If you’ve been an SEO for even a short time, you’re likely familiar with Google Search Console (GSC). It’s a valuable tool for getting information about your website and its performance in organic search. That said, it does have its limitations.
In this article, you’ll learn how to get better-connected data out of Google Search Console as well as increase the size of your exports by 400%.
Google Search Console limitations
While GSC has a number of sections, we’ll be focusing on the “Performance” report. From the GSC dashboard, there are two ways you can access this report:
Once inside the “Performance” report, data for queries and pages can be accessed:
This reveals one of the issues with GSC: Query and page data is separated.
In other words, if I want to see the queries a specific page is ranking for, I have to first click “Pages,” select the page, and then click “back” to “Queries.” It’s a very cumbersome experience.
The other (two-part) issue is with exporting:
Performance data for queries and pages must be exported separately.
Exports are limited to 1,000 rows.
We’ll look to solve these issues by utilizing the GSC API.
What is the Google Search Console API?
Now we know the GSC user interface does have limitations: Connecting query data with page data is tricky, and exports are limited.
If the GSC UI represents the factory default, the GSC API represents our custom settings. It takes a bit more effort, but gives us more control and opens up more possibilities (at least in the realm of query and page data).
The GSC API is a way for us to connect to the data within our account, make more customized requests, and get more customized output. We can even bypass those factory default settings like exports limited to 1,000 rows, for instance.
Why use it?
Remember how I said earlier that query and page data is separated in the “vanilla” GSC UI? Well, with the API, we can connect query data with the page that query ranks for, so no more clicking back and forth and waiting for things to load.
Additionally, we saw that exports are limited to 1,000 rows. With the API, we can request up to 5,000 rows, an increase of 400%!
So let’s hook in, make our request, and get back a more robust and meaningful data set.
Setup
Log in to the appropriate GSC account on this page (upper right corner). For instance, if my website is example.com and I can view that Search Console account under admin@email.com, that’s the account I’ll sign into.
Enter the URL of the appropriate GSC account:
Set up your request:
Set startDate. This should be formatted as: YYYY-MM-DD.
Set endDate.
Set dimensions. A dimension can be:
query
page
device
and/or country
Set filters (optional). A filter must include:
dimension (a dimension can be: query, page, device, or country)
operator (an operator can be: contains, notContains, equals, notEquals)
expression (an expression can be any value associated with the dimensions)
Set the rowLimit. With the GSC API, you can request up to 5,000!
The page shared in step one makes all of this setup pretty easy, but it can be tedious and even confusing for some. I’ve done all the fussing for you and have created JSON you can edit quickly and easily to get the API return you’d like.
Unfiltered request
The following request will be unfiltered. We’ll set our preferred dates, dimensions, and a row limit, and then make our request.
The order in which you place your dimensions is the order in which they’ll be returned.
The API will return data for desktop, mobile, and tablet, separated out. The numbers you see in the GSC user interface — clicks, for instance — are an aggregate of all three (unless you apply device filtering).
Remember, your dimensions can also include “country” if you’d like.
{
"startDate": "2019-11-01",
"endDate": "2020-01-31",
"dimensions":
[
"query",
"page",
"device"
],
"rowLimit": 3000
}
Filtered request
This version of our request will include filters in order to be more specific about what is returned.
Filters are stated as dimension/operator/expression. Here are some examples to show what’s possible:
query contains go fish digital
page equals https://gofishdigital.com/
device notContains tablet
It looks like you can only apply one filter per dimension, just like in the normal GSC user interface, but if you know differently, let us know in the comments!
{
"startDate": "2019-11-01",
"endDate": "2020-01-31",
"dimensions":
[
"query",
"page",
"device"
],
"dimensionFilterGroups":
[
{
"filters":
[
{
"dimension": "device",
"operator": "notContains",
"expression": "tablet"
}
]
}
],
"rowLimit": 3000
}
Choose a template, unfiltered or filtered, and fill in your custom values (anything after a colon should be updated as your own value, unless you like my presets).
Execute the request
So there you have it! Two request templates for you to choose from and edit to your liking. Now it’s time to make the request. Click into the “Request body”, select all, and paste in your custom JSON:
This is where you could manually set up your request keys and values, but as I stated earlier, this can be tedious and a little confusing, so I’ve done that work for you.
Scroll down and click “Execute.” You may be prompted to sign-in here as well.
If everything was entered correctly and the request could be satisfied, the API will return your data. If you get an error, audit your request first, then any other steps and inputs if necessary.
Click into the box in the lower right (this is the response from the API), select all, and copy the information.
Convert from JSON to CSV
Excel or Sheets will be a much better way to work with the data, so let’s convert our JSON output to CSV.
Use a converter like this one and paste in your JSON output. You can now export a CSV. Update your column headers as desired.
Query your own data
Most SEOs are pretty comfortable in Excel, so you can now query your request output any way you’d like.
One of the most common tasks performed is looking for data associated with a specific set of pages. This is done by adding a sheet with your page set and using VLOOKUP to indicate a match.
The API output being in a spreadsheet also allows for the most common actions in Excel like sorting, filtering, and chart creation.
Get more out of Google Search Console
GSC offers important data for SEOs, and the GSC API output offers not only more of that data, but in a format that is far less cumbersome and more cohesive.
Today, we overcame two obstacles we often face in the standard GSC user interface: the query/page connection and limited exports. My hope is that utilizing the Google Search Console API will take your analyses and insights to the next level.
While my JSON templates will cover the most common scenarios in terms of what you’ll be interested in requesting, Google does offer documentation that covers a bit more ground if you’re interested.
Do you have another way of using the GSC API? Is there another API you commonly use as an SEO? Let me know in the comments!
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For local businesses today, there are numerous different ways to market your brand online. The majority of your potential customers still use Google to find local businesses near them — businesses where they will spend their hard-earned money. In fact, 80% of searches with “local intent” result in a conversion.
This begs the question: “What’s the best way to catch the attention of local searchers on Google?”
The answer: through Google Maps marketing.
What is Google Maps marketing?
Google Maps marketing is the process of optimizing the online presence of your brand in Google Maps, with the goal of increasing your brand’s online visibility.
When you search a query on Google that has local intent, you often see something like this:
Google Maps marketing utilizes a number of strategies and tactics to help your business become one of those three positions on local map packs.
Why is marketing important for Google Maps?
The reason every local business should care about ranking in Google Maps is simple: potential brand visibility.
It’s no surprise that Google is by far the most popular search engine. But what about Google Maps specifically?
Thus, any business that is serious about getting found in this day and age needs to utilize the power behind Google Maps marketing. This is why we at Ratynski Digital focus much of our local SEO time on getting our clients to rank both in Google Maps AND organic search results.
