Episode 516: 2021 Google Algorithm Updates #516

And welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram, the lead digital strategist at EWR Digital. And one of the owners here at EWR Digital. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 516. You may have noticed that this is one week after the podcast 515. We're getting back on track. We recognize that you guys are interested in getting the value of our podcast. And we're really carving out the time, is probably the right word, like carving out the time from the kind of hectic schedules to make sure that we're bringing you real and good content. For some of those who may have been listening for a long time, before I do that, I actually don't have a review to cover this time. So we're going to spend just a moment and it will be just a moment saying, hey, leave us a review. We really would appreciate a review. We hope that review would be five stars. And the way you can leave us a review is go to EWRDigital.com forward slash review, not reviews, but review. That'll take you to our GM, our Google business page. And then you can also go one second, also go to Facebook.com forward slash best SEO podcast. So we actually do have a review, but it's a video review and I needed to load it into the software prior to that. So did a strategy session last week and use protestimonial.com to get a review after that. So I have that. What is that? What is protestimonial.com? I've only heard of it here on the podcast. Yeah, no, it's a video testimonial service. We really got it going in the midst of COVID when our video crews got shut down. No one wanted to interact with anybody outside their kind of vacuum or bubble when that was happening. And really you do need video testimonials on your website and there's nothing better than

a recorded video testimonial to capture it in an affordable way than pro testimonial. There's some updates and things that were added to it. And a lot of our clients have been using it successfully. And so I just built it into our review process and did a consulting session and got a review. I just needed to upload the clip to this so we could have played it. So we'll have to do that maybe next time. So option A, find a crew, hire a crew, send a crew to one location to get one review video. Option B, protestimonial.com, send them a link. They can use their phone. They don't even need to download an app, just their phone. They can use their camera on their laptop or on their computer. And boom, you've got your video review. You can add intros, extras easily to that particular review right in the software. It really is pretty easy. Yeah. I mean, it's fantastic. I think, I don't know if it's 20 times cheaper than sending a video crew on average. Maybe a lot more cheaper than that relevant to sending a crew. Yeah. So it's a fantastic option. If you have a website that you have text reviews on and you really need to be going into search console, looking at your click-through rate, your conversion rates, you can use other tools to find that out. But what I can tell you and guarantee you is that if you do use video testimonials on your website, your click-through rate on those pages and your conversion rate will be a lot higher. Yeah. Substantially higher. All right. So we should add the link to that. We'll make a link, ewrdigital.com, just so people can remember it, forward slash, I don't know, video review and have it forward to our testimonial video. So go ahead and check that out. We'll have it done by the time this airs, except this is airing live. So it's not done right now. If you're listening to this on iTunes or Spotify or something like

that. So I'm going to make a note of that video. What did we say? Video review? Yeah. ewrdigital.com, forward slash, video review. And that'll work. All right. So what are we covering today? For those people who have been listening to the podcast for a really long time, you may remember a segment called Algorithm Categorism. We didn't get that one down right. We haven't done that in a while. And that section was because Google would really announce very kind of finite and very specific algorithm updates on a fairly regular basis. Inconsistent in terms of like, it wasn't every three weeks or whatever, but it did happen fairly regularly. And then really they transitioned to a style or a process where they're releasing stuff like almost immediately. And when they do that, then, you know, there's, there's a lot less time for, I'm trying to find the, the... Well, they, they give us head, they, they give you heads up. I mean, they give you like, they probably give you like two years heads up and then probably a couple of months. And then, you know, you can see the stuff in the patents. So they try to give you ample warning. But they didn't release like four in a month. They, you know, you could kind of, you look at the variables, see what changed, but now they're hitting you with them all at once. And so, you know, it's hard to triangulate what's causing, you know, whatever's happening in the rankings, because there's multiple factors that you have to look at. And, you know, a lot of like, you know, I know we're going to get into it, but a lot of big things that are changing is really around how the AI and Google views search intent, right? Like what is the intent of the search? And that's the basis for, for a lot of this stuff. And we'll, we'll go into that. So, so, so really this is just going to be one algorithm cataclysm episode. Just to give you a perspective in

