Tag: Update

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Check to see if there are any dead links and fix them. Dead links create a poor user experience.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?
  6. Can you make the article simpler? Remove fluff and avoid using complex words that very few people can understand.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

January 2020 SEO News Update

SEO News Update – December 2019/ January 2020 Edition Before we begin reviewing the events happened in 2020, I would like to take this opportunity to wish fellow SEOPressor’s readers a Happy New Year! Now, let’s begin. Interesting News 27/12/2019 – What Happens If You Do Not Have a Single Content On-page? A user asked …

The post January 2020 SEO News Update appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.

How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing

Google announced that it has been rolling out a new update call Bert.

I know what you are thinking… does this update really matter? Should I even spend time learning about it?

Well, Bert will affect 1 in 10 search queries.

To give you an idea of how big of an update this is, it’s
the biggest update since Google released RankBrain.

In other words, there is a really good chance that this impacts your site. And if it doesn’t, as your traffic grows, it will eventually affect your site.

But before we go into how this update affects SEOs and what you need to adjust (I will go into that later in this post), let’s first get into what this update is all about.

So, what is Bert?

Bert stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from
Transformers.

You are probably wondering, what the heck does that mean, right?

Google, in essence, has adjusted its algorithm to better understand natural language processing.

Just think of it this way: you could put a flight number into Google and they typically show you the flight status. Or a calculator may come up when you type in a math equation. Or if you put a stock symbol in, you’ll get a stock chart.

Or even a simpler example is: you can start typing into Google and its autocomplete feature can figure out what you are searching for before you even finishing typing it in.

But Google has already had all of that figured out before
Bert. So let’s look at some examples of Bert in action.

Is Bert even useful?

Here are 4 examples
of Bert.

Let’s say you search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need
visa”.

Before Bert, the top result would be how US citizens can travel to Brazil without a visa. But look at the search query carefully… it’s slight, but it is a big difference.

The search wasn’t about US people going to Brazil, it was
about people from Brazil traveling to the US.

The result after the Bert update is much more relevant.

Google is now taking into account prepositions like “for” or
“to” that can have a lot of meanings to the search query.

Here’s another example… “do estheticians stand a lot at work”…

Google used to previously match terms. For example, their
system used to think “stand” is the same as “stand-alone”.

Now they understand that the word “stand” has the context of physical demand. In other words, is the job exhausting… do you have to be on your feet a lot?

And one more, “can you get medicine for someone pharmacy” …

As you can see from the before and after picture, it’s clear
that the new result is more relevant.

Same with this one on “math practice books for adults” …

Is that the only change?

It isn’t. Google also made changes to featured snippets.

For example, if you searched for “parking on a hill with no
curb”, Google used to place too much emphasis on the word “curb” and not enough
emphasis on the word “no”.

That’s a big difference… and you can see that in the
results.

The new changes this algorithm update brings makes it much more relevant for searchers and it creates a better experience for you and me and everyone else who uses Google.

But how does it affect SEOs?

You need to change your SEO strategy

There are three types of queries people usually make when
performing a search:

  1. Informational
  2. Navigational
  3. Transactional

An informational query is like someone looking to lose
weight. They aren’t sure how so they may search for “how to lose weight”.

And once they perform the search, they may find a solution such as different diets. From there they may search for a solution, using a navigational query such as “Atkins diet”.

Once someone figures out the exact solution, they then may perform a transactional search query, such as “the Atkins diet cookbook”.

From what we are seeing on our end is that Bert is mainly impacting top-of-the-funnel keywords, which are informational related keywords.

Now if you want to not only maintain your rankings but gobble up some of the rankings of your competition, a simple solution is to get very specific with your content.

Typically, when you create content, which is the easiest way
to rank for informational related keywords, SEOs tell you to create super long
content.

Yes, you may see that a lot of longer-form content ranks well on Google, but their algorithm doesn’t focus on word count, it focuses on quality.

The context of the tweet from Danny Sullivan, who is Google’s search liaison, is that he wants SEOs to focus on creating content that is fundamentally great, unique, useful, and compelling.

So when you use tools like Ubersuggest to find new topics to go after, you need to make sure your content is super-specific.

For example, if you have a business about fitness and you blog about “how to lose weight without taking pills”, your content shouldn’t focus on diet shakes or supplements or anything too similar to diet pills. Instead, it should discuss all of the alternative methods.

I know what you are thinking, shakes and supplements may not be diet pills and they aren’t the same keyword but expect Bert to get more sophisticated in the next year in which it will better understand what people are really looking for.

Additionally, you should stop focusing on keyword density.

Yes, a lot of SEOs have moved away from this, but I still
get a handful of emails each day asking me about keyword density.

Keyword density will even be less important in the future as
Google better understands the context of the content you are writing.