Google My Business (GMB) is a free platform provided by Google where local businesses can create a profile that is displayed across a variety of Google products.
In order to qualify for a GMB profile you must make in-person contact with your customers during your stated business hours. This may mean that you have a brick-and-mortar location where customers come to see you, or perhaps you travel to see your customers.
A GMB profile can display a variety of information about your business such as:
Business name
Business description
Reviews
Phone number
Address
Website
Business category or industry
Locations that you serve
Business hours
Products and services
Photos
And much more depending on your industry!
The purpose of creating a Google My Business profile for your brand is to increase your rankings, traffic, and revenue.
Click on the blue button that says “Manage now” (be sure you are signed into your Google account).
Step 2: Create the listing and name your business profile.
Name your new listing and start adding all of your important business information.
It’s important to note that before you create your GMB profile, you should familiarize yourself with Google’s guidelines. And please, don’t create GMB spam. Not only will creating fake or spammy listings offer a horrible user experience for your potential customers, but it also puts you at risk for penalties and suspensions.
Step 3: Add as much relevant information about your business as possible.
Remember all those different types of information I mentioned above? This is when you get to add those to your profile. Take advantage of this free platform and try to include as much relevant information as you can. Keep in mind, you will want to avoid adding GMB categories that are NOT relevant to your business. You should also work to keep all of your Google My Business contact information accurate, and make sure that it matches your website.
Step 4: Verify your profile.
If this is a brand new account, you will need to verify the physical address with a postcard that will be sent via mail by Google.
If you are claiming a listing that already exists on Google Maps but is not verified, you may be able to verify the profile via email or phone.
Step 5: Pop the champagne — you did it! Easy peasy.
Now that we are all set up, let’s dive into Google Maps SEO.
Top Google Maps ranking factors
It’s important to have a firm understanding of Google Maps ranking factors before you can expect to see high-ranking results. Once you understand how it works, Google Maps marketing becomes as easy as operating your 7-year-old’s Easy Bake Oven.
Okay, maybe not that easy, but everything will be much more clear. For a deep dive, I recommend checking out Moz’s 2018 local ranking factors study, but I’ll cover the top factors here.
In a nutshell, there are eight ranking factors that contribute to ranking in Google Maps and the local pack:
Google’s local algorithm analyzes all of the signals listed above and ranks listings based on the following three areas:
Proximity: How close is the business to the searcher?
Prominence: How popular or authoritative is the business in the area?
Relevance: How closely does the listing match the searcher’s query?
Now that you have a handle on how the local algorithm works and its many ranking factors, let’s talk about specific ways to optimize your GMB profile to improve your ranking in Google Maps.
How to optimize for Google Maps
To kickoff your optimizations, double check that ALL of your business information is filled out in full and 100% accurate. This includes adding the many services that you might offer as well as descriptions of those services.
Sherri Bonelli wrote a comprehensive post on optimizing the information on your GMB listing. She did a great job covering that topic, so I am going to focus instead on three more factors that will make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time:
1. Get more online reviews
Reviews continue to be one of the most important components for ranking in Google Maps, but the benefit of building more reviews is not purely for the purpose of SEO (not by a long shot).
Reviews offer a much better customer experience. They help to build up social proof, manage customer expectations, and they can sell your product or service before you even get in touch with your customer.
With 82% of consumers reading online reviews for local businesses, every business owner needs to understand the importance and power of reviews.
Google understands the customer’s desire to read reviews before they visit a store or trust a brand. They have heavily factored reviews into the local algorithm because of this (reviews from both Google and third parties).
Keep in mind that the “review factor” is not simply a measurement of who has the most reviews. That is certainly a piece of the puzzle, but Google also takes into consideration many other aspects like:
Whether a review has text along with the star rating or not.
The words chosen to write the review.
The overall star rating given to the business.
The consistency of reviews.
Overall review sentiment.
Business owners must regularly train themselves (and their team) to ask their customers for reviews. It’s important to set up systems and processes to make review generation a regular occurrence.
I also recommend setting up a process or purchasing a service that helps with review management. For example, Moz Local offers the ability to monitor the flow of reviews as well as comment and reply to those reviews as they come in (all in one cohesive dashboard). Always reply to your reviews!
Pro Tip: Don’t ask for a review too early. Too many businesses ask for a review for a product or service before their customer has had the opportunity to fully experience it (and actually benefit from it). Only after they have had the chance to solve their problem with your product or service should you ask for a review.
2. Build local links
Links are still one of the largest ranking factors in Google’s algorithm (both in organic ranking and in Google Maps). In fact, building local links is especially important if you want to rank in Google Maps.
It’s true that any link that isn’t marked as nofollow will pass “authority”, which will likely help with rankings. However, local links are especially important because they have a much higher probability of driving actual business.
One of the best ways to start building local links is to utilize your local relationships around town. Think about other businesses that you work closely with, organizations that you support, or even companies that might qualify as a “shoulder niche”.
For the highest success rate, start with businesses that you already have a relationship with or know well. You could offer to write or record a testimonial in exchange for a link, or perhaps you could co-create a piece of content that benefits both of your audiences.
Here’s exactly how to do it:
Create a list of niches that offer services that compliment (but don’t compete) with your business.
Consider how you might be able to incorporate these other companies into your content outreach.
For example, a carpet cleaning business may decide to create a really helpful piece of content about cost-effective ways to increase a home’s value in a specific market. They might include advice about landscaping, painting, and of course, carpet cleaning. Before writing the content, they could reach out to a few local painting, landscaping, or home service businesses in the area and ask if those businesses would be willing to collaborate on the content and perhaps add a link to their resource pages.
This process can also work even if you don’t have an existing relationship with the business currently. Here’s a basic outreach template you can use:
Hello [NAME],
My name is [YOUR NAME] from [BUSINESS]. We are actually business neighbors in a way, as we are located not too far from you in [CITY]. I often pass by [THEIR BUSINESS] on my way to [LOCAL LANDMARK/DESTINATION].
I thought it was finally time to reach out and say hello, and let you know that if there’s ever anything you or your team need, please let us know.
Also, I am working on writing an article about [INSERT BLOG TOPIC HERE]. Since our businesses both serve a similar audience and compliment each other nicely, I was wondering if you’d like to be featured in the article?
I am going to include a section about [TOPIC ABOUT THEIR INDUSTRY], and would like to use a sentence or two with your advice coming from the [THEIR INDUSTRY]. It might even make a great addition to the resource page on your website. Please let me know if this is something you'd be interested in.
Either way, thanks for your time, and great to meet you!
[YOUR NAME]
Pro Tip: If you are working to build links on a budget, it may help to get approval for the link before you invest the time and resources in content collaborations.
3. Fight off GMB spam in the map
This final optimization is less of an “optimization” and more of a tactic. This tactic is powerful because unlike most GMB optimizations, the goal is not to do something better than your competition, it’s to remove the competitors that are trying to cheat their way to higher rankings.