2020, there were four kind of noteworthy or newsworthy updates in 2021, nine already, right? And we're, you know, we're in August. So before we get started, Google has said that some sites may lose positions, not because they did something bad, but because the algorithm's judgment of what is relevant has changed. And I think Matt has a good example of that. Many times Google's updates, updates change how Google understands what queries and or web pages mean. That can result in a different, in different sites moving up, sites that conform to the algorithm's new understanding of what a user is looking for when they make a particular search query. So it's not like we work, you know, you often, when you're talking about algorithm updates, you're like, oh, my site got dinged. It's not that it got dinged and it may not even have been anything technical. It may just be that the consumer's utilization of the search you were targeting has shifted dramatically. And I think, I think you have like an example. Well, I have a couple of examples. You know, I'll give you maybe three different examples so you can kind of understand what I'm talking about. One is office furniture based since COVID user intense change. So people are now looking for home office furniture, used office furniture over like corporate office furniture, right? That that's a big shift in buyer behavior and search intent of what people are searching for. Also, I do believe there's kind of an update coming. They're talking about where they're merging images with text, right? So if you're merging images with text, let's say like home remodeling. If people are looking for home remodeling in a specific state, Google wants to see pictures of home remodeling in that state, Google is looking at the weighting of original content, original images. And if people are going to be searching for, let's say, home furnishings or home remodeling. And they want you to put contractor or vendor or company or something like that on that modifier. So people know

exactly what you're looking for. But if you're looking for pictures, just imagine if search with videos and text were combined, right? And if you do that, that's going to determine how you search. So I think that they're kind of prepping for this a little bit. I can also tell you that Google was viewing things differently. We had a client that was ranking for a number of terms that we actually didn't have that word on the page, but Google understood by the association. Well, I think they fed into this algorithm some new data sets to learn from. And so those keywords weren't on the page and they dropped. And what was interesting is the rankings that they moved up for, this was a hard money lender for real estate and anything related to real estate and lending shot up to top three for this client. But hard money lender in general, that could go to a lot of different things, not specific to real estate. They dropped it. Does that make sense? And so Google is getting a lot more precise on what is the intentionality of that search of what people are looking for when they find that. And that's having a lot to do with how the content's laid out on the page and what's the quality of the content on the page and what's the behavior that someone's looking for when they go. And so we can get lost in a lot of the different technical components of SEO when it goes all the way back to content really is what the bigger issue is. I think the BERT update, I think that the machine learning of how natural language processing, I think all that stuff is starting to come to a head right now. That makes sense. All right. So I mentioned there were four updates in 2020. We're not going to cover the 2020 updates. There's nine in 2021. And so we're going to jump into these. There were, I don't know, four or five in June. So we're going to

lump June and maybe the beginning of July together. But let's jump into this, right? So the first change that was of note in 2021 was February 10th and it was passage ranking. So Google publicly is on for search Danny Sullivan. And you may remember, by the way, this article was published in search engine journal. He's one of the co-founders of search engine journal. I thought it is it searching your land or was it searching? Oh, no, you're right. He was co-founder of search engine land and this is published in search engine journals. Interesting. I just assumed it was the way I said it and it actually wasn't. You're right. Yeah. He is co-founder of search engine land. This happened to be published in search engine journal. And what he said on February 10th is that they've got this new change. It was a passage ranking is officially launched. This change doesn't mean we're indexing individual passages independent of pages. We are still indexing pages and considering info about entire pages for ranking. But now we can also consider passages from pages as an additional ranking factor. Yeah. I mean, uh, to break this down, um, you know, if, if you're create, if, if, if there's an anchor text link, uh, that's going to your site, uh, Google's looking at what's going on in that sentence, um, is target keywords. How close is it to that link? How is it in that passage or paragraph? And so they're, they're, they're waiting the contextual basis around these links and not just the links themselves. So. Makes sense. And that was February 10th, uh, on April 8th, it was the product reviews update, uh, designing, and it was designed to reward product reviews that share in-depth research rather than then content that simply summarizes a bunch of products. Uh, Google also shared nine useful questions, uh, and we actually have those questions, nine useful questions to consider when creating and publishing product reviews. So one of them is, um, express expert knowledge about products where appropriate. Next is

