Rich Snippets Give Way to Knowledge Graph

SEO rich snippets used to be all about microdata and schema markup. Rise of mobile usage and voice searched changed that. By 2016, Google has dialed down eye catching insertions.  Results are more compact, mobile friendly and uniform looking. Rise of voice search is prompting Google, Siri, Echo, and automobiles to try to simply provide answers. Video thumbnails, author snippets, and long lists of local results are now replaced with Answer Boxes, Tables, Lists, Organization Knowledge Panels, and 3-pack local results.

JSON-LD vs. Microdata

Not only does the Google SERP look less fancy, but the way to get there is less fancy too! We used to do all kinds of content markup tricks to trigger rich snippets – hiding microdata in NOSCRIPT tags, meta tags, etc. Now Google recommends JSON-LD for schema, which is completely invisible from the user and separate from the content. JSON-LD is great for local SEO and getting your organization information, like logo, social profiles, images, phone number, etc to appear in a nice big Google Knowledge Panel. These most often appear for brand searches or when there are very few nearby competitors on a non-brand search.

Google Answer Boxes, Tables and Lists

After the brand search low hanging fruit of local SEO and organization markup is complete, the next tactic should be content marketing. Brands now think of themselves as publishers. The idea is to engage users who are self guiding through the conversion funnel. Content must cover the complete audience across a full spectrum of user segments and phases within the user journey.

A golden opportunity in SEO for content marketing is to be featured in Google search in an answer box, table or list. These are prominent and drive traffic. No markup is needed for these. Just be sure the page provides both the simple and complete answer to your user. Use standard HTML to provide tables and lists.  Google will recreate these in search results.

Brightedge provides guidelines to help get into Google quick answers, but here are the highlights.

1. Be ranked in the top 5 positions in search results
2. Have at least 1,000+ links to your domain
3. Have 1,500 – 2,000 words on a page
4. Have a low bounce rate from search
5. Include your target question in H1
6. Answer the question in the first paragraph

Voice Search and the Future of SEO

This video from Rand Fishkin gives an easy to understand and logical look at voice search and/or conversational search’s affect on SEO. Basically as voice search grows, traditional typed searches will continue to grow. Very simple answers will be addressed with direct answers, while more complicated results will require a user to click through to a website. This further supports the idea behind ensuring your content illustrates both know simple and know complete.

The post How Voice Search Effects Google Knowledge Graph appeared first on Blend SEO.

Here is my client’s question about H1 tags for SEO.

It turned out that there were loads of H1 tags in the headers added by the back-end team that were dinging us from an SEO perspective. Anyway, we just removed those tags in the global header which resolves this issue on thousands of pages.

Today however as I review this work I see that there are still many “<h1 class=“ tags on share.[client_website].com. Is H1 class a problem? Normally content classes should be immune to such things, but out of an abundance of caution I thought it might be a good idea to remove these as well. What do you think?

My Response Explains How H1 is used for SEO & Excessive H1 Tags

The class part of that tag is just for CSS styling purposes and has very little bearing on the bigger SEO concerns (unless you were using CSS to do something black hat, like stuffing an area with keyword spam and hiding it). If you are removing excessive H1, it doesn’t matter if it also has class=”name-of-the-class” or style=”whatever-styling-code” inside the H1 tag. By the way, your H1 tag will open with <h1 and close with >, and capitalization does not matter.

The idea behind removing excessive H1 is that a webpage is supposed to use H1 to code the main heading of text content, like a headline for an article. There is only supposed to be one H1 heading for each page. It is supposed to identify to the user what page they are on. It usually coordinates with the navigation that got them there and the title tag. Because those elements are used that way, search engines weight them highly in terms of understanding the theme of the page and what keywords the page should rank for. Back when basically all SEO was black-hat, people started using multiple H1 tags and stuffing them with keywords. In response, search engines started looking for excessive use of H1’s to help identify if a website is using keyword spam and should be penalized. But they also realize a lot of people are using multiple H1’s who aren’t trying to do anything black hat, but are just using an H1 several times on a page to identify different sections within the page (ideally, those would be tagged as H2). So you probably won’t get penalized unless you are accidentally doing something black hat.