Just how powerful is this approach? Very.
Let’s take a look at this Google Maps SERP as an example:
At first glance, all of these listings seem legitimate. However, after about two minutes of investigating you can quickly discern that a few are fake. One of them doesn’t have a website and links to Nerdwallet, some are using fake reviews, and some are even using fake addresses (one is using the DMV’s address).
Now imagine you are DCAP Insurance (a real company) and you are trying to rank higher in Google Maps. If you successfully remove the top four spam listings, you have now jumped to the #1 position without making any additional optimizations.
Starting to see the logic behind this approach?
Unfortunately, Google Maps still has quite a bit of spam throughout its ecosystem. In fact, out of the top 20 spots in the example above, I was able to find seven fake listings and three more that were extremely questionable. This approach can work whether a listing is using an improper business name, keyword stuffing, or is a fake location entirely.
How to remove or edit Google My Business spam
Create a detailed record of each GMB listing you find and what edits are necessary. This will help later on if the changes keep getting reverted back.
Next, head over to Google Maps, find the listing, and click on “Suggest an Edit”.
Depending on the issue at hand you can either select:
“Change name or other details”
“Remove this place”
If you’re trying to remove keyword stuffing from a listing’s business name, you simply select “change name or other details” and make the necessary edits.
If you’re dealing with spam of some sort, you will need to select “Remove this place” and then select the exact issue from the drop-down list.
When suggesting an edit doesn’t get the job done
Unfortunately, submitting an edit about spam doesn’t always cut it. When this happens the best way to handle these spam listings is to use Google’s Business Redressal Complaint Form.
When using the redressal form, you’ll need to provide evidence before the required action takes place. For more information, be sure to check out this helpful resource.
Google Maps SEO checklist
At this point, you likely understand the importance of filling out your Google My Business profile to completion. But that’s not all it takes to rank in Google Maps — ranking requires comprehensive optimizations on a variety of levels and there is often not just one magic thing.
To help you cover all your bases, I created this Google Maps SEO Checklist that will help you pinpoint specific areas for improvement.
Tracking results and GMB analytics
Tracking your results is crucial in every aspect of SEO and online marketing, and Google My Business is no different. Most of your profile analytics will be found in your Google My Business account.
You can find this information by logging into your account and selecting “insights” on the far left side. Here is an example of what that looks like for Roadside Dental Marketing’s Google My Business account.
From there, you should be able to see things like:
Which specific search queries triggered your listing.
How often your listing appeared in Google search.
How often your listing appeared in Google Maps.
What kind of customer actions were taken (e.g. visiting your website, requesting directions, phone calls).
Where customers are requesting business information from.
Which days of the you week get the most calls.
How many photos have been viewed, and how that number compares to your competition.
The one thing that GMB analytics does NOT offer is any sort of rank tracking. Thankfully, the brilliant people at Moz are working on Local Market Analytics (beta). LMA not only offers rank tracking on a local level, but it also contains a plethora of competitor information within a target market.
Conclusion
While covering the GMB basics is fine and dandy, comprehensive optimizations coupled with making ongoing improvements is what truly separates the wheat from the chaff. Regularly test different optimizations within your industry and market and closely monitor your results. If you’re ever in doubt, do whatever is in the best interest of your customer. They must always come first.
By investing in Google Maps marketing, you’ll be able to drive local leads to your business on a consistent basis. If you find yourself with any questions, let me know in the comments below or on Twitter and I will happily answer them!
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We've all been there. You're the SEO on point for a project, and you're also the one tasked with getting great content written well and quickly. And if you don't have an expert at your disposal, great content can seem out of reach.
It doesn't have to be. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones arms you with the tools and processes to expand your content from prompt to paragraph to published piece.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, folks, great to be back here with you on Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to be talking about content expansion. It's a term you probably haven't heard before because I just made it up. So hopefully, it will be useful in the future for you. But I think you'll get the gist of exactly what we're trying to accomplish here.
How do SEOs produce great content when they're not subject matter experts?
You see, search engine optimizers have this really bizarre responsibility. We are often asked by our clients to produce content about things we have no business writing about. As a search engine optimizer, we know exactly the kinds of things that make content good for Google, but that doesn't mean we have any domain knowledge about whatever it is our customer does.
Maybe your customer is an artist of some sort or your customer runs a restaurant. You might not know anything about it, but you still might have a deadline to hit in order to get good content that talks in depth about some sort of topic which really isn't in your wheelhouse. Today I'm going to talk about a couple of tricks that you can use in order to go from a prompt to a couple of paragraphs and then ultimately to a published page, to a good piece of content.
Caveat: If an expert can create the content, they should
Now I want to step back for a second and just make one thing clear. This is not the preferred way to produce content. If you can have an expert produce the content, by all means have the expert produce the content, and then you go to work optimizing that content to make it the best it possibly can be. That's the way it ought to be done whenever possible.
But we know that's not the case. The truth is that most small business owners don't have the time to write lengthy articles about their services and their offerings and what makes them special and the kinds of things that their customers might need. They have a business to run. There's nothing unethical about taking the time to actually try and write a good piece of content for that customer.
But if you're going to do it, you really should try and create something that's of value. Hopefully this is going to help you do exactly that. I call this content expansion because the whole purpose is to start from one small prompt and then to expand it a little and expand it a little and expand it even more until eventually you are at something that's very thorough and useful and valuable for the customers who are reading that content.
Each one of the individual steps is just sort of like taking a breath and blowing it into a balloon to make it a little bigger. Each step is manageable as we expand that content.
1. Start with a prompt
First, we have to start with some sort of topic or prompt. In this example, I've decided just bike safety off the top of my head. I'm here in Seattle and there are bikes everywhere.
It's completely different from North Carolina, where I'm from, where you've got to get in a car to go anywhere. But with the prompt bike safety, we now have to come up with what are we going to talk about with regard to bike safety. We pretty much know off the top of our heads that helmets matter and signaling and things of that sort.
Find the questions people are asking
But what are people actually asking? What's the information they want to know? Well, there are a couple of ways we can get at that, and that's by looking exactly for those questions that they're searching. One would be to just type in "bike safety" into Google and look for PAAs or People Also Ask. That's the SERP feature that you'll see about halfway down the page, which often has a couple of questions and you can click on it and there will be a little featured snippet or paragraph of text that will help you answer it.
Another would be to use a tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, where you could put in "bike safety" and then just select from one of the drop-downs "are questions" and it would then just show you all the questions people are asking about bike safety. Once you do that, you'll get back a handful of questions that people are asking about bike safety.
In this case, the three that came up from the PAA for just bike safety were:
Is riding a bike safe?
How can I improve safety?
