Google Algorithm Changes and How it Affects Your Page - #seopdocast 165

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you guys for tuning in. You have tuned in to podcast number 165 of the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Yes. That is because of you guys, 7,000 downloads per week, 76 different countries. Aloha. That's not another country, but I just threw that out there. As always, we have... Aloha. How do you respond to aloha? Aloha. Oh, you said that? I think it's back, yeah. It means... What is mahalo? Mahalo is thank you. Goodbye? I think it's thank you. Aloha is hello and goodbye. Okay. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast, and the tip is, effective SEO for mobile is something that takes some thought and planning. Yeah, you definitely want to make sure that, first off, you consider, optimizing your site or making sure your site is mobile-friendly. And more importantly, if your site is mobile-friendly, make sure it's optimized for mobile browsers. Images load fast, the content shows correctly, and things like that. So keep that in mind as you strategize and work on your mobile campaign. Yeah, so go back and listen to podcast number 164, and you can hear us talking about a good SEO strategy for mobile. Please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position, Snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is... Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. Yeah, it's not a good look. If you guys are sitting in front of any sort of electric device that enables you, allows you, causes you, can... Wait for what device is in my desk? If you're, I'm expecting, like, I'm melting, I'm melting, I don't have my tweet device. Go ahead and tweet to us or tweet about us, that tweet that you're listening and learning. Hashtag. Thank you, yeah. Hashtag SEO podcast. 165. Tag us in it, at eWebStyle, and we shall give you a punch in the face for it. Remember to put a

space between the 165, we're really going after the hashtag SEO podcast. Ooh, that was good. We're getting back on path here. Hey, we have, today, we actually have one, and it's time for the algorithm cataclysm. We just have too much fun doing this. All right, go. Oh, okay, yeah, I have it here. So, I came across this article, Google actually released over 65 algorithm changes over the past two months, August and September. Wow. 65 algorithm changes. And so, I found an article that discussed them, but more importantly, it broke them down. And so, we'll cover the kind of top high ones that I think we'll probably feel the most effect from. One of the changes was to improve web ranking and the indexing. And so, the statement says, we improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant queries containing locations. What pages are relevant for queries containing locations? Which kind of gets into our question somebody asked we'll talk about in a minute as well. So, they're looking to, you know, people searching and they include a zip code or a town or a state. They're trying to improve what pages show for that. Well, and I wonder if this goes back to the question we have. If you Google Internet Marketing Houston, it doesn't show any Google Google Google. That's a new search engine that I'm sure just got formed. Google local places. And so, although Internet Marketing is clearly something you can do anywhere in the world, we find that a lot of our customers want to, you know, knock on our doors, shake our hands, look us in the eyes, and praise us for the results that we're getting. So, we would argue that actually an Internet Marketing Houston search should have Google local places. Yeah, it should show local results. The seven pack. One of the other ones for WebRanking and indexing was they refreshed the Panda for high-quality sites. So, we'll see how that goes. Page quality and scoring. This launch helped find more high-quality content from trusted

sources. Chuck, what does that mean to you? That means that sites that have probably a higher PR, a higher trust factor, will probably become more credible in Google's eyes or a trusted source. And so, the content that's linking from these sources or linking to these sources probably has more value. The last one, the site links. This change improved the signal we used to determine how relevant a possible result title actually is for the page. I like this one. So, you don't go in there putting, you know, these crazy page titles, and that's not what your content's about. So, they're clearly making changes to try and improve the user's experience, better content, better results, better links. And it works. They even had another one. I didn't print that page that talked about image search. And the image search was there to, that signal, the change they made was to reduce the amount of adult images that show when you search on the image search. So, now Google actually has the ability to search for new photos, identify them as new photos, and then remove them. That's interesting. Here we go. A little bit of news. We don't have much. First, and this is pretty exciting. We now have the first position in iTunes when you search for SEO podcast. And we've identified, we've been saying we're the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is for a number of reasons. Podcasts that have no longer, are no longer broadcasting, we exclude. Podcasts that didn't have many reviews, we exclude. And then we just looked at the star ratings. And we actually got some reviews today, too. So, it's exciting to be in that first position. To be number one. Yeah. I think we'll start. You guys have been reviewing, giving us the stars. I mean, thank you. Yeah. I really do appreciate it. The next thing is, we all know the struggles that the iPhone 5 has had with the maps. We'll call it the maps. And Google actually had the maps also as an app