My advice is not to get to hung up on how many H1 tags are used on a page, but at least make sure the first H1 tag has meaningful text.

You could definitely be leveraging your H1’s better.

Generally in a blog post, like this [URL omitted for client’s privacy], the title of the post would be the H1.

That webpage actually has six H1 tags, and this is what they each say…

1. Welcome
2. Your account has been created and you are signed in. Congratulations!
3. something went wrong
4. Your account has not been created
5. Archives
6. Add a Comment

How to Use H1 Tags for SEO

I recommend changing the template so that you have a post title using H1, followed by the author by-line using H2. So you would make the title of the post H1, move the name of the blog below the post title and make it an H2, and make the author name an H2. You can insert words in the template, like “by” and “in”, so the user understands the context and use CSS classes in the H2 to make sure they are styled the way you want them to look. It might look like this.

[Title of Post Omitted for Client’s Privacy]

By [author] in [name of blog] Aug 22, 2014 7:55 AM

Or you could do the by-line as all one H2 tag using <span class=”name-of-CSS-class”> tags inside it to bold/color the author name and blog name. Your span tags would wrap around just the author and just the blog name inside the H2, which wraps around the entire by-line. And by the way, it’s nice to use a standard by-line because Google specifically looks for it and makes it clickable in search results if the author has a Google+ account (but that’s a whole other strategy we could talk about).

If you click the name of the blog and to view the full blog [blog name omitted for client privacy], I would make the name of the blog an H1 and the name of each post an H2. She only has one post, but others I saw show a long list of their posts listed, so there would be multiple H2’s that make sense for the page.

That just covers 2 pages within your blog template. I usually include steps in our SEO plans to review and give technical SEO recommendations like this for the architecture of each different part of a website (like forums, galleries, news, ecommerce, etc).

Thanks for the question, I love digging into this kind of stuff! Let me know if my response makes sense.

The post How are H1 Tags Used for SEO? Are Excessive H1’s Really Bad? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Search Engine Optimization consulting question:

On the [webpage being optimized], in the 4th paragraph beginning …

Only you know if it’s a good time …

You wanted us to make the remainder beginning “commit to …” a link to [a related webpage]. That portion that’s the link becomes a different size than the first part, and as it is now looks “clunky.”  Since you asked us to do that, we also added the right-hand column with the 4 buttons. The top button goes to the same destination.

Question – can we then remove that portion of Para #3 that’s a link and let the added button suffice?

Do the spiders find the links behind the buttons?

Search Engine Optimization consulting answer:

It would be ideal for SEO to keep the link.  We can provide the HTML code for style so it looks the way you want.

Here is the explanation for why…

Why Keyword Text Links Help SEO

Spiders do find the links behind the buttons, however, there is added value creating links using the words within paragraphs.  When those words link to another page, it tells the search engine what that page is about.  So when you make a text link that includes the keyword “business development” to your Registration page, it sends the signal to Google that your Registration page is about “business development”…and should rank when people search for that term.  The reason it is important to use links within paragraphs, is that the other words surrounding the link also are read by Google and it teaches Google that those nearby words are also related to the page where the link goes.  This helps you rank for a wider variety of keywords.

On another level, it also tells Google there is a connection between the two pages.  In this way, the optimization and content on one page adds a little more depth and optimization to the other page.  If we know that a group of pages on your website are related, we want to create a web work of links between those related pages.  This shows Google that you not only have one page relevant to a keyword search, but a group of pages, which makes you a better resource on the subject matter of that keyword, and therefore a better website to list in the rankings for that keyword.

