… it could be a wide variety of reasons, but these are the sites you want to look at and analyze.

In the image above, you see that the result from the AMA ranks higher than Hubspot yet they have fewer links and a lower domain score. So, if you were trying to rank for that keyword, you would want to spend more time analyzing AMA because they are doing something right.

Conclusion

User experience is going to be more and more important over time.

If you love a site and everyone else loves that site, Google will eventually want to make sure that the site ranks high.

On the flip side, if everyone feels a website has a terrible user experience, then Google won’t rank that website as high in the long run.

Just like any algorithm update Google does, expect to see multiple revisions over time. As they learn, they adapt to make their algorithms more effective over time.

But what is unique about this update is you have advanced notice, which is nice. So, take the opportunity and fix any usability issues you may have.

What other ways can you make your website more usable?

The post Google’s New Algorithm: Page Experience appeared first on Neil Patel.

Google’s May 2020 Core Update: What You Need to Know

On May 4th, Google started to roll out a major update to its algorithm. They call it a “core” update because it’s a large change to their algorithm, which means it impacts a lot of sites. To give you an idea of how big the update is, just look at the image above. It’s from …

Google’s May 2020 Core Update: What You Need to Know

On May 4th, Google started to roll out a major update to its algorithm. They call it a “core” update because it’s a large change to their algorithm, which means it impacts a lot of sites.

To give you an idea of how big the update is, just look at the image above. It’s from SEMrush Sensor, which monitors the movement of results on Google.

The chart tracks Google on a daily basis and when it shows green or blue for the day, it means there isn’t much movement going on. But when things turn red, it means there is volatility in the rankings.

Now the real question is, what happened to your traffic?

If you already haven’t, you should go and check your rankings to see if they have gone up or down. If you aren’t tracking your rankings, you can set up a project on Ubersuggest for free and track up to 25 keywords.

You should also log into your Google Analytics account and check to see what’s happening to your traffic.

Hopefully, your traffic has gone up. If it hasn’t, don’t panic. I have some information that will help you out.

Let’s first start off by going over the industries that have been most impacted…

So what industries were affected?

Here are the industries that got affected.

As you can see, travel, real estate, health, pets & animals, and people & society saw the biggest fluctuations with rankings.

Other industries were also affected… the ones at the bottom of the list were the least affected, such as “news.”

There was also a shakeup in local SEO results, but that started before the core update.

One big misconception that I hear from people new to SEO is that if you have a high domain authority or domain score (if you aren’t sure what yours is, go here and put in your URL), you’ll continually get more traffic and won’t be affected by updates. That is false.

To give you an idea, here are some well-known sites that saw their rankings dip according to our index at Ubersuggest:

Spotify.com
Creditkarma.com
LinkedIn.com
Legoland.com
Nypost.com
Ny.gov
Burlington.com

More importantly, we saw some trends on sites that got affected versus ones that didn’t.

Update your content frequently

I publish 4 articles a month on this blog. Pretty early every Tuesday like clockwork, I publish a new post.

But do you know how often I update my old content?

Take a guess?

Technically, I don’t update my own content, but I have 3 people who work for me and all they do is go through old blog posts and update them.

On any given month, my team updates at least 90 articles. And when I say update, I am not talking about just adjusting a sentence or adding an image. I am talking about adding a handful of new paragraphs, deleting irrelevant information, and sometimes even re-writing entire articles.

They do whatever it takes to keep articles up to date and valuable for the readers. Just like how Wikipedia is constantly updating its content.

Here’s an interesting stat for you: We know for certain that 641 sites that we are tracking are updating old content on a daily basis.

Can you guess how many of them saw a search traffic dip of 10% or more?

Only 38! That’s 5.92%, which is extremely low.

What’s crazy, though, is that 187 sites saw an increase in their search traffic of 10% or more.

One thing to note is when we are calculating organic search traffic estimates, we look at the average monthly volume of a keyword as well as click-through rates based on ranking. So holidays such as May 1, which is Labor Day for most of the world, didn’t skew the results.

Now, to clarify, I am not talking about producing new content on a daily or even weekly basis. These sites are doing what I do on NeilPatel.com… they are constantly updating their old content.

Again, there is no “rubric” on how to update your old content as it varies per article, but the key is to do whatever it takes to keep it relevant for your readers and ensure that it is better than the competition.