Why is bike safety important?
What this does is start to get us into a position where now we're building out some sort of outline of the content that we're going to be building.
Build the outline for your content
We've just expanded from a title that said bike safety to now an outline that has a couple of questions that we want to answer. Well, here's the catch. Bike safety, sure, we've got some ideas off the top of our heads about what's important for bike safety. But the real thing that we're trying to get at here is authoritative or valuablecontent.
Well, Google is telling you what that is. When you press the button to show you what the answer is to the question, that's Google telling you this is the best answer we could find on the internet for that question. What I would recommend you do is you take the time to just copy the answer to that PAA, to that question. Why is bike safety important?
You click the button and it would show you the answer. Then you would write down the citation as well. But if you think about it, this is exactly the way you would write papers in college. If you were writing a paper in college about bike safety, you would go into the library, identify books on safety studies, etc. Then you would go through and then you would probably have note cards pulled out.
You would find a particular page that has an important paragraph. You would write a paraphrase down, and then you would write the citation down. This is the exact same thing. I'm not telling you to copy content. That's not what we're going to be doing in the end. But at the same time, it is the way that we take that next step of expanding the content. What we've done here is we've now gone from a topic to a couple of questions.
Now for each of those questions, we've kind of got an idea of what the target answer is. But, of course, the featured snippet isn't the whole answer. The featured snippet is just the most specific answer to the question, but not the thorough one. It doesn't cover all the bases. So what are some of the things we can do to expand this even further?
2. Extract & explain entities
This is where I really like to take advantage of NLP technologies, natural language programming technologies that are going to allow us to be able to expand that content in a way that adds value to the user and in particular explains to the user concepts that both you, as the writer in this particular case, and they, as the reader, might not know.
My favorite is a site called dandelion.eu. It's completely free for a certain amount of uses. But if you're going to be producing a lot of content, I would highly recommend you sign up for their API services. What you're going to do is extract and explain entities.
Imagine you've got this featured snippet here and it's talking about bike safety. It answers the question, "Why is bike safety important?" It says that bicyclists who wear their helmets are 50% less likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries in a wreck or something of that sort. That's the answer in the featured snippet that's been given to you.
Well, perhaps you don't know what a traumatic brain injury is, and perhaps your readers don't know what that is and why it's important to know that one thing protects you so much from the other.
Identify and expand upon terminology for your questions
That's where entity extraction can be really important. What dandelion.eu is going to do is it's going to identify that noun phrase. It's going to identify the phrase "traumatic brain injury," and then it's going to give you a description of exactly what that is. Now you can expand that paragraph that you originally pulled from the featured snippet and add into it a citation about exactly what traumatic brain injury is.
This will happen for all the questions. You'll find different terminology that your reader might not know and then be able to expand upon that terminology.
3. Create novel research
Now the one thing that I want to do here in this process is not just take advantage of content other people have written about, but try and do some novel research. As you know, Google Trends is probably my favorite place to do novel research, because if there is any topic in the world, somebody is searching about it and we can learn things about the way people search.
Use Google Trends
For example, in this Google Trends that I did, I can't remember the exact products that I was looking up, but they were specific bike safety products, like, for example, bike lights, bike mirrors, bike video cameras or bike cameras, etc. In fact, I'm almost positive that the red one had to do with bicycle cameras because they were becoming cheaper and more easily accessible to bicyclists. They've become more popular over time. Well, that's novel research.
Bring insights, graphs, and talking points from your novel research into your writing
When you're writing this article here about bike safety, you can include in it far more than just what other people have said. You can say of the variety of ways of improving your bike safety, the use of a bike camera has increased dramatically over time.
4. Pull it all together
All right. So now that you've got some of this novel research, including even graphs that you can put into the content, we've got to pull this all together. We started with the prompt, and then we moved into some topics or questions to answer. Then we've answered those questions, and then we've expanded them by giving clarity and definitions to terms that people might not understand and we've also added some novel research.
Rewrite for relevancy
So what's next? The next step is that we need to rewrite for relevancy. This is a really important part of the process. You see chances are, when you write about a topic that you are not familiar with, you will not use the correct language to describe what's going on. I think a good example might be if you're writing about golf, for example, and you don't know what it means to accidentally hit a golf ball that goes to the right or to the left.
Find relevant words and phrases with nTopic
Which one is a hook and a slice? Now, those of you who play golf I'm sure know right off the top of your head. But you wouldn't know to use that kind of terminology if you weren't actually a golfer. Well, if you use a tool like nTopic — it's at nTopic.org — and you write your content and place it in there and then give bike safety as the keyword you want to optimize for, it will tell you all of the relevant words and phrases you ought to be using in the content.
In doing so, you'll be able to expand your content even further, not just with further language and definitions that you know, but with the actual language that experts are using right now whenever they're talking about bike safety or whatever topic it is.
Examine (and improve) your writing quality with the Hemingway app
The next thing that I would say is that you really should pull things back and take a chance to look at the quality of the writing that you're producing.
This whole time we've been talking mostly about making sure the content is in-depth and thorough and covers a lot of issues and areas and uses the right language. But we haven't spent any time at all talking about is this actually written well. There's a fantastic free app out there called Hemingway app.
If you haven't heard of it, this is going to make your day. [Editor's note: It made mine!] Every writer in the world should be using a tool like this. You just drop your content in there, and it's going to give you all sorts of recommendations, from correcting grammar to using different words, shortening sentences, passive and active voice, making sure that you have the right verb tenses, etc. It's just incredibly useful for writing quality content.
Two important things to remember:
Now there are two things at the end that matter, and one is really, really important in my opinion and that is to cite.
1. Cite your sources — even if they're competitors!
You see, when you've done all of this work, you need to let the world know that this work, one, isn't only created by you but, two, is backed up by research and information provided by other professionals.
There is no shame whatsoever in citing even competitors who have produced good content that has helped you produce the content that you are now putting up. So cite. Put citations directly in. Look, Wikipedia ranks for everything, and every second sentence is cited and links off to another website. It's insane.
But Google doesn't really care about the citation in the sense that somebody else has written about this. What you're really interested in is showing the users that you did your homework.
2. Take pride in what you've accomplished!
Then finally, once you're all done, you can publish this great piece of content that is thorough and exceptional and uniquely valuable, written well in the language and words that it should use, cited properly, and be proud of the content that you've produced at the end of the day, even though you weren't an expert in the first place.
Hopefully, some of these techniques will help you out in the long run. I look forward to seeing you in the comments and maybe we'll have some questions that I can give you some other ideas. Thanks again.
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For a while now, I’ve been disappointed with the People Also Ask (PAAs) feature in Google’s search results. My disappointment is not due to the vast amount of space they take up on the SERPs (that’s another post entirely), but more that the quality is never where I expect it to be.