download. And it was lacking a couple things. And they recently added Street View. Street View. Yeah. And this goes to an interesting discussion that we had. So, if people are really miffed at the iPhone 5, and because they're miffed at the iPhone 5, they're shifting to Android devices. Because, frankly, it's a Windows or that. And I used a Windows. So, frankly, it's just an Android device as the option. And then there's more advertising opportunities for Google on an Android device. Is there maybe? Maybe it's only in maps, right? At this point. So, the debate is, do you let the iPhone 5 struggle and not have a decent map app? Wow. Map app. Or do you give them a decent map app so that you're actually collecting traffic on the iPhone 5s? And clearly, they're thinking that they should give a good map app. Well, I think they're just taking advantage of opportunity. The debate is, is the opportunity in letting them struggle and people shifting to Android? Or is the opportunity in putting an app that people are going to use over the existing Apple map? Put it in an app. Because there are dedicated Apple users. There's people who are just not going to leave. You know what I'm saying? That's true. And there may be 5 million of them. People who leave Apple and come to Android probably still have an iPhone. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I would place an app over there that works. That's better than all the stuff they're trying to do and make it free. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And that's what they're doing. Apparently, it has a few limitations and it's significantly... Yeah. There's no navigation. You know what I'm saying? You got to pay for that. Yeah. Apple. Not even the users. Apple needs to work that out with Google. They can get access to that. That's crazy. And it makes you wonder if maybe Apple kind of went to Google and said, hey, can you improve your app and

it'll increase the downloads and we'll make an announcement. I doubt that. But that would be... It would be smart. We got an email and you can email us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. And this is Chris Olenek and he says, hey guys, great work. I just wrote a review. The new iPhone podcast icon is going to make it so much easier to keep up. I don't know what the new... The new what? Icon. It's the iPhone podcast icon. iPhone podcast icon. Remember they came out with a separate app. iPhone podcast icon. They separated the podcast. Well, I don't know if they separated entirely. They created a podcast app so that it wasn't... Oh, simple from iTunes. So it wasn't built into iTunes. So maybe the icon is going to tell you when new podcasts are up or something. I don't know. He usually listens in bulk. Anyway, just wrote a review. Can I get that punch in the face? He would have wrote the review anyway, but since you mentioned it, you can juice me at agency20.com. We are a crowdfunding campaign agency. All right. Well, punch in the face to you, Chris. Thank you for tuning in. Thanks for your support. And we'll give you that link there. And we've got about three more reviews. I'm going to just do two of them. And I'm going to go in this order. This is from Z.W. Collier. Thanks for simply being rad. At this point, I listened for just the entertainment value and managed to pick up a few SEO PPC pointers along the way. The best thing I learned is that I need to stop managing my own PPC. Hey, that's a good thing to learn. I'll contact you soon to manage our accounts. Anyway, thanks for taking the time each week to share your thoughts. Thanks to you, Z.W. Collier. That was a five-star review. Yeah, don't manage your own PPC. I see it too many times. You know, clients we get, they come in, they've been managing it, and it's not right. Now,

I will drop this disclaimer here. Revamping a PPC campaign takes time. You know, it's not an okay, turn it back on, make a few changes, and then, wow, it's performing extremely better. Now, that will happen. It will perform better once we make those changes. But it takes time. I have to gather some data, look at the numbers, and kind of tweak. One of the things I tell our clients is that, you know, we'd rather ramp up rather than start real big, use a whole bunch of money, a lot of spend, and then have to scale back. We were at the start small, manage the spend, and as we tweak the campaign, continue to increase budget and take maximum advantage of it. So, yeah. And it takes a lot of conversations also with the client. With the client, back and forth. Hey, how is this working? Are you getting decent calls? Are you getting lots of calls and none of them close? Again, at the end of the day, the clients really only care about calls that close. Lots of calls that tie up the secretary do not help the business. Yeah, they cause money. Here's the last one. A bit goofy, but a great way to keep up. Only four stars, which I think is a bit goofy. These guys can be a bit goofy, but I find their podcast to be very informative. With everything changing quickly every day, listening to the SEO podcast is a great way to keep up with the latest updates, trends, techniques, etc. I generally listen while I'm working and make a note of anything interesting to research when I have the time to investigate it deeper. It's definitely a great resource. And that's from Chadwa2. Chadwa2. Patoof. Yeah. We'll give you a... If that was goofy, wouldn't it? That was goofy. That was really good. And for the lack of one star, we will just do a quick little... Oh, that's the wrong one. Kick in the shins. All right, Chad. Thank you. We had another email. I