If you still want some guidance on updating old content, here is what I tell my team:

If the content is no longer relevant to a reader, either delete the page and 301 redirect it to the most relevant URL on the site or update it to make it relevant.
Are there ways to make the content more actionable and useful? Such as, would adding infographics, step-by-step instructions, or videos to the article make it more useful? If so, add them.
Check to see if there are any dead links and fix them. Dead links create a poor user experience.
If the article is a translated article (I have a big global audience), make sure the images and videos make sense to anyone reading the content in that language.
Look to see the 5 main terms each article ranks for and then Google those terms. What do the pages ranking in the top 10 do really well that we aren’t?
Can you make the article simpler? Remove fluff and avoid using complex words that very few people can understand.
Does the article discuss a specific year or time frame? If possible, make the article evergreen by avoiding the usage of dates or specific time ranges.
If the article covers a specific problem people are facing, make sure you look at Quora first before updating the article. Look to see popular answers on Quora as it will give you a sense of what people are ideally looking for.
Is this article a duplicate? Not from a wording perspective, but are you pretty much covering the exact same concept as another article on your site. If so, consider merging them and 301 redirect one URL to the other.

Fix your thin content

Here’s another interesting stat for you. On average, Ubersuggest crawls 71 websites every minute. And when I mean crawl, users are putting in URLs to check for SEO errors.

One error that our system looks at is thin content (pages with low-word counts).

On average, 46% of the websites we analyze have at least one page that is thin in content. Can you guess how many of those sites got impacted by the latest algorithm update?

We don’t have enough data on all of the URLs as the majority of those sites get very little to no search traffic as they are either new sites or haven’t done much SEO.

But when we look at the last 400 sites in our system that were flagged with thin content warnings for pages other than their contact page, about page, or home page, and had at least 1,000 visitors a month from Google, they saw a massive shift in rankings.

127 of the sites saw a decrease in search traffic by at least 10% while 41 saw an increase in search traffic by at least 10%.

Sites with thin content saw a roughly 3 times higher likelihood of being affected in a negative way than a positive one. Of course, the majority of the sites with thin content saw little to no change at all, but still, a whopping 31.75% saw a decrease.

If you don’t know if you have thin content, go here and put in your URL.

You’ll see a report that looks something like this:

I want you to click on the “Critical Errors” box.

You’ll now see a report that looks like:

Look to see if there are any “low word count” errors. If there is, click on the number and it will take you to a page that shows you all of the pages with a low word count.

You won’t be able to fix them all, as some pages like your contact page or category pages, which may not need thousands of words.

And in other cases, you may be able to get the point across to a website visitor in a few hundred words or even through images. An example would be if you have an article on how to tie a tie, you may not have too many words because it’s easier to show people how to do so through a video or a series of images.

But for the pages that should be more in-depth, you should fix them. Here are the three main questions to consider when fixing thin content pages:

Do you really need to add more words – if you can get the message across in a few hundred words or through images or videos, it may be enough. Don’t add words when it isn’t needed. Think of the user experience instead. People would rather have the answer to their question in a few seconds than to wait minutes.
How does your page compare to the competition – look at similar pages that are ranking on page 1. Do they have more content than you or less? This will give you an idea if you need to expand your page, especially if everyone who ranks on page 1 has at least a few thousand words on their page.
Does it even make sense to keep the page – if it provides little to no value to a reader and you can’t make it better by updating it, you may want to consider deleting it and 301 redirect the URL to another similar page on your site.

Fix your SEO errors

Another interesting finding that we noticed when digging through our Ubersuggest data is that sites with more SEO errors got impacted greatly.

Now, this doesn’t mean that if you have a ton of SEO errors you can’t rank or you are going to get hit by an algorithm update.

More so it was one type of error that hurt sites more than others. It was sites with duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.

One thing to note was that many sites have duplicate meta tags, but when a large portion of your pages have duplicate meta tags, it usually creates problems.

So we dug up sites that contained duplicate meta tags and title tags for 20% or more of their pages.

Most of these sites didn’t get much traffic in general, but for the 363 that we could dig up that generated at least 1,000 visits a month from Google, 151 saw a decrease in traffic by at least 10%.

89 of them also saw increases in traffic by 10% or more, but still, 41.59% of sites with duplicate meta tags saw a huge dip. If you have duplicate meta tags you should get this fix.