SEO Means Helping Google Create a Better Experience

Google knows that if it sends a visitor to a webpage where there are links to related pages, if that visitor does not see what he wants right away, he is more likely to read and click around to find what he wants, compared to if Google sends that visitor to one page with very few links, if he doesn’t see what he wants, he’s more likely decide he is unsatisfied with where Google sent him and hit the back button – resulting in a dissatisfied Google experience.  In this way, interlinking within related pages, especially using links right in the main content area where people read, makes you more desirable for Google to rank in search results.

The post Search Engine Optimization Consultant Question: Do Text Links in Paragraphs Help SEO? appeared first on Blend SEO.

What’s Wrong with HTML 5, Microdata and Schema.org?

After reading the article, here are the main points Keery Dean makes against HTML 5 microdata tags using Schema.org vocabulary on your website.  People can simply go overboard and tag every possible thing on a webpage. This would cause code bloat and eventually nullify the effectiveness granted by search engines due to overuse.

Well, here’s the thing.  Overusing any type of tag is basically SPAM.

As website SEO professionals, we have to be sensible, practical and strategic.  Every SEO consultant should be able to spout off the known types of on-page SEO SPAM.  The oldest forms of SPAM mainly boil down to excessive use of keywords, A.K.A keyword stuffing.  The goal of over optimization of a website, being to game the search engine algorithm, tends to create poor user experience.  This is contrary to the search engine goal, which is to provide high quality user experience search results.  With the emergence of new technology, it is in our best interest to apply the principles of SEO best practices.  Microdata is a tool.  Use it when it makes sense.  Use it strategically, when needed.  Otherwise, as Kerry Dean points out, it becomes useless code bloat.

Strategic Use of Microdata and Schema.org for SEO

So far, my use of schema.org for website SEO and development has only been two fold:

1. an effort to label and specify something that I can’t get into Google otherwise
2. to create rich snippets based on what Google already includes in its Webmaster Guidelines

Local SEO

I made an attempt to get about a couple dozen Caribbean resorts accurately located in Google maps.  The problem is you can’t verify them, because Google doesn’t support business owner verification in those countries yet.  None of the feed providers like Localeze or Acxiom support these countries either. For the most part, the resorts in the Caribbean don’t even have street addresses.  They just have PO boxes.  Based on PO boxes, Google Maps tends to place the locations on the post office – which is generally inland, not on the beach where the resort is located.  So I set up unverified locations where you can recognize the buildings and resort logos in the pools from satellite view.  However, other Google map users would edit things and change what I put in, even though I know my information is correct because it came straight from the owner (or rather corporate or hotel managers on location).  The funny thing is, after fighting a little with the tide of other Google users moving things around, I noticed that Google Maps takes its cues for the location more from other online resources than from where Google Map Maker users place it.  Moving forward, my strategy is to use microdata tags with schema.org vocabulary, including longitude and latitude coordinates to indicate the resort location on the homepage for each resort.

Example of microdata marked up organization location that might appear in a footer under the copyright:

Rich Snippets

My other use of schema.org vocabulary purely overlaps with what Google already was supporting in the way of rich snippets.  Except now, if Google guidelines give a choice between microformats, search monkey, Hcard, etc and microdata… I go with microdata.  My goal for this is purely conversion.  Make the existing listing and big and full as possible.  It stands to reason, if you take up more visual space with your listing on the Google result page, you’ll get more clicks.  Just because it’s bigger.   I’m also in the process of experimenting with getting bullet point lists inserted in Google SERPs.

The post How to Use Schema.org and Microdata for Website SEO without SPAMMING appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google, Bing and Yahoo cracked down hard on duplicate content starting December 2010.  Penalties hit hardest on February 24, 2011 in the Google Panda algorithm update.  Bing and Yahoo rankings followed suite.

How To: The SEO Tools and Process to Address Duplicate Content

Comparison SEO Tool

An SEO services client with which we work has developed multiple websites for different brands, but the client recycled the content.  Instead of writing 100% unique text for each website, paragraphs and sometimes whole pages were used universally across multiple websites.  They were getting away without noticeable revenue loss, so despite existing duplicate content penalties (though not actual penalties – more accurately wasting crawl budget and possibly dividing link juice) on interior entry pages, the client decided it was not a big enough priority to rewrite all the content … until now.