think you've got access to that. And this is a really good in-depth email. So, yeah, let's hit it. Okay. Yeah, so we got an email from JD. That's what the name says here. The JD, he emailed us at podcast at edashwebsite.com. The subject was multiple locations without duplicate content. It's a lengthy email, so I'll kind of paraphrase. But about three months ago, we didn't know what SEO was. Now it's part of his job. Basically, a tech guy learns technology pretty quickly. Got handed the job of optimizing the site. That sucks for you. I understand, though. I ranked the page using non-competitive keywords, and it didn't seem difficult. Here's why I'm stuck. I'm not sure how to properly proceed forward, or at least not do a bunch of work and discover I need to redo it. Great observation. Let's see here. So, first is backlinks. In my particular market, he ships containers, having trouble formulating a backlink strategy that doesn't involve acting like a complete douche sending out bland emails begging people to link to me. My company operates out in office with no inventory on site, but we have 40-plus locations spread throughout the U.S. Ideally, we'd like to make a page for each location, focusing on geo-targeted long-tail keywords. How do you go about doing that without getting Google spanked for dupe content? There's only so many ways you can say, buy my shipping containers in this city. Is there an easy way to do this, or am I stuck trying to reformulate the same content 40 times? JD, first off, long question. Great question. It's a question that most people deal with frequently. Who are doing national campaigns or statewide campaigns, even. With multiple locations. It's interesting you ask this because me and Chris were discussing this yesterday. We had a long discussion yesterday. And so, I think you asked two questions. One was about multiple locations. The other one was about generating backlinks without being a douche. I think tie them both in. Chuck, what does that mean? That means if you're

trying to get backlinks, you probably shouldn't focus on that, I'll be honest, because since you're a local business, I think spending your time chasing reviews is probably going to be a more effective use of time than getting backlinks. With penguin updates coming, if you're not getting really high-quality backlinks, they probably won't have that much value. So, spend your time getting reviews for each of the locations. And that will serve better than the backlinks to me. And was one of the questions, should I, do I have individual locations? Does he have Google Local Plus pages in different locations? Is that? Well, the question was, does he, should he set them up? Or how do you go about doing that without getting Google spanked for a whole bunch of dupe content and keywords in each one? And so, I think it's probably okay to have dupe content in a Google Local Plus page if you have, so assuming here you've got physical locations, you know, it makes sense that it's going to be, it's going to have very similar content. In fact, dupe content typically only comes into play when Google is saying, do I want to show this page or this page? Oh, wait, they're totally duplicate, so I'm only going to show one of them. That's never going to happen in a Google Local Places setting plus page. A plus page, yeah. Because Google Local Plus page. It's not going to happen because if they're searching in a particular location, clearly your other location is never going to be competing against that particular site. So, dupe content doesn't even come into consideration because the other one's in one location, this one's in, let's say you're searching in Houston, you're searching in Houston, your Dallas location isn't even in contention to show up on the search engine result page. So, dupe content doesn't matter. What you have to make sure you do is that each Google Local Plus page has a different address and a different phone number. That way, Google, that's how Google identifies that

this indeed is a different location. And then I think the dupe content at that point is okay. For example, if you was to search for McDonald's on Google Maps, you'll get locations everywhere. And these all have the same hours of operation, the same menu, the same parking, the same, everything is identical except the address and the phone number. Well, except for the service that the one by my house really sucks. Yeah, they all have different reviews, which is a great point. Yeah. They all have different reviews. Some of them have great five-star reviews. Others have sucky zero-stars and one-star reviews. And so I think that's done on purpose. So maybe if you did a search for the best hamburger in a certain location, a Burger King result would probably show up higher than a McDonald's result with bad reviews. So, yeah, focus on getting reviews, kind of back to the first point. Yeah, exactly. To make the local play just work for it. And one of the things that we were discussing is, can you just make dupe content and change cities? The answer is yes and no. We have a particular client who's got identically dupe content, city name change only, and he's doing well in smaller cities. So that content isn't optimized enough. And he may be taking a little bit of hit for dupe content in more competitive markets. But in tiny cities, if you search his terms and mention a tiny city, he comes up first page. So it really is the fact that Google's really trying to provide a good experience to the Google user. And if your dupe content page is relevant in different cities, then that one page is okay. Going to the supplemental, I really think, is a terminology that applies to a particular search phrase. So, I may have great, whatever, carpet installation content. And if I have carpet installation Houston content, the same content as Dallas, the same content as that is somewhere else, then those other pages clearly won't show up in Houston. And,