show what the product is like physically or how it is used with unique content beyond what's provided by the manufacturer. We have talked on, on almost every podcast where we talk about e-commerce that you don't want to just copy paste the manufacturer's descriptions and texts and everything. Uh, you want to actually come up with your own content. Uh, next provide quantitative measurements about how a product measures up in various categories of performance. Explain what sets a product apart from its competitors, cover comparable products to consider or explain when products might be best for certain uses or circumstances, discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a particular product based on research into it. By the way, these, these all make perfect sense. And if you were to kind of pull yourself back and say, hey, I'm going to do a review site, uh, or I I'm going to go find a review site and I hope the review site is useful. It would address all of these issues if it was useful. So just keep that in mind. Again, it goes back to, uh, as long as you're providing a good experience to the Google user, Google will like you. Um, next describe how our product has evolved from previous models and releases to provide improvements, address issues, or otherwise help users and making a purchase decision. Should I buy the newest version or an older version? Identify key decision-making factors for the product's category and how the product performs in those areas. For example, a car review might determine that fuel economy safety and handling are key decision-making factors and rate performance in those areas. And then finally describe key choices and how a product has been designed and their effect on the users beyond what the manufacturer says, right? So the manufacturer is going to paint a really pretty picture about its product. And again, this goes into, I think it's kind of like actually do a review, actually like test the product, uh, engage with the product and competitive products, and then write your

opinion about that. I think that's really what that's Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are cutting and pasting manufacturer renderings or images with, uh, manufacturing texts and there's nothing original there. And customers are, or potential customers are looking for information to help that make them a decision. And they're typically going to probably buy from, uh, you know, when there's alignment of what they're looking for in that review attached to that product. Um, and Google wants to reward that original content by ranking higher. It makes perfect sense. Yep. All right. So, uh, that's about the product reviews update. Uh, next is the first one in June. Like I said, we're going to kind of lump these out. We'll go through these pretty quickly. Matt might interrupt, which is fine, uh, on, on any particular subject he wants to bring up. First, June 2nd was a broad core algorithm update announced by Danny Sullivan. June 10th, my birthday, uh, known victims protection. Uh, hopefully that wasn't in honor of my birthday, basically in it. Uh, uh, and this is Pandu actually re, uh, released this. Uh, he discusses Google's work towards improving the algorithm to demote sites that employ exploitative removal practices. Yeah. Predatory practices. He also shared a link people can use to report online harassment. Yeah. I think that that's really, uh, not affecting a lot of people. Um, I think it's, it's certainly, uh, something that they're targeting specific, um, type of websites or, um, content online. I think all the social media sites are going after certain things, uh, and they're working together to do that. I think that this is something related to that, but overall, uh, the general updates have like, it's not going to affect you unless you're in that specific niche. So, yep. Yep. And then the next update was June 15th, just five days later. Uh, this was a page experience update. Uh, Google confirms it's long awaited page experience update has started rolling out. Uh, and they say that any sudden drops or spikes