To double check if you do, put your URL in here again. It will load this report again:

And then click on the critical errors again. You’ll see a report that looks like this:

Look for any errors that say duplicate meta description or title tag. If you see it, click on the number and it will take you to a page that breaks down the duplicates.

Again, your site doesn’t have to be perfect and you’ll find in some cases that you have duplicates that don’t need to be fixed, such as category pages with pagination.

But in most cases, you should fix and avoid having duplicate meta description and title tags.

Conclusion

Even if you do everything I discussed above, there is no guarantee that you will be impacted by an algorithm update. Each one is different, and Google’s goal is to create the best experience for searchers.

If you look at the above issues, you’ll notice that fixing them should create a better user experience and that should always be your goal.

It isn’t about winning on Google. SEO is about providing a better experience than your competition. If that’s your core focus, in the long run, you’ll find that you’ll do better than your competition when it comes to algorithm updates.

So how was your traffic during the last update? Did it go up or down, or just stay flat?

The post Google’s May 2020 Core Update: What You Need to Know appeared first on Neil Patel.

An Inside Look at Google’s Future Plans

Everyone talks about algorithm updates, but Google does a
whole lot more than adjust algorithms.

Some of the moves they are making are really going to impact
your marketing efforts.

So, what are these non-algorithm changes?

Well before I get into them, keep in mind that you aren’t
going to like some of them, and that’s ok. Instead, I want you to focus your
energy on how you can leverage these changes before your competition.

Let’s get started…

Change #1: Google executives are big on “ambient
computing”

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of ambient computing,
here’s a quick definition:

Ambient computing is a term that encompasses many different concepts. At its core, it is the combination of hardware, software, user experience, and machine/human interaction and learning, all of these things becoming the idea of using a computer or internet-enabled device, without necessarily consciously using it.

In other words, Google wants you to use them 24/7 no matter
where you are or what you are doing. They are doing this by integrating
products everywhere.

Whether it is Nest, Android devices, Chromebooks, smartwatches, Google Home, or anything else they can drum up.

Because their mission is to spread the usage of all Google
related products, it will eventually open up new ways for you to drive traffic
and monetize.

An obvious example is to create apps on mobile devices that
work on Android phones. Uber, Netflix, and Candy Crush are all examples of apps
that work on Android devices.

You already know about apps, but I bet you don’t have one.

To give you an idea of how well you can do with a mobile
app, there are roughly 2 million mobile
apps, and there are over 13
billion mobile devices.

Of course, a lot of those devices are old or in landfills. But still, there aren’t that many apps for how many mobile devices that exist. Especially when you consider that there are over 1,518,207,414 websites.

In other words, there are 759 times more websites than
apps, so consider creating one. 😉

If you don’t know how you can always use services like Build Fire.

And in addition to apps, you’ll need to start looking at generating traffic through all voice devices. Phones, watches, and even the smart home assistants that Google is creating leverage voice search.

Using tools like Jetson.ai
will help you create a voice version of your website so you can collect sales
and leads.

If you don’t think voice search is that important, 50% of searches are now voice-based.

Again, just like an app, I bet you don’t a voice search version of your website.

Question is, are you going to create one first or is your competition?

Change #2: Future generations are more likely to be
hooked on Google devices

Do you have a Chromebook? Chances are you
don’t.

But if you have kids, or nieces or nephews, ask them if they
have ever used a Chromebook.

Chromebooks are not only affordable, but they are taking
over the world, at least when it comes to millennials and generation z.

Just look at the percentages
of schools that use Chromebooks.

In some countries like the United States, 60% of the schools
use Chromebooks.

That’s a ridiculously high percentage.

Apple has also been trying to penetrate classrooms, but they
haven’t been having the same success as Google.

All this means is that kids are going to grow up using
Google devices and fall into their ecosystem.

Sure, social sites like Instagram, Tiktok, or whatever else is new will always be popular, but the chances are these young kids will get to those sites using a Google device.

Even though Google isn’t as sexy as it once was, you shouldn’t
take it for granted. It’s not going anywhere, and future generations will
continue to leverage them. Just don’t drop your eye on Google and you’ll be
fine.

Change #3: Expect Google to buy someone big in the
ecommerce space

When you think of ecommerce, what name comes to mind?

I bet you are thinking of Amazon.

We all use Amazon and, of course, every major tech company wants a slice of the ecommerce market.

Even when I’m using a search engine to find something to
buy, I usually click on an Amazon listing because we all love their Prime
shipping feature.