The quality issue I’m running into is that I still find several obscure PAA questions and results or content from other countries.
When I run searches that have a universal answer, such as “can you eat raw chicken?”, the answer is universally correct so there is no issue with the results. But when I run a search that should return local (UK) content, such as “car insurance”, I’m finding a heavy influence from the US — especially around YMYL queries.
I wanted to find out how much of an issue this actually is, so my team and I analyzed over 1,000 of the most-searched-for keywords in the finance industry, where we would expect UK PAA results.
Before we dig in, my fundamental question going into this research was: “Should a financial query originating in the UK, whose products are governed within UK regulations, return related questions that contain UK content?”
I believe that they should and I hope that by the end of this post, you agree, too.
Our methodology
To conduct our analysis, we followed these steps:
1. Tag keywords by category and sub-category:
2. Remove keywords where you would expect a universal result, e.g. “insurance definition”.
3. Extract PAAs and the respective ranking URLs using STAT.
4. Identify country origin through manual review: are we seeing correct results?
Our findings
55.1% of the 4,507 available financial PAAs returned non-UK content. US content was served 50.5% of the time, while the remaining 4.6% was made up of sites from India, Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Spain, and Singapore.
Results by category
Breaking it down by category, we see that personal finance keywords bring back a UK PAA 33.72% of the time, insurance keywords 52.10%, utilities keywords 64.89%, and business keywords 38.76%.
Personal finance
Digging into the most competitive products in the UK, personal finance, we found that a significant percentage of PAAs brought back US or Indian content in the results.
Out of the 558 personal finance keywords, 186 keywords didn’t bring back a single UK PAA result, including:
financial advisor
first credit card
best car loans
balance transfer cards
how to buy a house
best payday loans
cheap car finance
loan calculator
Credit cards
17.41% of credit card PAAs were showing UK-specific PAAs, with the US taking just over four out of every five. That’s huge.
Another surprising find is that 61 out of 104 credit card keywords didn’t bring back a single UK PAA. I find this remarkable given the fact that the credit card queries originated in the UK.
Loans
Only 15.8% of searches returned a UK PAA result with over 75% coming from the US. We also saw highly-competitive and scrutinized searches for keywords like “payday loans” generate several non-UK results.
Mortgages
While the UK holds the majority of PAA results for mortgage-related keywords at 53.53%, there are still some major keywords (like “mortgages”) that only bring back a single UK result. If you’re searching for “mortgages” in the UK, then you want to see information about UK mortgages, but instead Google serves up mainly US results.
Insurance
Insurance results weren’t as bad as personal finance. However, there was still a big swing towards the US for some products, such as life insurance.
Out of the 350 insurance keywords tested, there were 64 keywords that didn’t bring back a single UK PAA result, including:
pet insurance
cheap home insurance
life insurance comparison
car insurance for teens
cheap dog insurance
types of car insurance
Car insurance
60.54% of car insurance PAAs were showing UK-specific PAAs, with the US taking 36.97%. Out of the 132 keywords that were in this sub-category, UK sites were present for 118, which is better than the personal finance sub-categories.
Home insurance
As one of the most competitive spaces in the finance sector, it was really surprising to see that only 56.25% of results for home insurance queries returned a UK PAA. There are nuances to policies across different markets, so this is a frustrating and potentially harmful experience for searchers.
Utilities
Although we see a majority of PAAs in this keyword category return UK results, there are quite a few more specific searches for which you would absolutely be looking for a UK result (e.g. “unlimited data phone contracts”) but that bring back only one UK result.
One interesting find is that this UKPower page has captured 35 PAAs for the 49 keywords it ranks for. That’s an impressive 71.43% — the highest rating we’ve seen across our analysis.
Business
At the time of our analysis, we found that 36.7% of business-related PAAs were from the UK. One of the keywords with the lowest representation in this category was "business loans", which generated only 6.25% UK results. While the volume of keywords are smaller in this category, there is more potential for harm with serving international content for queries relating to UK businesses.
What pages generate the most PAA results?
To make this post a little more actionable, I aggregated which URLs generated the most PAAs across some of the most competitive financial products in the UK.
Ironically, four out of the top 10 were US-based (cars.news.com manages to generate 32 PAAs across one of the most competitive industries in UK financial searches: car insurance). A hat tip to ukpower.co.uk, which ranked #1 in our list, generating 35 results in the energy space.
To summarize the above analysis, it’s clear that there is too much dominance from non-UK sites in finance searches. While there are a handful of UK sites doing well, there are UK queries being searched for that are bringing back clearly irrelevant information.
As an industry, we have been pushed to improve quality — whether it’s increasing our relevancy or the expertise of our content — so findings like these show that Google could be doing more themselves.
What does this mean for your SEO strategy?
For the purpose of this research, we only looked at financial terms, so whilst we can’t categorically say this is the same for all industries, if Google is missing this much across financial YMYL terms then it doesn’t look good for other categories.
My advice would be that if you are investing any time optimizing for PAAs, then you should spend your time elsewhere, for now, since the cards in finance niches are stacked against you.
Featured Snippets are still the prime real estate for SEOs and (anecdotally, anyway) don’t seem to suffer from this geo-skew like PAAs do, so go for Featured Snippets instead.
Have you got any thoughts on the quality of PAAs across your SERPs? Let me know in the comments below!
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Google’s Index Coverage report is absolutely fantastic because it gives SEOs clearer insights into Google’s crawling and indexing decisions. Since its roll-out, we use it almost daily at Go Fish Digital to diagnose technical issues at scale for our clients.
Within the report, there are many different “statuses” that provide webmasters with information about how Google is handling their site content. While many of the statuses provide some context around Google’s crawling and indexation decisions, one remains unclear: “Crawled — currently not indexed”.
Since seeing the “Crawled — currently not indexed” status reported, we’ve heard from several site owners inquiring about its meaning. One of the benefits of working at an agency is being able to get in front of a lot of data, and because we’ve seen this message across multiple accounts, we’ve begun to pick up on trends from reported URLs.
Google’s definition
Let’s start with the official definition. According to Google’s official documentation, this status means: “The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.”
So, essentially what we know is that:
Google is able to access the page
Google took time to crawl the page
After crawling, Google decided not to include it in the index
The key to understanding this status is to think of reasons why Google would “consciously” decide against indexation. We know that Google isn’t having trouble finding the page, but for some reason it feels users wouldn’t benefit from finding it.
This can be quite frustrating, as you might not know why your content isn’t getting indexed. Below I’ll detail some of the most common reasons our team has seen to explain why this mysterious status might be affecting your website.
1. False positives
Priority: Low
Our first step is to always perform a few spot checks of URLs flagged in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” section for indexation. It’s not uncommon to find URLs that are getting reported as excluded but turn out to be in Google’s index after all.
