SEO Fight Club – Episode 180 – SEO Q & A
SEO Fight Club / By
“Tinfoil Hat SEO: Pushing Boundaries & Google’s Humane Q4”
I largely agree that the terminology used when discussing SEO needs some clarity, and it can be confusing.
When you push new knowledge and SEO, you must wear a tinfoil hat in order to make discoveries.
Failing and looking ridiculous is part of pushing boundaries in SEO
– luckily Google has been relatively Humane this year with regards to their Q4 approach.
Google was likely not influenced by Ted’s predictions as they had done similar things prior using devops data before they changed how core updates are released.
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Unraveling The Mystery Of Historic Data
I’ve been advocating for a shake-up of historic data for the past three years, and it seems like my efforts have finally paid off.
Everyone is starting to call out the same issues I observed and this update will hopefully be in effect until January so small businesses can see results from Q-
If Google plays nice, we could potentially get more transparency about when their indexing or crawling is slow or offline.
It’s perplexing that pages can be indexed quicker than usual considering since February there have only been security patches which means maybe they’re scrambling to protect their Googlebot servers.
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“Chrome’s Security Fixes, Thanksgiving Algorithm Update And SEO Optimization”
-Recently Chrome released information about deprecated versions and security fixes
-There was chatter of a Thanksgiving holiday ranking algorithm update, but it looks like there wasn’t an official update
-Google advised to avoid technical errors and not to spam when optimizing SEO
-It’s important to remember that successful SEO is not necessarily based on the number of elements such as backlinks or keyword densities, but how they are implemented
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“Broaden Your SEO Horizons For Maximum Reach”
– It is important to consider the levers you have been neglecting and broaden your horizons when it comes to SEO.
– When doing a multi-channel marketing effort, it can increase organic search for brand keywords.
– A great tactic for ranking category pages is to include short descriptions of each product within the database on that page.
– Optimizing homepages should focus around brand name keywords, while category pages should be optimized for head terms that require product listings.
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“Link Juice, Product Pages, And Cannibalization: Maximizing Relevancy For SEO”
– Link juice used to flow through more than it does now, meaning homepages typically get the bulk of backlinks.
– Product pages often get little love from both direct links and homepages, which is why sometimes with as little as 25 referring domains you can outrank them in search results.
– Category Pages tend to rank better due to site-wide Authority coming into a finite number of category pages.
– To maximize product page relevancy, use lots of upselling widgets and carousels with entities and relevant keywords.
– Cannibalization is very real so try not to compete between a homepage, category page, or content page for one keyword.
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“Taming Cannibalization: Achieving Search Optimization Balance”
– RLs targeting the same keywords can cause your page to only appear in search 33% of the time
– Investing effort into on/off page tuning won’t be as effective until you fix ‘cannibalization’ issues
– Cannibalization isn’t always a bad thing, it helps keep warehouses efficient and agile by removing out of stock products from Google’s index quickly
– Have proof of over optimization? Reach out to Lee Witcher and the other people mentioned
– they’d love to review it!