in fact, they may be taking a little bit of a hit because there's so much dupe content. But if I have one for, you know, carpet installation, let's choose some small neighborhood somewhere in Texas. We can do, like, Plano. Not a neighborhood, but a small city. Then the hit that comes from duplicate content is low enough that they can actually, that that dupe content page. That page is still a relevant page to display for that search. Right. And then in that case, dupe content isn't a bad experience to the Google user, is it? And it's, you know, if I'm in Plano, I don't know that there's, whatever, 5,000 pages. Now, we debated this, and this is not 100%. And it is some results that we're seeing. Well, it works. Will it continue to work? I don't know. I mean, my good response is probably not. After Matt Cutts listens to this particular podcast. So, we're figuring out ways to optimize locally. How do you do that? Making sure you have better Google Plus pages, that you do have all of your locations listed, that you do on your contact page, because I think it works similar to the author page. Google knows contact us usually contains addresses. It usually contains phone numbers. So, make sure the contact information that's on your site, even if it's for multiple locations, is identical to the contact information that's on your local plus pages. And that way, you may not necessarily need to have several seedy pages, because you already have them listed on your contact page, and you have local plus pages that reference them. So, we're talking content earlier, and we'll brief through this. We got an article. You got any tweet punches in the face? Not today. We probably do. I just didn't have time. Well, we can give a punch in the face to Internet Tracker, who's actually watching us right now. We've also got Aaron Thomas. Hey, T, what's up, man? What's up? Yeah, Internet Tracker doing a conference, investigative something, I forgot. Yeah.

Investigative conference. Doing some sort of conference, investigative something. Looking up stuff. So, you were talking about content earlier. So, I got this article here. Jenny Halas, she posted this over at Search Engine Land. 11 things to ask yourself when optimizing content. This article was appealing to me because we have a few clients whose sites just finished getting produced, and now we're moving about to shift gears into content optimization and things like that. So, she broke it down in a few sections. Steaming content. First question is, what is this page about? I think this is a great question to ask before you just begin spitting out content. Figure out what this page is about. Is it about, what did you say earlier, carpet installation? If it is, then great. Now, you have a topic. If you can't answer what this page is about, and you're just trying to do something to rank for a certain keyword, then you might not need to write that page. Second question. What is the purpose of this page? Is it to educate somebody on how to do carpet installation? Is it to inform people on the best carpet installation you can get? Is it a checklist of different ways to check if the carpet is installed right? You know, what is the purpose of this page? Maybe simply just to establish yourself as a carpet installation expert. You know, critique and compare and contrast. Wow, I put all of that in one word. You know, different ways and different techniques and things that work and don't work with other installers. Yeah, she goes on to say, here, is it news? Is it a press release, a blog post? Is it educational? You know, what are the goals for this page? Is it to get people to sign up and use you for carpet installation? Or is it to educate them about how to do it themselves? You know, you take all of that into consideration when composing the content. I like this one. Consider the content timing. How long will

this content remain relevant? Right? Let's say this is a new test product that you're pretty sure won't do well. You know, then it may not be worth investing a whole bunch of time putting this post together. Her recommendation is, well, just create a couple pieces, a couple phrases, a few sentences, and then link to some other content. If this is something that's going to be around for a while, it's probably sure to gain a lot of traffic and create a buzz, then take the time and write a nice lengthy post. Make sure you have all the stuff that goes with it and the videos and the images and the other rich media that will help that post. And then put it out there. Content optimization. What makes sense for the optimization? Are there relevant keywords? Should you include links to other content? And so I think, you know, you have to take all of this in consideration before you start writing the article, before you start writing that post. That way, if you know the links you're going to link to, if you already know the images you're going to use, you know the video you're going to include on there, you know the keywords that you need to include in this article, then that makes composing that article a lot faster, a lot easier, and it ended up making more sense. I like this one here. She says, making decisions. Don't apply a one-size-fits-all method to your optimization. You can't optimize for carpet installation the same way you would optimize for a CD download or something like that. It's a totally different audience, totally different keyword selection, totally different viewers. And so, you're going to get totally different responses. Exactly. Calls to follow up or buy. Or buy or download or submit or whatever it is. So keep that in mind as well. So that's it. She had an info on here. Post a link. It was pretty cool about how you could go through and figure out which content works, what doesn't work,

should you write it, and where you should link it to. So, yeah, 11 things to ask yourself when optimizing content. Remember, we are always having some sort of contest, almost always. There's usually some downtime between contests. On our Facebook page. So follow us, facebook.com slash e-wipstyle. You can also hit us up on Twitter, twitter.com slash e-wipstyle. Watch videos at YouTube, youtube.com slash e-wipstyle. And again, send us emails, podcast at e-wipstyle.com. And I know we actually have some interaction going on on Facebook that's worth checking out. There's a video that was posted, which is pretty hilarious, on our wall, which is pretty hilarious about a guy who's IE uninstall challenged, meaning he runs around and uninstalls IE from everyone's computer. And it was actually put out by Microsoft because the end of it is, you know, check out IE 9. It's actually okay or actually pretty good. Do we have any blank stare news? No, I don't. No blank stare? All right. All right. Well, you have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of all of you. We really appreciate you. Something that you could do for us that would help us is go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review, and then if you choose to, go ahead and send us an email. Let us know that you did those three things. Podcast at e-wipstyle.com. And we'll give you a punch in the face. Which, if you haven't figured out yet, is a good thing. Yeah. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up, eyebrow, eyebrow, head in my way.