So, where’s the opportunity?

As I mentioned, it’s related to creating highly specific content around a topic.

It’s not necessarily about creating a really long page that talks about 50 different things that’s 10,000 words long. It’s more about answering a searcher’s question as quick as possible and providing as much value compared to the competition.

Just like when you search for “what is it like to be in the
Olympics”, you’ll see a list of results that look something like this:

Although the first result has the title of “What it’s like
to go to the Olympics”, the article doesn’t break down what it is like to go as
an attendee, it breaks down what it is like to go as an athlete. Just like a
searcher would expect based on the query.

Bert was clearly able to figure this out even though the title could have gone either way. And the article itself isn’t that long. The article itself only has 311 words.

If you want to do well when it comes to ranking for informational keywords, go very specific and answer the question better than your competitors. From videos and images to audio, do whatever needs to be done to create a better experience.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that long-form content doesn’t work. It’s just that every SEO already focuses on long-form content. They are going after generic head terms that can be interpreted in 100 different ways and that’s why the content may be long and thorough.

In other words, focus more on long-tail terms.

You may think that is obvious but let’s look at the data.

It all starts with Ubersuggest. If you haven’t used it yet, you can type in a keyword like “marketing” and it will show you the search volume as well as give you thousands (if not millions) of keyword variations.

In the last 30 days, 4,721,534 keyword queries were performed on Ubersuggest by 694,284 marketers. Those 4,721,534 searches returned 1,674,841,398 keyword recommendations.

And sure, SEOs could be typing in head terms to find more long-tail phrases, but when we look at what keywords people are selecting within Ubersuggest and exporting, 84% of marketers are focusing on 1 or 2-word search terms.

Only 1.7% of marketers are focusing on search terms that are
5 or words longer.

Following the strategy of creating content around very specific long-tail phrases is so effective that sites like Quora are generating 60,428,999 visitors a month just from Google alone in the United States.

And a lot of their content isn’t super detailed with 10,000-word
responses. They just focus on answering very specific questions that people
have.

Conclusion

Even if your search traffic drops a bit from the latest
update, it’s a good thing.

I know that sounds crazy, but think of it this way… if
someone searched for “how to lose weight without diet pills” and they landed on
your article about how diet pills are amazing, they are just going to hit the
back button and go back to Google.

In other words, it is unlikely that the traffic converted into a conversion.

Sure, you may lose some traffic from this update, but the
traffic was ruining your user metrics and increasing your bounce rate.

Plus, this is your opportunity to create content that is super-specific. If you lose traffic, look at the pages that dropped, the search queries that you aren’t ranking for anymore, and go and adjust your content or create new content that answers the questions people are looking for.

If you don’t know how to do this, just log into Search Console, click on
“search results”, and click on the date button.

Then click on compare and select the dates where your
traffic dropped and compare it to the previous periods. Then select “Queries”
and sort by the biggest difference.

You’ll have to dig for the longer-term search queries as those are the easiest to fix. And if you are unsure about what to fix, just search for the terms on Google that dropped and look at the top-ranking competitors. Compare their page with yours as it will provide some insights.

So, what do you think about the latest update?

The post How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game

Google released a major update. They typically don’t announce their updates, but you know when they do, it is going to be big.

And that’s what happened with the most recent update that they announced.

A lot of people saw their traffic drop. And of course, at the same time, people saw their traffic increase because when one site goes down in rankings another site moves up to take its spot.

Can you guess what happened to my traffic?

Well, based on the title of the post you are probably going
to guess that it went up.

Now, let’s see what happened to my search traffic.

My overall traffic has already dipped by roughly 6%. When you look at my organic traffic, you can see that it has dropped by 13.39%.

I know what you are thinking… how did you beat Google’s core update when your traffic went down?

What if I told you that I saw this coming and I came up with a solution and contingency strategy in case my organic search traffic would ever drop?

But before I go into that, let me first break down how it all started and then I will get into how I beat Google’s core update.

A new trend

I’ve been doing SEO for a long time… roughly 18 years now.

When I first started, Google algorithm updates still sucked but they were much more simple. For example, you could get hit hard if you built spammy links or if your content was super thin and provided no value.

Over the years, their algorithm has gotten much more complex. Nowadays, it isn’t about if you are breaking the rules or not. Today, it is about optimizing for user experience and doing what’s best for your visitors.

But that in and of itself is never very clear. How do you know that what you are doing is better for a visitor than your competition?

Honestly, you can never be 100% sure. The only one who actually knows is Google. And it is based on whoever it is they decide to work on coding or adjusting their algorithm.

Years ago, I started to notice a new trend with my search
traffic.

Look at the graph above, do you see the trend?