Google’s been trying to take a piece of that market for years. From shopping actions to Google Shopping nothing has really been too effective.

As consumers, we are just trained to go to Amazon to buy stuff.

And if you aren’t going to Amazon, you are probably going to Walmart or one of their online stores that they own all around the world.

To make matters worse, Walmart has removed all of its products from Google Shopping.

Google hasn’t made any big ecommerce or commerce purchases in general but you can expect that to change.

They may decide to buy a grocery delivery company like Instacart, but knowing them, I believe they will stick with the software, just like most things that they are doing.

Expect them to go after Amazon by helping people create
their own ecommerce site. Whether it is through a Shopify
acquisition or Bigcommerce or any other
platform out there, they want to own the ecommerce market.

It’s going to be too tough to go head-on with Amazon, and that’s I think they will take a different route and go after a platform like Shopify.

If you are selling products online you should, of course, be on Amazon, but don’t rely on them. Make sure you have your own website and look to see what platform play Google makes as you may eventually want to consider moving over to whatever they buy.

Change #4: Google will dominate the hardware industry

And no, I don’t mean they are going to create something
better than an iPad or an iPhone.

Apple, at its core, is a hardware company and they are clearly the winner when it comes to producing amazing devices that we use. But there is a big issue with Apple devices and even Samsung devices.

They are expensive.

If you want to buy a brand new iPhone, expect to drop $699 for the lowest model.

Google, on the other hand, does have high-end devices, but they also try and produce affordable devices. They also let other manufacturers use their operating system for their phones.

Their goal isn’t to make the most money per phone. Their goal is to get everyone in the world using their hardware.

Why?

Because that means they are collecting more data and that allows them to generate the most amount of money from advertising because all of these devices drive people to their search engine that is filled with ads.

It’s a pretty smart move.

I highly recommend that you watch this…

They aren’t just using this strategy with their phones, they
are trying to make all of their products affordable. That way people all over
the world can afford them.

Because if you live in places like Brazil or India, Apple
devices are too expensive, which leads people to choose a Google device.

Less than 5% of the world lives in the United States… the money is in the global markets.

If you are debating which platform to build on, consider Google, even if it isn’t the sexiest due to sheer volume. Android’s market share is roughly 87% because of its affordable hardware and partnerships.

Change #5: Expect Google Ads to go offline

Right now you mainly see ads on their search engine.

Yes, you will also find ads on some of their other properties like Maps, but expect them to be everywhere.

For the first time, the 2019 digital ad spend overtook traditional ad dollars in the United States.

But still, ad dollars offline is more than a hundred billion-dollar industry, and that’s just in the United States.

Over the next few years, I bet you’ll see Google dip into offline advertising.

Just think of it this way. Google owns Waymo, a self-driving Uber type of service that is growing fast in popularity.

They have data from the Google devices in your home and the watch on your wrist and they know where you going through Waymo… essentially, they have more data on you than anyone else.

Heck, they are even starting to offer checking
accounts.

With all of that data, who better to serve you offline ads?
They’ll be able to target people better and make them more relevant.

This will also increase the value (cost) of offline ads as
well as online ads in the long run.

Change #6: Search results won’t look the same in the
future

You are probably going to hate this change the most, but it
will also make their search engine more usable.

They are testing a lot of different ad types.

For example, as a business, you can collect leads through Google.

And eventually, you’ll just be able to book a hotel room right on their search engine without going to the hotel’s website.

The same will happen with mortgages, auto insurance, and many more industries.

This doesn’t mean that SEO will be dead or no one will go to
your site from search engines, it just means you will have to adapt.

For example, you can create educational-based content, rank highly, and when people land on your website, you can convert them through sales funnels.

You can also use tools like Hello
Bar to create sliders and popups to drive visitors to your money pages.

Conclusion

The future isn’t going to look the same. Companies like
Tesla aren’t the only ones who are innovating, most big companies are.

Don’t expect Google to just stay the same and not adapt just
like every other tech company is trying to do.

It’s the only way to stay ahead and win.

As marketers and entrepreneurs, Google won’t be the only one
disrupting how you are growing your sales and traffic. But instead of getting
upset or complaining, accept it.

Be productive with your time and focus on adapting. Because
when you are adapting while your competition is complaining, you’ll win.

What other changes do you see Google making in the
future?

The post An Inside Look at Google’s Future Plans appeared first on Neil Patel.