should be mitigated by the gradual rollout process, which doesn't really like, doesn't set anyone who's kind of watching their position. Oh, don't worry. You're not going to drop from position three to page three overnight. It's going to take a while. Yeah. Yeah. And Google says you haven't done anything wrong if that's happening. Right. Um, I think that, uh, this is more, uh, more or less a speed update is, is, is the main thing, but core web vitals, you need to be in search console. You need to see what's going on in there. Um, yeah, I can talk more about that, uh, on another update, but, but this is a really a speed update more than anything else. I think some of the things you need to be thinking about is, um, you know, basic things like, are you putting things in the header that you could put in the footer from a, from a load time? Uh, what are you doing above the fold? Uh, I mean, they rolled back up amp like amp was a big requirement. Um, but it's basically amp stripped away all the styling or, or contextual stuff and people didn't really like that. Um, and so it needs to be a good, a good balance, but the less code, the less JavaScript that you have, uh, increasing the, the load time, maybe some server side caching. Actually, uh, I recently had an article in search engine journal about this. I'll have to share that link where from an enterprise standpoint, uh, all the things you really need to look at, uh, speed wise, cause you know, one second load time could cost you a ton of money for these big enterprise or e-commerce sites. Uh, especially depending on where your competition is, you have to be competitive. There's things that you really need to do. We've even launched a specific hosting company to support, uh, this infrastructure build out as well as, uh, SEO hosting cohost. Um, but you know, bottom line is this is a speed update and you

need to really be thinking about how heavy the site is, how many plugins you're using, you know, all the things that could slow down your site, uh, you know, $9 hosting is maybe not going to work. You know what I mean? Like if you're running a business, uh, one of the big things not to go off on a tangent or get up on a soap box, but like web infrastructure security is so important and having sites that are managed is so important. We recently brought on a client that was paying to be on a dedicated server, which is great. Uh, but their site was not managed. And when we brought them over, we had to quarantine the site and clean up all kinds of stuff. So they correct, they were collecting and I won't disclose who it is credit card information. And they had all kinds of malicious malware on that site. Okay. And so think about all the sites out there. If it's not one of those big enterprise consumers, are they maintaining their site? What could be happening on the links or the images or the videos you click on? What could be embedded in the code? I mean, website security, phone security, like there's hacks have gone through the roof, like identity security theft has gone through the roof. You know, if you're maintaining customer information, whether it's customer information or it's credit card information, you need to make sure that that's secured and maintained. And, um, you know, it comes down to hosting and web maintenance. And I think that that gets skirted over a long time. You're ready to spend a bunch of money on marketing or SEO or anything like that. And you got to go back to the fundamentals and look at, uh, the, the website. Uh, is it being maintained? Where's it being hosted? And I just, I think that that's a question that, that gets bypassed a lot and, and I want to bring it to the forefront, but there it is. That's my soapbox. And

we're going to have William on to talk about that, to talk about some of the things that have been implemented, um, on, on cohost, uh, and, and the value that we're seeing from an SEO perspective there. Yeah. And William's background for, for anybody, uh, cause we just threw out someone's first name. Uh, he was recently at Google before that, uh, he was at GoDaddy. Uh, he was one of the top security experts at GoDaddy. He had dealt with all kinds of problems. Um, he, we brought him on as our, uh, a senior system admin, um, you know, in the last year and we're really doing some phenomenal stuff. Uh, and, uh, we're increasing bandwidth and we've hired some more people, uh, to support him. And, um, you know, so again, I think it's super important. Uh, we're seeing it as extremely important. It plays into SEO. You can't just do on page. You can't just do off page. You got to have that technical component. You got to be able to get it in the back end. You got to get it, be able to optimize the server. Those are all things that are increasingly important with SEO. And I've talked about this in the past, but not recently that I think that there's going to be this delineation that you're going to have to spend X amount of money to be able to maintain web presence. And so, um, you know, it's not as equal of a playing field anymore because Google's going to expect certain things. And so if you're, uh, trying to transition into digital, I certainly encourage you to go digital now and not, uh, be pulled in that direction because it's only going to go in that direction more and more. And you want to, uh, be at the forefront of what's happening and take, uh, the, the winnings of, uh, I don't know if that's the spoils. Is that right? Take the spoils of, of the changes and get on them early because I mean, literally being in that

