SEO Fight Club – Episode 158 – SEO News and Q & A
SEO Fight Club / By
“Going Down The Wrong Path: SEO Fight Club And The Mueller Quote”
– I recently watched an episode of SEO Fight Club and we discussed some news stories, did a Q&A, and discussed the podcast update.
– During this conversation, there was a John Mueller quote that suggested measurements should not be used in SEO. He implied money is better spent on content rather than using data to determine success.
– This idea goes against scientific method and reason which suggests paying big for content won’t always pay off due to Google’s ever changing algorithms.
– The only way to find if something works or doesn’t is by testing it out through data but based on my experiences with clients who had already tried going down the white hat route first resulted in expensive yet non ranking content.
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“SEO: The Risky Business Of Measurement”
– When John Mueller said that all metrics are bad, he was likely referring to a specific type or cluster of metrics and not all measurement in general.
– SEO is hard because people don’t measure; it’s impossible to know the future and predict which strategies will work.
– The stock market is like SEO in the sense you can’t always know which factors will be successful; spending big on content without research isn’t a smart strategy.
– Terry thought Mueller was referring to made up metrics companies use only for sales purposes, rather than actual algorithms that have been proven to work over time.
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“The Mystery Of Referring Domains: Uncovering SEO Benefits”
– Matt was inquiring about whether John included metrics from Search Console, which are exempt.
Google had a report on referring domains in the past, but they silently took away the report without giving much explanation.
This year I’ve been able to effectively use referring domains for minimum viable SEO with great results.
Though there are studies showing that hedge fund managers perform worse than chimps throwing darts at stocks on a wall, John Mueller may be referring to core web vitals instead.
Linking sites is still counted and considered when looking at targeted pages views.
Hosting content on CDN might not have any direct benefits for SEO though things can be done with CDNs that will benefit it; however edge SEO can lead to ranking boosts and more control over page speed performance and CRO
– both of which contribute positively to SEO.
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“301 Redirects: Unlocking SEO Benefits From Old Links”
– Tiered link building can have an SEO impact when done on a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Using CDNs can make page render time shorter, reduce bandwidth costs, and cut out unnecessary headers.
Core Web Vitals & Page Speed are important for SEO optimization
– having a fast website with helpful resources helps positively impact your search rankings.
301 redirects help to “resume benefit” from old backlinks that have been orphaned by web design updates
– It is important to use 301 redirects in order to correctly guide users to the new URLs while continuing to get credit from old links.
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“The Redirect Roadblock: Why Direct Links Are Preferable”
– Generally, when a link passes through an extra layer such as a redirect, it can lose between 15 to 30 percent of its value.
– This was something discussed during the Matt Cutts era, and there have been estimations that support this.
– It is logical to assume that a direct link will be more valued by Google than one going through via 301 redirects.
– Although John Mueller has not answered definitively why Google prefers links directly over 301s, it could be to conserve crawling resources.
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“Taming The SEO Beast: Tips From Google”
– John Mueller is trying to be helpful by suggesting that people don’t orphan their backlinks.
– 301s are lightweight and help identify the new URL for web browsers to request from the server.
– Planning out a proper URL structure upfront will give you the best SEO effects.
– Google will take nofollow links into advisement, however recently Twitter has stopped using nofollow which impacts SEO reporting as people may receive a boost in traffic value now.
