Search Engine Visitor Optimization (SEVO) and Google Factors for SERPS - #seopodcast 43

Episode36 min2010-02-11

Google uses over 200 ranking signals, but the most important on-page factors are keyword placement in the title tag, unique quality content, and domain name keywords, while the core goal is providing a good user experience.

Cover art for Search Engine Visitor Optimization (SEVO) and Google Factors for SERPS - #seopodcast 43
Key takeaways
Your job is to provide a good experience to the users of Google.

About this episode

We discuss Search Engine Visitor Optimization (SEVO). How do you keep and convert the visitors who arrive at your website. We also discuss how we use Multiple Accounts within Google for our personal and customer Analytics. A big topic for this podcast is the 300 factors Google considers when returning search engine results. Find our facebook page at www.e-webstyle.com/facebook. Houston Search Engine Marketing. You…

Questions this episode answers

How many ranking signals does Google use and what are the most important ones?

Google uses over 200 ranking signals. The hosts highlight keyword use in the title tag, keyword use as the first word of the title tag, having keywords in the root domain name, and unique quality content as the most important. They sourced this from SEOmoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 3.

What is SEVO and why does it matter for SEO?

SEVO stands for Search Engine Visitor Optimization. It means designing pages so that visitors who arrive via a specific keyword actually find that keyword and relevant content on the landing page. If a visitor searched for back pain and the page says nothing about back pain, they will bounce.

What is cloaking and why is it a negative ranking factor?

Cloaking means showing different content to Google's crawl robots than to human visitors. The SEOmoz article cited in the episode flags cloaking with malicious or manipulative intent as a negative ranking factor because it degrades the user experience Google is trying to protect.

Terms defined in this episode
SEVO (Search Engine Visitor Optimization)
Designing a landing page so that visitors who arrived via a specific keyword find that keyword and relevant content on the page, reducing bounce rate.
Anchor text
The clickable text used in a hyperlink that points back to your website; controlling it to match target keywords adds SEO value.
Cloaking
Showing one version of page content to search engine robots and a different version to human users; flagged as a negative ranking factor when done with malicious or manipulative intent.
Title tag
An HTML element that names a webpage; placing target keywords in the title tag, especially as the first words, is one of the most important on-page ranking factors.
Read the full transcript (6,339 words · 32 min read)

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Hi, welcome back. Oh, wait. Sorry. I cut you off. No, it's all right. Podcast. Is that the cue? We didn't rehearse this. I don't know. I know. Podcast. 43. 43. Clearly, we have not rehearsed this well enough. And when you are watching this video, you'll be highly entertained. Actually, here we are. I don't know if we're in Cubicle 8 or 38. I don't know how the rows are organized here. But I'm going to open this guy up here. I'm going to get a little space in here. Welcome back. Glad to have everybody back. Well, you're probably not watching this until the new year because we told you we weren't going to have a podcast. Yeah, a trip that I had scheduled got postponed, and so I'm still here. We're like, hey, we've got to crank out a podcast. Our people need to hear us. They just need more. The gospel of SEO. You are listening to the most popular podcast, SEO podcast, excuse me, SEO podcast on iTunes. So thanks for joining us. You're here because you want to learn how to get your website on the first page of Google, or just in general, you want to understand how to get any website on the first page of Google. In fact, we've got some examples of people who are interested in doing just that. That's right, and it's cool. We've got some fan mail. Fan mail. That's right. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Fan mail. Man, I feel like we're just, we're missing something. Yeah. We've got to do something. Oh, we've got to talk about what? Oh, news. Did you get any news? No. All right. Go get your phone. Do you have your phone real quick? I got it somewhere. Oh, I do know of something, which is a couple days old. Okay. Many people, many of you have already heard this. I forgot to say this on the news last week. Here's a bit of technology news. AOL and Time Warner,