February search engine algorithm updates penalized entire websites that have pages similar to any other site that the search engine credits as the originator. Even if words are rearranged and the brand name is switched out, the Google algorithm is not fooled.  Google chooses one website as the originator and penalizes the others.

In late 2010, various rankings started to slip.  On February 24th, clients with duplicate or similar content across different websites saw a total drop off for #1 ranked keyword phrases.   Google guidelines for duplicate content indicate that the algorithm perceives these similar pages as  “deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic“.

By the way, these guidelines were [initially] updated March 20, 2011, less than a month after the [first] Panda algorithm update.

Systematic Process of Identifying and Addressing Duplicate Pages

If you are intimately familiar with your websites, like this search engine optimization consultant is, you already know which pages are similar and possibly causing duplicate content penalties. If you are an SEO agency taking on a new client with duplicate content issues, leaving it up to you to figure out where the duplicates are within their online properties, then you may need a few SEO tools to help identify possible duplicate pages.

UPDATES: Google Panda Filter Dates

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about  4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.51: October 9, 2011 (minor filter update about 2 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.52: October 13, 2011 (minor filter update)
• Panda Update 3.0: October 19, 2011 (3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.1: November 18, 2011 (3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.2: January 18, 2012 (8 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.3: February 28, 2012 (refresh to update index 6 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.4: March 23, 2012 (refresh to update index 3.5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.5: April 19, 2012 (refresh to update index 4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.6: April 27, 2012 (refresh to update index 8 days later)
• This has become crazy to update.  Just check the SEOMoz Google Algorithm Change History.

To determine if your website fell victim to a Panda filter, check your traffic.  Panda “penalizes” your website by dropping your rankings, not just on pages with duplicate or thin content, but universally across your website – including your homepage.  If you were hit by the Panda Filter, you will see a significant traffic drop on one of the dates above.  Subsequently, if you address the issue, your traffic should be adjusted the next time the Panda filter runs.  Each time the filter runs, it updates the Google index.

Update: February and March 2012 updates were merely when the Panda Filter was run again in order to refresh the Google index, so that changes made to websites will be reflected in Google.  In other words, if you implemented fixes to get out of the Panda Filter before February 28 or March 23, you can check traffic at those dates to see if your fixes did the trick.

Identify Duplicate Content

This paid tool makes your process simple, but costs money. Copyscape is a tool for finding copyright and plagiarism offenders.  Since Google generally penalizes the copier and not the original author, plagiarism is not an SEO issue.  For this reason CopyScape is not a regular part of the SEO arsenal of tools.  Don’t ask me why as an SEO I even know about it, but I’ve known about it for years (guess that’s part of the multidisciplinary Blend SEO approach).

The process to identifying duplicate pages is, using the paid version called CopySentry, you can feed it your non-penalized website and let it find the duplicate content out there amidst your penalized websites.

Using free tools takes a little more time and effort.  Download and install A1 Sitemap Generator, a great sitemap generator program with a fully functional free 30 day trial.

1. Run a scan of your penalized website.  It will generate a list of pages of the website, ignoring those blocked by robots.txt, following any redirects or canonical tags – meaning you have a list of webpages that spiders crawl.
2. Among the sitemap output choices, you can create a text file list of page URLs with each URL on a separate line.
3. Paste this list into excel and start your search for duplicate content.  Use your intuition and Google to check blocks of text.  If a different website ranks number one for any block of text, that website is credited as the originator.  Mark this URL and the originator URL.

Test or Check Duplicate Content

Once you have a list of pages from your penalized website and their counterpart on the originator website, you will want to check their similarity.  Are they similar enough to require a rewrite?  Run the URLs through a webpage comparison or duplicate content checker tool.  After you go through several pages between two sites, you will eventually get a feel for where the cut-off is for rewrite verses no rewrite.  Any pages with similarity higher than your cut-off require a writer to take a look for the duplicate or similar language.  Similar content on the penalized website must be completely rewritten.