first position in Google top three position can be the difference between the business exploding in growth and failing. And so, um, I just encourage that. So. Absolutely. Uh, all right. So that was June 15th page experience update. June 23rd was a spam update. Uh, again, Danny Sullivan announced on Twitter, uh, an algorithm update targeting, uh, targeted at fighting spam was rolled out to search results. He added that a second spam update would follow within a week. Sure enough, June 28th, uh, spam update part two, the second part of the spam update has begun on June 28th and will likely be completed on the same day. That wraps up June. Let's throw in July and we can kind of summarize some of this. Uh, it was a core update, uh, and it's just a core update that was rolling out. We'll take one to two weeks to complete. Uh, and that really wraps up, um, uh, June. If you, if you throw July 1st on, onto June. Well, so I would, I would say, you know, uh, some of this core update, I, I think I, I, didn't, you didn't give me any context to it, but I, but there's something about the question answering component of like Bert, like the, the contextual semantic machine learning component. I think that they're continuing to, to tweak that, uh, this spam update is really impacting. And this, this is actually, there's going to be another eat update coming out. That's going to rock everybody's world. Uh, and sites need to follow, uh, kind of eat protocol. We have a downloadable, uh, on our site about that. Uh, it's expertise, authoritativeness and trust, but basically any sites that are not supporting that are not linking together. Same as with schema markup, it's going to really, uh, impact you. So if you're getting links from sites or you have people guest posting on, on your, like, say like a doctor, for example, um, they need to be able to prove online through their digital presence. Uh, Google needs to be

able to figure out that they're a doctor. Also, if there's malpractice like lawsuits or something like that, and that's online, that's going to impact the quality of it. So they're looking at the expertise, authoritativeness and trust. And so this is a big one coming. This spam update is impacting people that have relied heavily on link building because they're looking at like total links as the bottom denominator of what you're doing. And they're looking at the value, uh, of those links, the traffic that's referred on those links. And one of the things that's crazy about what Google is doing is, again, going back to search console, Google is not giving manual reviews. So this is algorithmically, this is machine learning. The changes are being made. What they're doing is they're just, if you go into search console and you can look at discovered, but not, not indexed, and you can click on that, you can go through any low quality pages that you have. Google's just decided to de-index them. Right. And you know, if they're not indexed, it's not playing into, uh, the link juice that you're getting. Right. And so Google's trying to clean up the search and how is Google doing that? They're just automatically de-indexing, de-listing a ton of stuff on all these websites. So if you have a, a link from a website, uh, and that link is gone because it's a low quality, uh, page or, you know, spammy or whatever, um, you lose that link juice. So I think that a lot of what is happening there is they're looking at these high quality links. They're looking at the referral, um, uh, place from these links. So also too, is if you're having a lot of websites that you're getting links from that are like national, uh, in, in intention or news or whatever, and they're not locally contextual, then that changes kind of the link traffic or the, the traffic that you're getting to your site. And Google's looking at what's happening before people get to your site,

not just coming directly to your site. So there's a lot of things going on here, but it's, you know, it's coming down to, is the link useful for your particular business in your particular area? And, and does that match up and does that traffic match up? Now, one of the things I am seeing, and when you say in that case, when you say, does it match up it's, does it match up with the search intent of that search searcher? Yeah. I mean, if there's somebody that doesn't go through, let's say the Houston area a lot, um, and they're somewhere in the country or out of the country and they're coming to the site, is that useful? And how that person interacts with the site is that useful? So if someone sees an article up in New York or California and Google doesn't see their IP address of how they're tracking everybody come through the Houston area or not, like is the search and, uh, uh, uh, intentionality there. Right. And I think one of the ways to change this mix is to use AdWords. Google is, um, actually Google is ranking websites higher that have AdSense on them. Um, uh, I, you know, Google used to kind of penalize that, but, but now actually they're ranking higher and really paying for some ad traffic, right? So, uh, utilizing AdWords and driving locally relevant traffic for the target keywords that you have in your area is helping those ratios. Um, and that's certainly important. Um, I think that really, uh, there's a place for SEO, there's a place for paid ads. And if you can run them both together, I think that that's fantastic and you don't have to spend a lot of money to do that. Um, but what they're trying to do is stop link spam on the internet and all these links and all this content being created and auto-generated content. And, um, they're dinging a lot of stuff. I think, uh, where is it? Um, auto-generated content, link schemes, unoriginal content cloaking,