big time. I think the biggest merger in American corporate history is no longer going through. Not going to happen? Yeah. Well, it's done. AOL is now split from Time Warner as of about a week and a half ago. Woo-hoo! Yeah, so AOL, here's why it might have an effect. AOL is trying to reinvent itself as a search, as a company itself, but they're going to go big into, they're going to invest a lot of money into their search engine. Interesting. So that's going to, I mean, are they going to take over Google? I don't think they're quite, I don't even think they can actually make that claim yet. Yeah, yeah. Until they make some changes. So that is definitely some technology news that's changing and could possibly have an effect on you and your company. Excellent. Interesting. Interesting. We also like to, that's one of the things we do. The other thing, we like to also cover a little bit about what we covered last time. And last time we talked about Google Intelligence. That's it. All right. End of story. If you're interested in Google Intelligence, which is a new button as of this podcast, last podcast. And in fact, it says Intelligence Beta. So that means it's a new technology that Google's come out with. It's pretty sophisticated. It's pretty amazing. We're really excited. We covered a lot of details. It really allows you to, what we said was flag the anomalies that occur in your traffic, and then you can go and investigate them further, understand them, capitalize on them, or reduce them if there are things that you want to reduce, like bounce rates, or if you want to reduce, oh, I don't know, lack of traffic. I would say, yeah. Who wouldn't want to reduce that? Or reduce bounce rates or lack of time on traffic, because that's one of the, some of the key things that it keeps track of. Like I said, you're listening because you're trying to get your website or know how to get websites on

the first page of Google. If you're doing it yourself, great. Keep listening to our podcast. If you ever need our help, send us an email. You can send us an email at podcast at e-webstyle.com. We are broadcasting this video live on Ustream. We do this almost every Friday at 9.15. In fact, schedule it every Friday as of next year at 9.15 Central Standard Time. There's only one Central Standard in the world. That's right. Our time. Central Standard Time is Houston time. H-Town time. That's right. That's right. So tune in and catch us live, or you can catch these videos actually on our Ustream site. The quickest way to get to our Ustream page is e-webstyle.com slash Ustream. That's the letter Ustream. You can also stalk us on Twitter. Twitter is e-webstyle. No, excuse me. It's twitter.com slash e-webstyle. And the last one is Facebook. We still haven't done any promotions on Facebook. We will do some promotions on Facebook. So get signed up. Follow us as a fan. And our Facebook page is best and most easiest found on e-webstyle.com slash Facebook. That will pop you immediately to the Facebook page because the URL for Facebook is just outrageous. Yeah, it is. And you get to see pictures of snow. Because you posted the snowman, right? Oh, yeah. That's right. We had some snowmen on our cars. They're pretty cool. You'll get to see pictures. And honestly, the snowman did not come from our freezer. Yeah. Most snowmen in Houston actually do come from the freezer when it's time to defrost. It actually... And did you hear it's going to... It's supposed to snow. It's supposed to have a white Christmas here in Houston. Oh, man. That sucks. I'm sorry, man. Remember, it's not like a Detroit white snow. I know. It's just like a... It's like a little snow. Oh, my God. Oh, man. I am not cool. They can keep all that. Did you get excited when it snowed here the other day? No. Really? Oh, okay. I was like, this sucks, man.

You're like the one pissy Houstonian. I'm the one person that's like, oh, God. It's snowing. Oh, Jesus. It's snowing. I know. I'm like, I'm going to have to walk in it. We got like a quarter inch of snow. Oh, I got a flake on my nose. Damn. This weather in Houston. So, white Christmas. That's cool, I guess. I am seriously going to be Scrooge McDuck. If it snows. Scrooge McDuck. Where did that come from? Who is Scrooge McDuck? That's the uncle of Huey and Dewey. DuckTales. Oh, wow. Was that... Man. I know that because I played that character on improv stage. Scrooge McDuck. Actually, I think we played Huey and Dewey. And Huey and Dewey were locked in Scrooge McDuck's safe. Oh, okay. Was it the money vault? Yeah, it was the money vault. Because I remember on the... And this is a complete tangent. He would backstroke through his coins. Oh, yeah. I always wanted to do that. Yeah. That's a tangent. Until you realize that... It doesn't work. It's impossible. Maybe they're made out of plastic. Like the little plastic ball. Oh, and like turkey cheese. Tits you jump into. They can make them out of coins. And then your fantasy would be true. That would be cool. We should... We have a suggestion box. Yeah. For what to have in the office. Yeah. After you put it in there, you'll hear this... Yeah. It's called a paper shredder. That's our suggestion box. Okay. Make sure it's plugged in. Oh, my God. We will talk about SEO at some point. So, you are watching to get your website on the first page of Google or listening and or listening. Just like these guys, Darren Bowie. We've got an email from him. You had a couple notes here, Paul. You wanted to give some shout-outs to... To Darren Bowie. I said him last time, but he gave us a couple questions. And John Reynolds. John Reynolds of... That's probably in yours. Of JohnReynoldsMedia.com. Excellent. They both had questions. You want to go with those