Update: Unfortunately, my favorite duplicate content diagnostic tool has been abandoned.

This first similarity tool is my favorite.  Some only give a single percentage, letting you wonder how much of that similarity is due to non-visible code.  This tool tells you, without inundating you with too much information.  There’s no captcha, so checking through your list is quick.  I embedded the form below, so you can try it here.

Duplicate Content Check

This next tool, embedded below simply gives you a single percentage.  Depending on the template between your penalized and originator websites, the number you get will seem pretty low.  My cut-off with this tool was about 10%.  Anything over 10%, required a copywriter to rewrite the page or at least a section of the page.

This comparison SEO tool by SEO Book compares the page titles, meta information, and common phrases occurring on different pages.

Here are several more alternatives you can try.

• http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/duplicate-content-checker.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://utext.rikuz.com/en/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/duplicate-page-finder.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/site-comparison.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
• http://www.seomastering.com/similar-text-checker.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

The post SEO Tools & Process to Fix Google Panda Penalty appeared first on Blend SEO.

How the Demand Media Content Farm Works

If you are in the SEO business or work with a search engine optimization consultant, you’ve heard about the recent Google algorithm shift known as the Panda Algorithm update, Farmer update, or Content Farm update.

The big break on the story is in an interview between Cutts and Singhal of Google with Wired Magazine.

Here are the major take-aways as of now.

Little has been said about link farms.  The main issue seems to be your content, as apposed to your back links.  Scraper websites are those that automate content by republishing that which is already on other websites.  Content farms generate content with little value in order to capture search traffic.  Take a look at the info graphic about how the Demand Media content farm works [Image Source].

This is not a new issue.  Apparently, Google’s technology on how they filter, analyze and make decisions on duplicate content has changed.  As far as white-hat SEO, the rules are still the same.  The penalties just got a bit more serious.

Some of my SEO client sites, despite warnings about duplicate content still don’t realize they have significant duplicate content.  A new SEO business client who owns hundreds of domains was pointing different domains to the same webserver, serving the exact same website – same IP address and everything. Only the website domain credited as the originator will sustain rankings.

In other situations, the same text copy is used on several pages of a sister company websites under different brands.  It used to be that the duplicate pages from these re-branded websites would not rank.  Now the entire site is losing overall rankings.

This kind of thing means they are due for copy writing frenzy.  Find the offending pages – those that use the same copy from other sites and rewrite them as unique.

You can post your new page of copy on a live test bed site and check how similar it is to the other page using this tool.

[Update: March 31, 2011]

My update to this article, along with in depth background on the history of the biggest search engine algorithm changes was posted today on the Medium Blue blog.  I provide search engine optimization research and development for Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing.

The post Panda Content Farm Google Algorithm Update and Duplicate Content appeared first on Blend SEO.

The usual answer is… 301 redirect the old website to the new website.

But How Exactly?

Here’s the problem that always happens.  They end up redirecting the homepage from the old website to the homepage of the new website.  But what about all the interior pages?  There may be hundreds of back links to interior pages that get completely wasted as soon as the old website is deleted.  If you are hosting on a Microsoft IIs server, you may be limited without installing ISAPI or some other rewrite module. However, if you are hosting on an Apache server, the .htaccess file gives you an extremely flexible means of handling redirects.

There are a few options to address redirects, depending on your situation for the old domain to new domain transition:

1. If the two sites are different, ideally, you would redirect each interior page of the old site to a relevant interior page of the new site.  In the .htaccess file of the old site, you would specify the old page (using a relative path) and the new page (using an absolute path).  Here is the code to redirect one page to another individual page.Redirect 301 /old-page http://new-domain.com/new-page?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
2. If you are just changing the domain name and keeping the same folder structure, you can just redirect every page of the old domain to the same path on the new domain.  Here’s the.htaccess code for that.Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
3. If  the sites are different and there is no way to identify relevant pages for a one to one page comparison or if comparing every page of each site is simply not feasible or cost effective, you can use a wildcard in the .htaccess to simply redirect all the interior pages of the old site to the homepage of the new domain and a separate line to 301 redirect the old website to the new domain.  Here is the code for that.