hidden texts or links on pages, doorway pages, scraped content, abused, uh, structured data, uh, structured days, extremely powerful. Don't have enough time to go into it on this page, but Google is trying to get rid of just people generating all these links, but like really relevant high quality links and staying focused on that, that's really the quote or conversation that comes around one link could be worth a hundred other links, right? Um, the harder it is to get the, the more, the more natural it is. Um, you know, the more kind of, uh, brand awareness, uh, people have, it's really where that vote's coming from and is that valuable and how many of those votes versus other votes do you have, you really only need a lot of the high quality votes. Um, and that's what Google is trying to say, right? As they're trying to say is, is this relevant? So again, uh, even look at your own website and go look at in search console. If there's pages that you want to rank, um, are they meeting the quality standards? If not, the algorithms just hiding them and then that page won't even rank. And so that's something certainly you should be looking for. And, and any links coming out of that page, maybe to another page that you want to rank, uh, won't count as well. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, you want to use references on these pages. I've seen pages that have references, uh, doing, doing quite well. And when you're linking out to something, you should be linking out to something that's supporting what you're saying. Right. Um, uh, and then also looking at the trust of that, but you're trying to get third party verification for what you're saying. That's what Google is looking for. And a number of these updates is, is there quality there? Can I trust this data? I mean, you saw it in, in the medical field, um, medical, uh, questions and, uh, medical sites started to skyrocket higher, uh, for a lot

of different rankings. I know you felt that Chris as well. And, and so these updates are making an impact. Um, a lot of people are on the fence. Oh, well, Google is not going to change anything significant. Well, I think actually even, uh, Google's reset a lot of this machine learning data that they're feeding into it. So it's having to relearn a lot of stuff. So, you know, I think over the long run, it will be better, but I feel like there are certain things that Google has completely forgotten. One of the things that Google is saying, uh, is, uh, exact match domains don't have as much value because Google's looking at the context of what's going on. But I think right now in the learning process of this, uh, sites that actually do have exact match in their, uh, URL are ranking stronger now. Like I've, I've definitively seen that even though Google said, Hey, that's not that big a deal. Um, I think it is right now at Google said it's overrated. I think that was the word that John Miller used, but it really, um, it really is having an impact, but I do think as the machine learns things will change. But right now, um, having those keywords on the page, having the exact match is important, but will be less important as time goes on. I think we're just in the learning phase of the curve and that sort of thing. So. Yeah. So, so all we've got left really is July 12th and July 26. Uh, 12th was just saying that the rollout, uh, in July was completed. Uh, and then on the 26th, we covered a lot of this. I mean, just think about this. Three of the nine announcements were related to link spam. Uh, and you just covered that. Well, the, the, the quote that I pulled out was Google warned that any sites taking part in the link spam tactics could see rankings change with sponsored guest and affiliate content most likely to be impacted.

Uh, and so you've got to, we're, we're not saying that you shouldn't do guest posting. You should just do it intelligently. And one of the messages that I'm taking from what you said, Matt is like, make sure your guest is, is authoritative, has a good eat profile so that, yeah, that's going to act that will add value. Uh, whereas if you're just getting a random post from some random person, um, in, in an, in an industry that they haven't established themselves as an expert, uh, it's probably just going to be ignored. Well, you, you want, like, think about it. Like if you, if you really look at just blogs and if it's you talking about the blogs or you bring in other experts to talk about it, it adds more value to it, or more people on your team and having that author and having that about us page and having those things make it more trustworthy, more authoritative, right. Um, uh, expert content of people that have degrees and you can online be able to prove that and link that together. Uh, I mean, bottom line is authorship, they rolled it back. Um, and it's coming back and it's growing and what's happening is your online presence of who you are. Um, offline and online should merge. Yeah. I, I think that there's probably going to be like, I don't know, like, I don't know, you get dystopic, but like global IDs, okay. Or passports or whatever, but everything, all the data is going to be tied to one person. Even, uh, if you look in your phone, like, Hey, can you go, you're looking at something on your desktop, you want to move to your, you know, your phone to be able to transfer that ID. So all these devices are tied together and also all your identities are tied together. Uh, and, and they need to all be linked together. Like, you know, you have a profile, you need a link to your LinkedIn profile, to your Facebook profile, to your Twitter