now? Yeah. I was going to go... I'll start with... Here we got... Who is it? Dewey. Darren Bowie. You know, he requested... I guess he requested an analysis from you. You sent him a long, nice analysis. And it was really good. And you made... I wanted to bring out two points that you made in it. He was asking... His simple question was, should I put my URL on lots of places? Is there of any value? And he actually pointed out that, you know, whenever you're doing a Google search, often these blogs come up that have, you know, places where their websites are listed, the information there. And Paul gave this really nice response. But one of the things Paul wanted to make clear, and this is absolutely true, if you are going to be using blogs for inbound links, remember a couple things. First off, yes, it does have value in giving you traffic. If there's any way you can manipulate the system so that you're in control of the keywords, and remember you asked this morning, they're target words? Anchor text. Anchor text. The anchor text that's used to link back to your website, you know, control that and make sure that, you know, if your website is selling plumbing in Houston, make sure that the text that links back to your website is Houston Plumber or plumbing in Houston or whatever. You also want to add value to the forum. Because remember that when you're doing links, it's not only about search engine optimization, it's also about the possibility of getting traffic back to your website. So as long as you're getting traffic back to your website, the only way that's going to happen is if the information you're providing is valuable, useful to the forum, maybe a little unique. Paul says, you know, make sure that you add value to the forum and submit something relevant to your business. In this case, relevant to plumbing would be, you know, apropos. And then link back to your business. So that's what Paul said.

Now, this was awesome. Darren comes back and he says, Paul, thanks for the in-depth advice. I now understand what you mean when you guys say you're world-class at what you do. Dude, that's awesome. Darren, you are now my favorite podcast listener. Absolutely. He says, and then he had one other question. And I'm going to read this. It's a little bit lengthy. It goes, I'm a little bit confused by Google Analytics. Should you use your brand new profile for each page you have in your website, or is it better to set up goals to URL destinations? I have noticed when you add the same tracking code to another page to an existing domain, when you add that, the data is exactly the same. Know what I mean. And frankly, I'm missing something here, Darren. I'm not exactly sure what you mean. It sounds like maybe you haven't spent enough time on it. And here, what I figured I'd do is just explain how we use it. Of course, we have access to tons of websites, Google Analytics. So when I sign in to Google Analytics, I've got a whole slew of accounts. Those are accounts, the first ones that I see. So we've got our customer, Texas Orthopedic. That's one of our accounts. American Precious Metals. That's one of our accounts. So all of these accounts. And one of those accounts is actually all of the websites. We're partnered in a couple of different websites. So all of the websites that we use, follow, and are partnered with are in one account. So I click that one account, and up comes, in that case, patrickwanis.com. We're partners with them. eWebStyle, my wife's website, marisarte.com, marisart.com. Oh, I never figured that out. That's cool. And so all of those, now those are actually profiles. So when you go into each one of those profiles, then you can see details about the traffic to individual pages. So I'm a little confused about your question. Hopefully that answers. I think the short answer when you say, should you use