For example, here’s a URL that’s getting flagged in the report for our website: https://gofishdigital.com/meetup/
However, when using a site search operator, we can see that the URL is actually included in Google’s index. You can do this by appending the text “site:” before the URL.
If you’re seeing URLs reported under this status, I recommend starting by using the site search operator to determine whether the URL is indexed or not. Sometimes, these turn out to be false positives.
Solution: Do nothing! You’re good.
2. RSS feed URLs
Priority: Low
This is one of the most common examples that we see. If your site utilizes an RSS feed, you might be finding URLs appearing in Google’s “Crawled — currently not indexed” report. Many times these URLs will have the “/feed/” string appended to the end. They can appear in the report like this:
Google finding these RSS feed URLs linked from the primary page. They’ll often be linked to using a "rel=alternate" element. WordPress plugins such as Yoast can automatically generate these URLs.
Solution: Do nothing! You're good.
Google is likely selectively choosing not to index these URLs, and for good reason. If you navigate to an RSS feed URL, you’ll see an XML document like the one below:
While this XML document is useful for RSS feeds, there’s no need for Google to include it in the index. This would provide a very poor experience as the content is not meant for users.
3. Paginated URLs
Priority: Low
Another extremely common reason for the “Crawled — currently not indexed” exclusion is pagination. We will often see a good number of paginated URLs appear in this report. Here we can see some paginated URLs appearing from a very large e-commerce site:
Solution: Do nothing! You’re good.
Google will need to crawl through paginated URLs to get a complete crawl of the site. This is its pathway to content such as deeper category pages or product description pages. However, while Google uses the pagination as a pathway to access the content, it doesn’t necessarily need to index the paginated URLs themselves.
If anything, make sure that you don’t do anything to impact the crawling of the individual pagination. Ensure that all of your pagination contains a self-referential canonical tag and is free of any “nofollow” tags. This pagination acts as an avenue for Google to crawl other key pages on your site so you’ll definitely want Google to continue crawling it.
4. Expired products
Priority: Medium
When spot-checking individual pages that are listed in the report, a common problem we see across clients is URLs that contain text noting “expired” or “out of stock” products. Especially on e-commerce sites, it appears that Google checks to see the availability of a particular product. If it determines that a product is not available, it proceeds to exclude that product from the index.
This makes sense from a UX perspective as Google might not want to include content in the index that users aren’t able to purchase.
However, if these products are actually available on your site, this could result in a lot of missed SEO opportunity. By excluding the pages from the index, your content isn’t given a chance to rank at all.
In addition, Google doesn’t just check the visible content on the page. There have been instances where we’ve found no indication within the visible content that the product is not available. However, when checking the structured data, we can see that the “availability” property is set to “OutOfStock”.
It appears that Google is taking clues from both the visible content and structured data about a particular product's availability. Thus, it’s important that you check both the content and schema.
Solution: Check your inventory availability.
If you’re finding products that are actually available getting listed in this report, you’ll want to check all of your products that may be incorrectly listed as unavailable. Perform a crawl of your site and use a custom extraction tool like Screaming Frog's to scrape data from your product pages.
For instance, if you want to see at scale all of your URLs with schema set to “OutOfStock”, you can set the “Regex” to: "availability":"<="" p="">
You can export this list and cross-reference with inventory data using Excel or business intelligence tools. This should quickly allow you to find discrepancies between the structured data on your site and products that are actually available. The same process can be repeated to find instances where your visible content indicates that products are expired.
5. 301 redirects
Priority: Medium
One interesting example we’ve seen appear under this status is destination URLs of redirected pages. Often, we’ll see that Google is crawling the destination URL but not including it in the index. However, upon looking at the SERP, we find that Google is indexing a redirecting URL. Since the redirecting URL is the one indexed, the destination URL is thrown into the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report.
The issue here is that Google may not be recognizing the redirect yet. As a result, it sees the destination URL as a “duplicate” because it is still indexing the redirecting URL.
Solution: Create a temporary sitemap.xml.
If this is occurring on a large number of URLs, it is worth taking steps to send stronger consolidation signals to Google. This issue could indicate that Google isn’t recognizing your redirects in a timely manner, leading to unconsolidated content signals.
One option might be setting up a “temporary sitemap”. This is a sitemap that you can create to expedite the crawling of these redirected URLs. This is a strategy that John Mueller has previously recommended.
To create one, you will need to reverse-engineer redirects that you have created in the past:
Export all of the URLs from the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report.
Match them up in Excel with redirects that have been previously set up.
Find all of the redirects that have a destination URL in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” bucket.
Create a static sitemap.xml of these URLs with Screaming Frog.
Upload the sitemap and monitor the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report in Search Console.
The goal here is for Google to crawl the URLs in the temporary sitemap.xml more frequently than it otherwise would have. This will lead to faster consolidation of these redirects.
6. Thin content
Priority: Medium
Sometimes we see URLs included in this report that are extremely thin on content. These pages may have all of the technical elements set up correctly and may even be properly internally linked to, however, when Google runs into these URLs, there is very little actual content on the page. Below is an example of a product category page where there is very little unique text:
This product listing page was flagged as “Crawled — Currently Not Indexed”. This may be due to very thin content on the page.
This page is likely either too thin for Google to think it’s useful or there is so little content that Google considers it to be a duplicate of another page. The result is Google removing the content from the index.
Here is another example: Google was able to crawl a testimonial component page on the Go Fish Digital site (shown above). While this content is unique to our site, Google probably doesn’t believe that the single sentence testimonial should stand alone as an indexable page.
Once again, Google has made the executive decision to exclude the page from the index due to a lack of quality.
Solution: Add more content or adjust indexation signals.
Next steps will depend on how important it is for you to index these pages.
If you believe that the page should definitely be included in the index, consider adding additional content. This will help Google see the page as providing a better experience to users.
If indexation is unnecessary for the content you're finding, the bigger question becomes whether or not you should take the additional steps to strongly signal that this content shouldn’t be indexed. The “Crawled —currently not indexed” report is indicating that the content is eligible to appear in Google’s index, but Google is electing not to include it.
There also could be other low quality pages to which Google is not applying this logic. You can perform a general “site:” search to find indexed content that meets the same criteria as the examples above. If you’re finding that a large number of these pages are appearing in the index, you might want to consider stronger initiatives to ensure these pages are removed from the index such as a “noindex” tag, 404 error, or removing them from your internal linking structure completely.
7. Duplicate content
Priority: High
When evaluating this exclusion across a large number of clients, this is the highest priority we’ve seen. If Google sees your content as duplicate, it may crawl the content but elect not to include it in the index. This is one of the ways that Google avoids SERP duplication. By removing duplicate content from the index, Google ensures that users have a larger variety of unique pages to interact with. Sometimes the report will label these URLs with a “Duplicate” status (“Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”). However, this is not always the case.