RewritEngine On
RewriteRule . http://www.newdomain.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss [R=301,L,NC]
Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

.htaccess Redirect Best Practices

301 Redirect non-www to www

Generally any page of a website is accessible by typing the URL into your browser without “www” and with “www”.  For example http://website.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and http://www.website.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss will serve the same page.  Any link to a non-www URL that a spider finds, will lead that spider to crawl the entire website using non-www for every page.  This assumes you are using relative paths in your navigation, which most CMS and web developers do.  The search engine is thus crawling your site twice, doubling the task for the crawler.  Now understand that search engine spiders have a limited crawl budget for each website.  Google uses PageRank to determine how deep to crawl your website.  If you look at crawl stats, you will see that your entire site does not get crawled each time the bot visits.  If the bot must crawl through two versions of your website, you basically doubled its work.  Later, the search engine algorithm will analyze the content, identify duplicate pages and determine which ones take priority over the others.

But why make extra work for the search engine?

If you want to optimize your website for search engines, than cut out this extra work for the crawler and algorithm.  Don’t let the crawler find the non-www version of your website.  The server URL rewrite that returns a 301 code will not allow the search engine crawler bot (or humans) to access any non-www URL pages of your website. This is an old standard SEO best practice for reducing duplicate content issues.

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss [L,R=301]

.htaccess Language – Apache Server Configuration Directives

There is a lot more you can do with .htaccess code that will affect SEO.  The below SEO .htaccess tips and more in depth background for creating your own Apache server directives can be found at http://www.corz.org?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.  Many  of these use regular expressions, or regexes that are explained very well at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.

Escaping:

\      char escape that particular char

For instance to specify special characters.. [].()\ etc.

Text:

.                 Any single character  (on its own = the entire URI)
[chars]       Character class: One of following chars
[^chars]      Character class: None of following chars
text1|text2    Alternative: text1 or text2 (i.e. “or”)

e.g. [^/] matches any character except /
(foo|bar)\.html matches foo.html and bar.html

Quantifiers:

?      0 or 1 of the preceding text
*      0 or N of the preceding text  (hungry)
+      1 or N of the preceding text

e.g. (.+)\.html? matches foo.htm and foo.html
(foo)?bar\.html matches bar.html and foobar.html

Grouping:

(text)     Grouping of text

Either to set the borders of an alternative or for making back references where the nthe group can be used on the target of a RewriteRule with $n

e.g.  ^(.*)\.html foo.php?bar=$1

Anchors:

^      Start of line anchor
$      End   of line anchor

An anchor explicitly states that the character right next to it MUST be either the very first character (“^”), or the very last character (“$”) of the URI string to match against the pattern, e.g..

^foo(.*)   matches foo and foobar but not eggfoo
(.*)l$   matches fool and cool, but not foo

The post Using .htaccess file for 301 redirects and URL rewrites appeared first on Blend SEO.

If you already know what keywords and phrases for which you want to rank, then the task is to reverse engineer those sites that rank at the top of the SERPs for your chosen keyword phrase.

This keyword density tool allows you to compare your keyword density of a phrase on your webpage against your competitor’s page who ranks above you.

However, beware of keyword stuffing…

Keyword stuffing can trigger an over-optimization penalty.  The text should read naturally.  There is no rule for what percent of density is ideal.  Compare your density to that of the webpages that rank at the top for your target keyword phrase.  This will give you an acceptable range.

You can also use this keyword density cloud SEO tool to get a feel for unnatural keyword density.

Once you have competitive on-page SEO factors, you can switch your focus to off-page to link building.

The post How to Out Rank Your Competitors Using Keyword Density appeared first on Blend SEO.