a brand new profile for each page on your website? The answer is no. One profile for all of the pages on your website is correct. And you do need to make sure that the Google Analytics code is on every page in your website. So we typically design a website so that there's a header page and a footer page, and it's consistent throughout. We've talked about website consistency and the value of that for your searchers, for your visitors. And then we'll just add the Google Analytics code into the footer or the header or something along those lines. And so hopefully, Darren, hopefully that answered your question. If not, hit us back, and we'll clarify it just a little bit more, and we'll get a better answer for you. Well, good question, Darren. We had a couple great questions. Another piece of fan mail from southwest of Western Australia from John Reynolds at JohnReynoldsMedia.com. That's the Pacific, right? That's what I thought it was. He was like, southwest of Western Australia would be the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So he's broadcasting his pirate signal from a boat. So what's up, John? John had a question. He says... By the way, Western, there's areas like New South Wales is a part. Western Australia may be a province. Oh, really? Yeah. I'm not sure. You mean like its own? Like a province, like a state. Like its own, okay. Western Australia. Oh. That's a possibility. Oh, okay. So then southwest of Western Australia kind of makes sense. Because that way I look stupid. So I hope that's not true. It's either you or me, Dan. What's he talking about? Western Australia is a state. Is there a state called Western America? Yeah, I guess you're right because there's South Africa. Yeah. There you go. Listen, I never said I was a geography whiz. Okay. So... You never said he was a whiz. I never said I was a whiz. There we go. John, he says, okay, Google openly admits that there are around 200 signals that they look

for when ranking a website. Yeah, we only hear about three of them. Content, keywords, and links. So what are the 197? I mean, this is worth repeating because this is such a great question. Google does talk about having over 200 triggers for their algorithm. And we talk about content. What are they? Content. Links. Links. And we talk about it so much we don't know. Content, keywords, and links. Content, keywords, and links. So what are the other 197? What a great question. Who cares? Yeah. You think you need to know that? Look. All you need to know is what we tell you. That's right. If only it were that simple. So we spent some time. We did some research. We made a couple calls and found some answers to this. Now, this is really some... Thanks, John. First of all, you put us to work. Yeah. We appreciate that. And we found a Bible. Yes. It was full of SEO, different SEO things. It was like 60 pages or something. And this is something we found from... We did not write this. We found this from seomoz.org. Seomoz. If you get on there and you search... If you get on seomoz, the URL, again, is really long. If you get on seomoz.org and you search for Search Ranking Factors, I'm sure you'll come up with this. The title of the article is Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 3. Version 3. Here. Y'all can take a look at it. Yeah. There you can see it. So this is where we found. So what we found is that they gave us like maybe 10 or 12 categories of factors. No, maybe 10 categories of factors, 8 to 10. And then if you click into one of those factors, then they give you a list of 10 to 20 actual techniques that you could use. And we'll start... We may not get through all of these today, but here's the first category. When you say May... May. I think what you mean to say is there's no way in

hell... There's not a chance that we can cover all of this information. This is going to go into the new year. There you go. This is going to take a year. This one, just the first one that I'm looking at, god dang, okay, it's 24 points to it. The first category that we're going to cover is on-page, keyword-specific ranking factors. Before we get started, this is exciting. I did want to talk about, we just got some stuff up for one of our clients. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's talk about that real quick. Like, we mentioned quite a while ago in a podcast that we were going to start work on TOSM.org. Yes. And the first thing that we're going to do is make changes to the website. One of the things we needed to do is add content. And really, this is a good example. We still have more work to do, by the way. But we're at a point now where we're able to start search engine optimization. So we're talking about two months of preparation. And a big part of that is this is an orthopedic surgery center. We are not orthopedic people at all, right? And orthopedic surgeons are pretty busy. In fact, the whole office is incredibly busy. So it took us most of this time just to get the content. And actually, frankly, Paul went out, met with one of the representatives over there, compiled as much information as he could, and he wrote the content. That's what we're willing to do for our SEO customers. And this resulted in the new first page. So if you go to TOSM.org, you're going to see a website that now talks about, you know, let's take a step back. Go to TOSM.org forward slash index old dot ASP. And that's the old index page. And what you'll see on that old index page, for those of you guys looking at the video, you'll see just an image of it's two of the doctors. And if you really look at it, all

