SEO Fight Club – Episode 157 – Google Update & Apple Search
SEO Fight Club / By
“Power Of Diversity: Google Update, Apple Search, And More On SEO Fight Club”
– Welcome to another episode of SEO Fight Club, where we discuss SEO topics and answer questions!
– We’re going to be talking about the Google update, as well as the anticipated Apple Search.
– Carolyn will be discussing mobile first indexing tests on her podcast this Friday morning
– so tune in!
– She also has a short daily YouTube update called ‘Crawl or No Crawl Report’ which needs 26 more subscribers
– so please support if you can!
– A look at Lee’s favorite data shows diversity, relevancy and authority are still playing an important role in successful ranking factors.
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“Google Update: Weather The Storm With Relevancy And Authority”
– It’s always been important to be in the top 200 of 2000 on Google searches.
– Tuning your website for factor deficits, relevancy, and authority is key to weathering an algorithm update by Google.
– Overinvesting in exact match and underinvesting in entities can cause pages to take a hit from updates.
– Clint Butler suggests any page that links to another is a backlink
– even if it’s internal linking
– could have caused some pages to drop recently, so checking internal and external links is important.
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“Searching For Apple’s Billion-Dollar Potential”
-I have recently been talking about rumors surrounding the Apple search engine.
-These rumors and speculation are not new, as they began in 2007 when iPhones were first released to the public.
-Our data to track keyword competitors comes from Core Shared Community which is accessed through Chorus Software.
-Apple’s failure to execute on this project for over a decade hints at them likely not taking it seriously or that we should expect a well thought out plan with an eye towards profitability if they do decide to move forward.
-Ahrefs recently launched their own search engine requiring only $60 million investment
– an amount that would be pocket change for Apple given their size today.
-Ultimately, if they did launch an engine I’d expect it would be of high quality with excellent branding since these are areas where Apple excels and doesn’t put its logo on just anything anymore like it may have done in the 80’s.
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“Beyond Google: Exploring Alternative Search Strategies”
-Google pays companies billions of dollars to be the default search engine, making it hard for other companies to compete.
-It’s worth considering if a company can do better than Google and if the resources are available before investing in developing another search engine.
-I researched HTML numbered list headings as a way to control text in search results summaries, which is becoming increasingly popular among CRO strategies.
-I found that when these lists are used with relevance they yield better rankings, plus work around certain historic filters that could block bad behavior.
-Additionally I observed volatility changes in meta descriptions since this strategy has become popular.
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“Regaining Control: Rank Well On Low Content Pages”
-I recently observed that Google has stopped their highly volatile split testing of search results summaries and titles.
-We have seen most of the results ranking within a position or two of each other, with occasional outliers.
-This new development offers an opportunity to regain some control over CRO since Google took away a lot previously.
-The lower boundary for thin pages should be revisited as SEO Fight Club’s website ranks despite its low content volume.
-It is possible for minimal effort, thin content on pages to rank well if done correctly
– this opens up possibilities for eCommerce category page optimization.
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“Ranking High With Thin Content: The Bing Indexing Dilemma”
– I’m a lazy writer, so trying to optimize content with 500 words instead of 1500 is awesome.
– Although it contradicts the standard practice, thin content pages still seem to rank pretty high.
– There must be some kind of metric involved that makes thin content rank so well and Lee’s training course touches on this.
– An issue many people have experienced is Bing indexing problems when using Cloudflare; contacting Bing support is the only way to solve this rather than switching any settings in Cloudflare.