And no, my traffic doesn’t just climb up and to the right. There are a lot of dips in there. But, of course, my rankings eventually started to continually climb because I figured out how to adapt to algorithm updates.

On a side note, if you aren’t sure how to adapt to the latest algorithm update, read this. It will teach you how to recover your traffic… assuming you saw a dip. Or if you need extra help, check out my ad agency.

In many cases after an algorithm update, Google continues to fine-tune and tweak the algorithm. And if you saw a dip when you shouldn’t have, you’ll eventually start recovering.

But even then, there was one big issue. Compared to all of the previous years, I started to feel like I didn’t have control as an SEO anymore back in 2017. I could no longer guarantee my success, even if I did everything correctly.

Now, I am not trying to blame Google… they didn’t do anything wrong. Overall, their algorithm is great and relevant. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using them.

And just like you and me, Google isn’t perfect. They continually adjust and aim to improve. That’s why they do over 3,200 algorithm updates in a year.

But still, even though I love Google, I didn’t like the
feeling of being helpless. Because I knew if my traffic took a drastic dip, I
would lose a ton of money.

I need that traffic, not only to drive new revenue but, more importantly, to pay my team members. The concept of not being able to pay my team on any given month is scary, especially when your business is bootstrapped.

So what did I do?

I took matters into my own hands

Although I love SEO, and I think I’m pretty decent at it
based on my traffic and my track record, I knew I had to come up with another
solution that could provide me with sustainable traffic that could still
generate leads for my business.

In addition to that, I wanted to find something that wasn’t “paid,” as I was bootstrapping. Just like how SEO was starting to have more ups and downs compared to what I’ve seen in my 18-year career, I knew the cost at paid ads would continually rise.

Just look at Google’s ad revenue. They have some ups and downs every quarter but the overall trend is up and to the right.

In other words, advertising will continually get more expensive over time.

And it’s not just Google either. Facebook Ads keep getting more expensive as well.

I didn’t want to rely on a channel that would cost me more next year and the year after because it could get so expensive that I may not be able to profitably leverage it in the future.

So, what did I do?

I went on a hunt to figure out a way to get direct, referral, and organic traffic that didn’t rely on any algorithm updates. (I will explain what I mean by organic traffic in a bit.)

I went on my mission

With the help of my buddy, Andrew Dumont, I went searching for websites that continually received good traffic even after algorithm updates.

Here were the criteria that we were looking for:

  • Sites that weren’t reliant on Google traffic
  • Sites that didn’t need to continually produce
    more content to get more traffic
  • Sites that weren’t popular due to social media traffic
    (we both saw social traffic dying)
  • Sites that didn’t leverage paid ads in the past
    or present
  • Sites that didn’t leverage marketing

In essence, we were looking for sites that were popular because people naturally liked them. Our intentions at first weren’t to necessarily buy any of these sites. Instead, we were trying to figure out how to naturally become popular so we could replicate it.

Do you know what we figured out?

I’ll give you a hint.

Think of it this way: Google doesn’t get the majority of their traffic from SEO. And Facebook doesn’t get their traffic because they rank everywhere on Google or that people share Facebook.com on the social web.

Do you know how they are naturally popular?

It comes down to building a good product.

That was my aha! moment. Why continually crank out thousands of pieces of content, which isn’t scalable and is a pain as you eventually have to update your old content, when I could just build a product?

That’s when Andrew and I stumbled
upon Ubersuggest.

Now the Ubersuggest you see today
isn’t what it looked like in February 2017 when I bought
it.

It used to be a simple tool that
just showed you Google Suggest results based on any query.

Before I took it over, it was generating 117,425 unique
visitors per month and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.

All of this was natural. The original founder didn’t do any
marketing. He just built a product and it naturally spread.

The tool did, however, have roughly 43% of its traffic coming from organic search. Now, can you guess what keyword it was?

The term was “Ubersuggest”.

In other words, its organic traffic mainly came from its own brand, which isn’t really reliant on SEO or affected by Google algorithm updates. That’s also what I meant when I talked about organic traffic that wasn’t reliant on Google.

Now since then I’ve gone a bit crazy with Ubersuggest and released loads of new features… from daily rank tracking to a domain analysis and site audit report to a content ideas report and backlinks report.

In other words, I’ve been making it a robust SEO tool that has everything you need and is easy to use.

It’s been so effective that the traffic on Ubersuggest went from 117,425 unique visitors to a whopping 651,436 unique visitors that generates 2,357,927 visits and 13,582,999 pageviews per month.

Best of all, the users are sticky, meaning the average Ubersuggest user spends over 26 minutes on the application each month. This means that they are engaged and will likely to convert into customers.

As I get more aggressive with my Ubersuggest funnel and start collecting leads from it, I expect to receive many more emails like that.

And over the years, I expect the traffic to continually grow.