it looks like is, okay, they got two doctors and they've written some article. And, you know, I don't know what these guys do. I don't know what orthopedics and sports medicine is about. Now go to TOSM.org and imagine you've arrived at this page because, I don't know, you're hurt your hand or wrist. Your foot or ankle is injured. My back's some pain. And you come to this page and you look at this page and this is really about SEVO, what we talk about all the time, search engine visitor optimization, which is when they come here, who's the target client and what do they know and what are they looking for? And they just want to know what you do, right? They want to know that you work on hands and wrists, spine and back, hip, knee, hip and shoulder. And we're actually still have to do some adjustment to this page. But now each one of those is a link to a page. Each one of those pages is keyword optimized so that we're going to really start our inbound link work on this website. And that's where we're at. We wanted to give you guys an update. This really shows, oh, here's the newer, good point. Here's the newer webpage and you can see right there you've got four different, the lighting may not be that great, but you've got four, six different things that we do. The company actually wants to add at least two more. At least two more. And we're going to adjust the page and we also need to bring in some local components. We just wanted it to get to this point so that we could start doing SEO on it in a major way. So now it says, hey, we're an orthopedic surgery center. We can handle problems with your blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's cool. That's what visitors look for. My hand hurts. And now they'll probably, oh, okay, they handle hand problems. Let's go. Let's see what's up with there.

Think about it. On that first page, if I ended up on this first page because I typed in back pain, well, there's nothing that says back pain. You know, this is classic SIVO. If there's nothing about, if I arrived on this page because I typed back pain and there's nothing about back pain, I'm going to bounce. Bounce. Yes. That's what I'm going to do. I was like, leave, go home. I'm going to bounce. Okay. Try a different browser. That's pretty funny, actually. So that's cool. Check out TOSM.org and look what's going on with it. And, you know, feel free to borrow some ideas. You know, everyone should be doing this. And give us their comments, too. You know, if you think, oh, you know, you guys are morons. Yeah. That's fine. We've heard that before. Yeah. Yeah. And he's not with us anymore. Rest in peace. Because we killed him. Okay. You can go for the subtle. He's not with us anymore was enough. At least you didn't tell him how he chopped him into pieces. Stuffed him in the back. He's under the reception desk. Okay. So, on page, keyword specific ranking factors. Like I said, there are 24 different tips of things you could do. What I did is, or what we took is we took the ones that we felt were the most important. The ones that are of most importance. And I found about three out of the 24. The first one is, keyword use anywhere in the title tag. I mean, if you've listened to this, we've told this before, you put a keyword in your title tag, that'll take you, what, 30 seconds? I mean, that's something quick and easy you can do. Also, having keyword use as the first word of the title tag. And that's actually something that you would tell me about if we could use the keyword as quickly as possible, especially with writing content. If you could have the keyword the first thing, that can have a pretty big effect on you. In your

header tag. One of the things that's really interesting about this particular article, not only does it talk about, and let's be honest, this is all guessing, right? This is all guessing. We do not know the Google algorithm. The only people who know the Google algorithm are people who have been injected with immediate explosive devices as soon as they start to talk about the algorithm. And so we're just kind of postulating, okay, based on our experience, what tends to work to get people on the first page, these are the key factors. Not only did it go through those factors and give kind of some estimate of the importance, it also had consensus. So they had a number of people who commented on these things, and what was the consensus? And keyword use anywhere in the title tag had moderate consensus. Keyword use as the first words had light consensus. And I'll be honest, that really surprises me. I'm really surprised, because I would think there would be very high consensus that having the keyword, now maybe this was an either or or something, who knows how the queries were set up. Keywords anywhere in the title tag, must. Absolute must. Must. Keywords as the first words, probably. Yeah. Most probably. You know, and it just boils down to, okay, if you knew the title, and the title had, wow, this is going to be a hard one to come up with an example. If the title had Houston Plumber only, or Houston Plumber provides great service, that's one. Or if you had Houston Hero saves cat, he is a Houston Plumber. Okay, well, it's just logical that the fact that the keywords are in the first part of the title tag really has more value. That's the crux of the information in that page. Yes. And Google recognizes that, and that's what we operate on here. We want the keywords as early in the title as possible. One more that was pretty good was using your keywords in your root domain, so if you are a