or whatever. And Google's indexing social socials having a greater impact now. And it's all tying together because it's all about that brand and you as a person or identity as a brand, a company's identity as a brand and everyone associated with it. Right. And, and how, how does that all fit together? Um, there's something that called a gravitar, uh, WordPress puts together where it pulls together all your data using your gravitar is something important. But I think people need to think about their online presence, uh, a lot more than they are, uh, and their company's, um, online presence. Right. And that's, would you even say they need to be thinking about their personal brand or the rise of their personal brand? Uh, yeah, I, I do. I, I think that that book, uh, that, that, uh, hit Amazon bestseller is a great book, but I think that there probably needs to be a part two of build your brand mania that's specific, uh, to, um, creating not just the concepts of creating a personal brand, but, but what is the technical components like the workbook? Yeah. Like, like the actual workbook of how to do it, of how to use schema, um, like same as how to, um, add your profile, uh, to different sites, how to build, um, like reputation management. Like, I mean, I think it almost fits under reputation management or brand management. Uh, and you know, I mean it, you just can't have any more, a LinkedIn profile for work and a Facebook profile for personal and keep them completely separate. Right. I mean, everything, and then everything online's blending to online. I mean, you, you know, I knew we were going to be able to talk, to talk about cryptos on every call. And, uh, but like, you know, like offline real estate, online real estate, I had a conversation, uh, this weekend actually with a real estate broker who wanted to be a real estate broker for crypt, like for a blockchain, uh, real estate in the metaverse, like,

and how to do that. Like, how do I become selling land? Like in, in, in a cyberspace in cyberspace, in addition to, uh, selling land and dirt where geographically where I am. And I, I just think that there's going to be a merger between, between all this stuff with technology. And, and that's going to come down to, I mean, that you see it with the NFTs and the crypto punks and the board apes and like people are putting those as their profiles, you know, and then those profiles or keys or membership accesses to certain points. And it's related to a brand, like you have a Gucci purse, you have, you know, this NFT as your, and it's the only one and you put it as your profile, like it's a status thing. And so I think that there's going to be this blend between what your, uh, personal brand is online and offline. I know we're getting way off tangent to these Google updates, but, but it's common. And, uh, I think the more you can get ahead of this stuff, uh, the greater rewards you're going to reap, uh, as these updates start to, um, catch up to that. So, and I think, I think that's a good point, not, not necessarily related to kind of NFTs, but you know, great. We understand algorithms change. We understand their algorithm updates. Uh, we understand sometimes those impact us. What is it that we can do? And I think we've done a good job of covering this. I don't know if you want to summarize in one or two points, like what are the best things? And I'll provide the first one cause it's the like 50,000 foot view, but what is it that you can do on an ongoing basis to make sure that that next algorithm change, whatever it may be, doesn't negatively impact you. And I'm going to revert to the thing that we share all the time. As long as you're keeping in mind the Google user and providing value to the

Google user, Google is going to look favorably upon you, uh, and therefore increase your rank. I don't know if there are any one or two points you want to make about what to focus on. Uh, I mean, you could just say I've covered it brand, but you know what to focus on to, to limit your exposure negatively from, uh, Google algorithm changes. Yeah. Um, I think that, um, you know, developers.google.com, the Google search center, uh, has, they've been adding a ton of content and trainings and they really line everything for you there. If you want to go further in depth, uh, I'll actually, let me share that link here in the video chat right now. Um, so that's first, as far as like a resource hearing it from the horse's mouth. Um, what I can tell you just, uh, anecdotally, um, is like, you gotta be thinking about not just the different boxes you need to check for SEO, but you really need to think about the content overall as a whole and really looking at is that is content communicating what I want it to communicate. And also, am I outlining in a way and creating signals that Google understands like with on page, with headers, that sort of thing to make it easy for Google to understand. But the, what I can tell you is the more time you spent on creating quality content and communicating your message, the better you communicate your message for that particular message. Uh, it's going to do quite well. I think that probably 75% of all the searches today are still unique searches to Google. So going after long tail key phrases, going after really high intent phrases and not general topics are S are very important. I think that images, videos, unique content, not using stock art or like product renderings and stuff like that, but having original art, having profiles of what you do, uh, uh, being connected in, uh, to, if you're a local business into the local community where Google can see your