Best of all, do you know what happens to the traffic on Ubersuggest when my site gets hit by a Google algorithm update or when my content stops going viral on Facebook?

It continually goes up and to the right.

Now, unless you dump a ton of money and time into replicating
what I am doing with Ubersuggest, but for your industry, you won’t generate the
results I am generating.

As my mom says, I’m kind of crazy…

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do well on a budget.

Back in 2013, I did a test where I released a tool on my old blog Quick Sprout. It was an SEO tool that wasn’t too great and honestly, I probably spent too much money on it.

Here were the stats for the first 4 days of releasing the
tool:

  • Day #1: 8,462 people ran 10,766 URLs
  • Day #2: 5,685 people ran 7,241 URLs
  • Day #3: 1,758 people ran 2,264 URLs
  • Day #4: 1,842 people ran 2,291 URLs

Even after the launch traffic died down, still 1,000+ people per day used the tool. And, over time, it actually went up to over 2,000.

It was at that point in my career, I realized that people
love tools.

I know what you are thinking though… how do you do this on a budget, right?

How to build tools without hiring developers or spending
lots of money

What’s silly is, and I wish I knew this before I built my first tool on Quick Sprout back in the day, there are tools that already exist for every industry.

You don’t have to create something new or hire some expensive developers. You can just use an existing tool on the market.

And if you want to go crazy like me, you can start adding multiple tools to your site… just like how I have an A/B testing calculator.

So how do you add tools without breaking the bank?

You buy them from sites like Code Canyon. From $2 to $50, you can find tools on just about anything. For example, if I wanted an SEO tool, Code Canyon has a ton to choose from. Just look at this one.

Not a bad looking tool that you can have on your website for just $40. You don’t have to pay monthly fees and you don’t need a developer… it’s easy to install and it doesn’t cost much in the grand scheme of things.

And here is the crazy thing: The $40 SEO tool has more features than the Quick Sprout one I built, has a better overall design, and it is .1% the cost.

Only if I knew that before I built it years ago. :/

Look, there are tools out there for every industry. From mortgage calculators to calorie counters to a parking spot finder and even video games that you can add to your site and make your own.

In other words, you don’t have to build something from scratch. There are tools for every industry that already exists and you can buy them for pennies on the dollar.

Conclusion

I love SEO and always will. Heck, even though many SEOs hate
how Google does algorithm updates, that doesn’t bother me either… I love Google
and they have built a great product.

But if you want to continually do well, you can’t rely on one marketing channel. You need to take an omnichannel approach and leverage as many as possible.

That way, when one goes down, you are still generating traffic.

Now if you want to do really well, think about most of the
large companies out there. You don’t build a billion-dollar business from SEO,
paid ads, or any other form of marketing. You first need to build an amazing
product or service.

So, consider adding tools to your site, the data shows it is more effective than content marketing and it is more scalable.

Sure you probably won’t achieve the results I achieved with Ubersuggest, but you can achieve the results I had with Quick Sprout. And you can achieve better results than what you are currently getting from content marketing.

What do you think? Are you going to add tools to your site?

PS: If you aren’t sure what type of tool you should add to your site, leave a comment and I will see if I can give you any ideas. 🙂

The post How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game appeared first on Neil Patel.

Google Update rel=nofollow is Now a “Hint” for Ranking

On Tuesday Google made an official announcement to
how they are changing the way they treat Nofollow
links. (This change is actually live)

Before the change

Before when Google found a Nofollow link then the
link would NOT be used for Crawling or Indexing and
it would NOT be used for Ranking.

Now

In the latest announcement Google has stated that
Nofollow links may be used as a “hint” for Ranking
purposes.

They will NOT be used for Crawling or Indexing.

Nofollow Changes in March 2020

On March the 1st 2020 Google will start to use Nofollow
links as a “hint” for Crawling and Indexing.

Other changes

In addition to the changes noted above, Google has
added two new link attributes

* rel=”sponsored”
* rel=”ugc”

rel=”sponsored” would be used for paid links whereas
rel=”ugc” would be used for user generated content
such as in Comments or on forums.

Do I need to make any changes to my site?

Making use of the 2 new link attributes is entirely
your choice. if you already use nofollow for such
links then you don’t need to do anything if you don’t
want to.

Google will still continue to work with the nofollow
attribute.

Looking forwards

To me, this sounds like an exciting change and I cant
wait to start testing things out for myself.

At least the Nofollow links that we now create will
not be completely ignored.

Now I just need to find out how much of a “hint” Google
actually needs to Rank me higher

Additional reading

If you would like to read more about this update
then you can read it on seoroundtable

Time to be prepared, stay prepared and reap the benefits. Keep in mind that Google is still being bound by their own infrastructure of the web, even today.

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