SEO Fight Club – Episode 167 – Helpful Content Update Discussion and Q & A
SEO Fight Club / By
“SEO Fight Club: Is The Google ‘Helpful Content’ Update As Helpful As We Thought?”
– During our recent SEO Fight Club we discussed the Google “Helpful Content” update
– We haven’t seen any significant difference in ranking post update, leading us to conclude that it may not be as impactful as once thought.
– Others have had anecdotal evidence of rankings going up and down but this is normal during no updates.
– While Google said the update would take weeks or months to get affected by, it is questionable if after 6 months someone can connect bad behavior with punishment.
– The purpose behind this slow rollout could likely be targeting bad content flooding the primary index which would be content Google doesn’t care about recovering and big sites most likely will see the biggest effect from being targeted first.
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“Separating The Wheat From The Chaff: How To Evaluate Websites”
– Google has recently announced that they have their eyes on site-wide metrics, and this got me thinking about how one would determine a good website from a bad one.
– One way could be by looking at the overall traffic for the site
– if there are many pages but low user engagement it indicates that the content is likely poor quality.
– Another example of something to look out for is when domains take up a large portion of primary index, yet rank poorly
– these can easily be targeted and taken out in order to diminish the size of primary index.
– We need to be careful with targeting low traffic websites though; there is often obscure information which deserves ranking despite its lack of search engine visibility.
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“Rewarding Quality Content In The Digital Age”
– Quality content should not be punished by the system.
– My content is all quality and differs from web spam.
– Google recently released a new score that needed to be optimized for, which resulted in people cleaning up their websites and deleting junk off of them.
– Some local businesses don’t even update their website or have an SEO strategy, so they would take longer to see any changes in results.
– Pages with poor scores can be kicked out of search engine indices easily if certain criteria are not met, like interlinking pages together.
– If a page isn’t given enough attention to link it within a website then it won’t rank well either or get indexed at all
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“The Affiliate Game: How To Succeed In A Google-Guided World”
– I learned that if you’re building a website of around 20,000
– 30,000 pages, and you interlink the pages with content focused on keyword density, your score likely won’t be low.
– We discussed an update from January that targeted affiliate sites but not all of them; we weren’t able to get any definitive information about why or how it was selective in its targeting.
– Google has had the same talking points for years about offering unique value and avoiding simply copying product information.
– To play it safe, it’s best to cloak affiliate links so as to make it expensive for google to apply bias against them if they decide too at some point.
– The most successful sites are ones that offer unique value beyond simple product information which prevents duplicate content issues from arising.
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“Rewriting Manufacturer Data For Optimal Affiliate SEO Performance”
– SEO works best with unique content, rather than duplicate manufacturer product information that often leads to a backlink war.
– Google is likely continuing to move towards taking over in the affiliate marketing space and searching for lazy use of the same product description or information.
– Experimenting with AI tools in order to rewrite manufacturer data can be beneficial when working on Affiliate SEO efforts.
– Changing perspective and pretending you own the product can help draw more attention from potential customers and buyers.
– Over optimizing internal links will eventually reach a point where additional anchors won’t have any effect; entities or variations should be explored after hitting this point for maximum effort efficiency.
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“Affiliate Link Cloaking: Staying In The Clear”
– Google may have implemented the helpful content update as a way to reduce their index size
– There are many tools available for cloaking affiliate links, including redirects and URL shorteners
– It is important to remain aware of the rules of your affiliate program when deploying any kind of link cloaking
– Manual penalties for misusing structured data have not been used in some time