This is a high priority issue, especially on a lot of e-commerce sites. Key pages such as product description pages often include the same or similar product descriptions as many other results across the Web. If Google recognizes these as too similar to other pages internally or externally, it might exclude them from the index all together.
Solution: Add unique elements to the duplicate content.
If you think that this situation applies to your site, here’s how you test for it:
Take a snippet of the potential duplicate text and paste it into Google.
In the SERP URL, append the following string to the end: “#=100”. This will show you the top 100 results.
Use your browser’s “Find” function to see if your result appears in the top 100 results. If it doesn’t, your result might be getting filtered out of the index.
Go back to the SERP URL and append the following string to the end: “&filter=0”. This should show you Google’s unfiltered result (thanks, Patrick Stox, for the tip).
Use the “Find” function to search for your URL. If you see your page now appearing, this is a good indication that your content is getting filtered out of the index.
Repeat this process for a few URLs with potential duplicate or very similar content you’re seeing in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report.
If you’re consistently seeing your URLs getting filtered out of the index, you’ll need to take steps to make your content more unique.
While there is no one-size-fits-all standard for achieving this, here are some options:
Rewrite the content to be more unique on high-priority pages.
Use dynamic properties to automatically inject unique content onto the page.
Remove large amounts of unnecessary boilerplate content. Pages with more templated text than unique text might be getting read as duplicate.
If your site is dependent on user-generated content, inform contributors that all provided content should be unique. This may help prevent instances where contributors use the same content across multiple pages or domains.
8. Private-facing content
Priority: High
There are some instances where Google’s crawlers gain access to content that they shouldn’t have access to. If Google is finding dev environments, it could include those URLs in this report. We’ve even seen examples of Google crawling a particular client’s subdomain that is set up for JIRA tickets. This caused an explosive crawl of the site, which focused on URLs that shouldn’t ever be considered for indexation.
The issue here is that Google’s crawl of the site isn’t focused, and it’s spending time crawling (and potentially indexing) URLs that aren’t meant for searchers. This can have massive ramifications for a site’s crawl budget.
Solution: Adjust your crawling and indexing initiatives.
This solution is going to be entirely dependent on the situation and what Google is able to access. Typically, the first thing you want to do is determine how Google is able to discover these private-facing URLs, especially if it’s via your internal linking structure.
Start a crawl from the home page of your primary subdomain and see if any undesirable subdomains are able to be accessed by Screaming Frog through a standard crawl. If so, it’s safe to say that Googlebot might be finding those exact same pathways. You’ll want to remove any internal links to this content to cut Google’s access.
The next step is to check the indexation status of the URLs that should be excluded. Is Google sufficiently keeping all of them out of the index, or were some caught in the index? If Google isn’t indexing a large amount of this content, you might consider adjusting your robots.txt file to block crawling immediately. If not, “noindex” tags, canonicals, and password protected pages are all on the table.
Case study: duplicate user-generated content
For a real-world example, this is an instance where we diagnosed the issue on a client site. This client is similar to an e-commerce site as a lot of their content is made up of product description pages. However, these product description pages are all user-generated content.
Essentially, third parties are allowed to create listings on this site. However, the third parties were often adding very short descriptions to their pages, resulting in thin content. The issue occurring frequently was that these user-generated product description pages were getting caught in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report. This resulted in missed SEO opportunity as pages that were capable of generating organic traffic were completely excluded from the index.
When going through the process above, we found that the client’s product description pages were quite thin in terms of unique content. The pages that were getting excluded only appeared to have a paragraph or less of unique text. In addition, the bulk of on-page content was templated text that existed across all of these page types. Since there was very little unique content on the page, the templated content might have caused Google to view these pages as duplicates. The result was that Google excluded these pages from the index, citing the “Crawled — currently not indexed” status.
To solve for these issues, we worked with the client to determine which of the templated content didn’t need to exist on each product description page. We were able to remove the unnecessary templated content from thousands of URLs. This resulted in a significant decrease in “Crawled — currently not indexed” pages as Google began to see each page as more unique.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this helps search marketers better understand the mysterious “Crawled — currently not indexed” status in the Index Coverage report. Of course, there are likely many other reasons that Google would choose to categorize URLs like this, but these are the most common instances we’ve seen with our clients to date.
Overall, the Index Coverage report is one of the most powerful tools in Search Console. I would highly encourage search marketers to get familiar with the data and reports as we routinely find suboptimal crawling and indexing behavior, especially on larger sites. If you’ve seen other examples of URLs in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report, let me know in the comments!
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Negative SEO can hurt your website and your work in search, even when your rankings are unaffected by it. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, search expert Russ Jones dives into what negative SEO is, what it can affect beyond rankings, and tips on how to fight it.
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Video Transcription
All right, folks. Russ Jones here and I am so excited just to have the opportunity to do any kind of presentation with the title "Defense Against the Dark Arts." I'm not going to pretend like I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, but anyway, this is just going to be fun.
But what I want to talk about today is actually pretty bad. It's the reality that negative SEO, even if it is completely ineffective at doing its primary goal, which is to knock your website out of the rankings, will still play havoc on your website and the likelihood that you or your customers will be able to make correct decisions in the future and improve your rankings.
Today I'm going to talk about why negative SEO still matters even if your rankings are unaffected, and then I'm going to talk about a couple of techniques that you can use that will help abate some of the negative SEO techniques and also potentially make it so that whoever is attacking you gets hurt a little bit in the process, maybe. Let's talk a little bit about negative SEO.
What is negative SEO?
The most common form of negative SEO is someone who would go out and purchase tens of thousands of spammy links or hundreds of thousands even, using all sorts of different software, and point them to your site with the hope of what we used to call "Google bowling," which is to knock you out of the search results the same way you would knock down a pin with a bowling ball.
The hope is that it's sort of like a false flag campaign, that Google thinks that you went out and got all of those spammy links to try to improve your rankings, and now Google has caught you and so you're penalized. But in reality, it was someone else who acquired those links. Now to their credit, Google actually has done a pretty good job of ignoring those types of links.
It's been my experience that, in most cases, negative SEO campaigns don't really affect rankings the way they're intended to in most cases, and I give a lot of caveats there because I've seen it be effective certainly. But in the majority of cases all of those spammy links are just ignored by Google. But that's not it. That's not the complete story.
Problem #1: Corrupt data
You see, the first problem is that if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, what's really going on in the background is that there's this corruption of data that's important to making decisions about search results.
Pushes you over data limits in GSC
For example, if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, it is going to push you over the limit of the number of links that Google Search Console will give back to you in the various reports about links.
Pushes out the good links
This means that in the second case there are probably links, that you should know about or care about, that don't show up in the report simply because Google cuts off at 100,000 total links in the export.