brand presence being associated with chambers of commerce, with better business bureau, uh, with, with sponsoring local events like, or being involved in the local community, the more Google understands that. Think about that web presence of the business. Is it connected to other businesses in that local area layering that digital presence on top of your real life presence and making sure that like, uh, we talk about, we talked about this big when COVID hit your digital storefront. Is it reflective of your physical storefront? And if your website is not a representative of your physical storefront, say you've spent a lot of money on your building or your showroom or something like that, you need to spend equal amount on your website because that's the first interaction with your brand. That's your digital showroom. Those kinds of things are super important. Uh, Google is semantically learning stuff. So if it doesn't understand it now, it's going to catch stuff later. I saw with this update, there's a lot of black hat stuff that is ranking really well and it offers no value. It's just a matter of time, right? Like it's something, it's something to combat right now. Uh, but it's something will go away and there's better, there's better ways to combat it than, uh, fighting fire with fire in a lot of cases. And again, these link schemes, you get, you, you set them up, you're going to get penalized. There's going to be either a dampening effect where it's not going to impact it or everything you do is not going to impact. Or when you get a manual update like that, that site might be just out of commission after that. And so it's really frustrating in a couple of these verticals that, uh, things are ranking where they shouldn't know that Google will catch them and work it out eventually. Um, and what can you do in the right way to further what you're trying to do? And I think the number one thing you can do is, um, going back to

content and does that page communicate and does your web website represent who you are offline. And then the last component is you need to be in search console all the time because search consoles telling Google's telling what to fix, telling you what it doesn't like it. And, and, and it's being very, um, re well, it's being, it's taking the algorithm and making changes and then telling you what to do. And so you can, you can follow a lot of the stuff. And what that's doing is it goes back to probably site structure and some things like that where Google can figure stuff out, but if you give it better signals to understand what's happening, it will do better. Um, and I guess one of the things that I just said, but I didn't say it in this way is social is having a lot more influence than it did. Uh, Google and Facebook kind of made up and, uh, Google is able to index Facebook and you know, Google's looking for, uh, brands and people talking about it and people sharing it. And Google's looking at all those different associations because social media or web 2.0 is representing what's happening in the physical world. And it needs to mirror that. And so as those things kind of converge, um, that that's where your focus needs to be. And I think if you're doing that, you're, you're going to be, you're going to be ahead of the game. So makes perfect sense. All right. So, uh, this is history of Google algorithm updates. We just did 2021. Uh, you can find that at search engine journal. Uh, some of the stuff that we referenced outside of this article, uh, are links that are in the article. So you can go find that, um, this has been, been good stuff, you know, uh, following the algorithm. I think, you know, the, the, the summary is try not to follow the algorithm, just stay ahead of it by providing good value, uh, and, and a good brand and,

and you'll get recognized for that. So we can, we can kind of end, uh, end it on there. Remember, we do would, and very much appreciate reviews that you would leave. Uh, again, we hope those reviews are five stars, uh, ask for EWR digital.com forward slash review. Uh, we'll get you to our GMB page, facebook.com forward slash best SEO podcast. And also if you want to test out our video, uh, review software pro testimonial, uh, and at the same time, two birds with one stone, uh, also give us a review that's EWR digital.com forward slash video review. And, uh, yeah, I have a call in one minute tell the next podcast. My name is Chris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.