Well, that's a big deal, because if you're trying to make decisions about how to improve your rankings and you can't get to the link data you need because it's been replaced with hundreds of thousands of spammy links, then you're not going to be able to make the right decision.
Increased cost to see all your data
The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.
You can get the data for more than 100,000 links pointing to your site. You're just going to have to pay for it. You could come to Moz and use our Link Explorer tool for example. But you'll have to increase the amount of money that you're spending in order to get access to the accounts that will actually deliver all of that data.
The one big issue sitting behind all of this is that even though we know Google is ignoring most of these links, they don't label that for us in any kind of useful fashion. Even after we can get access to all of that link data, all of those hundreds of thousands of spammy links, we still can't be certain which ones matter and which ones don't.
Problem #2: Copied content
That's not the only type of negative SEO that there is out there. It's the most common by far, but there are other types. Another common type is to take the content that you have and distribute it across the web in the way that article syndication used to work. So if you're fairly new to SEO, one of the old methodologies of improving rankings was to write an article on your site, but then syndicate that article to a number of article websites and these sites would then post your article and that article would link back to you.
Now the reason why these sites would do this is because they would hope that, in some cases, they would outrank your website and in doing so they would get some traffic and maybe earn some AdSense money. But for the most part, that kind of industry has died down because it hasn't been effective in quite some time. But once again, that's not the whole picture.
No attribution
If all of your content is being distributed to all of these other sites, even if it doesn't affect your rankings, it still means there's the possibility that somebody is getting access to your quality content without any kind of attribution whatsoever.
If they've stripped out all of the links and stripped out all of the names and all of the bylines, then your hard earned work is actually getting taken advantage of, even if Google isn't really the arbiter anymore of whether or not traffic gets to that article.
Internal links become syndicated links
Then on the flip side of it, if they don't remove the attribution, all the various internal links that you had in that article in the first place that point to other pages on your site, those now become syndicated links, which are part of the link schemes that Google has historically gone after.
In the same sort of situation, it's not really just about the intent behind the type of negative SEO campaign. It's the impact that it has on your data, because if somebody syndicates an article of yours that has let's say eight links to other internal pages and they syndicate it to 10,000 websites, well, then you've just got 80,000 new what should have been internal links, now external links pointing to your site.
We actually do know just a couple of years back several pretty strong brands got in trouble for syndicating their news content to other news websites. Now I'm not saying that negative SEO would necessarily trigger that same sort of penalty, but there's the possibility. Even if it doesn't trigger that penalty, chances are it's going to sully the waters in terms of your link data.
Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content
There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.
Nofollowed malware links in UGC
For example, if you have any kind of user-generated content on your site, like let's say you have comments for example, even if you nofollow those comments, the links that are included in there might point to things like malware.
We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.
Hacked content
Unfortunately, in some cases, there are ways to make it look like there are links on your site that aren't really under your control through things like HTML injection. For example, you can actually do this to Google right now.
You can inject HTML onto the page of part of their website that makes it look like they're linking to someone else. If Google actually crawled itself, which luckily they don't in this case, if they crawled that page and found that malware link, the whole domain in the Google search results would likely start to show that this site might not be safe.
Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
All of this really boils down to this concept of FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You see it's not so much about bowling you out of the search engines. It's about making it so that SEO just isn't workable anymore.
1. Lose access to critical data
Now it's been at least a decade since everybody started saying that they used data-driven SEO tactics, data-driven SEO strategies. Well, if your data is corrupted, if you lose access to critical data, you will not be able to make smart decisions. How will you know whether or not the reason your page has lost rankings to another has anything to do with links if you can't get to the link data that you need because it's been filled with 100,000 spammy links?
2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost
This leads to number two. It's impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost. It could be duplicate content. It could be an issue with these hundreds of thousands of links. It could be something completely different. But because the waters have been muddied so much, it makes it very difficult to determine exactly what's going on, and this of course then makes SEO less certain.
3. Makes SEO uncertain
The less certain it becomes, the more other advertising channels become valuable. Paid search becomes more valuable. Social media becomes more valuable. That's a problem if you're a search engine optimization agency or a consultant, because you have the real likelihood of losing clients because you can't make smart decisions for them anymore because their data has been damaged by negative SEO.
It would be really wonderful if Google would actually show us in Google Search Console what links they're ignoring and then would allow us to export only the ones they care about. But something tells me that that's probably beyond what Google is willing to share. So do we have any kind of way to fight back? There are a couple.
How do you fight back against negative SEO?
1. Canonical burn pages
Chances are if you've seen some of my other Whiteboard Fridays, you've heard me talk about canonical burn pages. Real simply, when you have an important page on your site that you intend to rank, you should create another version of it that is identical and that has a canonical link pointing back to the original. Any kind of link building that you do, you should point to that canonical page.
The reason is simple. If somebody does negative SEO, they're going to have two choices. They're either going to do it to the page that's getting linked to, or they're going to do it to the page that's getting ranked. Normally, they'll do it to the one that's getting ranked. Well, if they do, then you can get rid of that page and just hold on to the canonical burn page because it doesn't have any of these negative links.
Or if they choose the canonical burn page, you can get rid of that one and just keep your original page. Yes, it means you sacrifice the hard earned links that you acquired in the first place, but it's better than losing the possibility in the future altogether.
2. Embedded styled attribution
Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.
You can imagine that my content might say "Russ Jones says so and so and so and so." Well, imagine surrounding "Russ Jones" by H1 tags and then surrounding that by a span tag with a class that makes it so that the H1 tag that's under it is the normal-sized text.
Well, chances are if they're using one of these copied content techniques, they're not copying your CSS style sheet as well. When that gets published to all of these other sites, in giant, big letters it has your name or any other phrase that you really want. Now this isn't actually going to solve your problem, other than just really frustrate the hell out of whoever is trying to screw with you.
But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.
3. Link Lists
The third one, the one that I really recommend is Link Lists. This is a feature inside of Moz's Link Explorer, which allows you to track the links that are pointing to your site. As you get links, real links, good links, add them to a Link List, and that way you will always have a list of links that you know are good, that you can compare against the list of links that might be sullied by a negative SEO campaign.
By using the Link lists, you can discern the difference between what's actually being ignored by Google, at least to some degree, and what actually matters. I hope this is helpful to some degree. But unfortunately, I've got to say, at the end of the day, a sufficiently well-run negative SEO campaign can make the difference in whether or not you use SEO in the future at all.
It might not knock you out of Google, but it might make it so that other types of marketing are just better choices. So hopefully this has been some help. I'd love to talk you in the comments about different ways of dealing with negative SEO, like how to track down who is responsible. So just go ahead and fill those comments up with any questions or ideas.
I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.
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