plumber, having a domain that's HoustonPlumber.com. Another great example. Yeah. Go back and listen to our interview with Joe Orsak. His domain name, when he started his company, he started with the domain name, ImproveMyCreditUSA.com. So, ImproveMyCredit, when you go to type ImproveMyCredit, his domain has all of those three words in it, including USA. So, that's a great example of include the keywords in your domain if that's something that you have a choice to do. Yeah. And that's actually a really good example. We need to figure out which podcast that was so we can tell. Let you know. Yeah, we'll put it in the blog cast. Yeah, I don't know where that is. And, okay, so those are three things that we find are important. Go on, I'll get that information. Here's some more stuff that we don't really find that's important. I just want to give you guys examples of, hey, what are the other, here's some of the other 197 things, John. Okay, keyword use in external link anchor text on the page. I mean, yeah, you should do it. It's good. But it's not something you need to do. Keyword use in page folder URL. Keyword use in page name URL. I mean, keyword use in the subdomain name. I mean, we can keep going on and on. Keyword use in comment tags in the HTML. Keyword use. I mean, there's so many different things that you could stuff keywords into, but you don't need to do all of it. And I know some of you are out there saying, well, crap, every time I listen to you, you give me four other things that I could do for your SEO. Can I do all of this? You know, if you have an unlimited budget and unlimited time, yeah, you should do all of this. Hire us. Yeah, there you go. If you have an unlimited budget. We can do a lot with an unlimited budget. Oh, man. Cancun. I promise you, man. Unlimited. You give us an unlimited budget, I'll make your dead

relatives come back from the dead. Even if he's under our reception desk. The Joe Orsak interview was around podcast 32 or 33. So if you get on iTunes or any one of the places that you can view our podcast, you know, all of our podcast. Take a half. Skirp. Your head's about to fall off the video. So if you get onto iTunes or any one of the podcast places, you'll be able to see, look around 30, 32, 33, and you'll see an interview with Joe Orsak. That's where you can see that. That was a really good interview. Okay. So the next category we found are, and I didn't highlight these, are on-page, non-keyword ranking factors. And let me grab these. Again, there are, this is the second category that we've gone into, and there are 12 different ones of these. So another good, one of importance is existence of unique content on the page. Duh. I mean, I don't even know what to say. What's king? What's king? Content is king. Is king, queen, prince, and court jester. I mean, you got to have content. We kicked this dead horse. And it's good to be the king. It is good to be the king. Yes. That is of utmost importance, unique content on your page. People always will send requests. And one of the common things I see, and I'm having to say, is content. You need more content. You can't have too much. Can you have too much content? Too, you know. You can have bad content. But you need good, I guess, let me rephrase this. Unique quality content on the page. What was the consensus on that one? The consensus, 9.2. Okay, I don't really. There were 72 SEO experts that were interviewed in this. And everybody and their mama should have agreed with that. Yeah, okay. I mean, content, you need good keywords. You need good quality content. I love the concept of this article, though. Oh, I do. I definitely love this. The concept of getting experts together and having

them comment and their consensus. That's really cool. There's one more that I'm kind of questioning whether it's a... Well, I guess it is important. The recency of page creation. Freshness of the actual page creation. What about the... Remember, that's only 50%. So, this is kind of falling off our scale. I don't... I'm not thinking that that's that important. I'd say... And if I had to take a wild guess, I'd say they included that because they do give some importance to... New content. To new content. Fresh content. Okay. And, yeah. There you go. So, I would say what's important would be... I guess it could be the relevancy and the freshness of that content. Of the content, yeah. Especially, as we know, I think in our last podcast, we talked about how Bing and now Google are indexing Twitter. Oh, are indexing Twitter. So, there is an absolute awareness in the search engines that recent content is actually going to be more relevant and more interesting and valuable to their clients than something that's been static for, I don't know, months and months or weeks or whatever. Weeks, yeah. I wouldn't even... I'd say now, static is like... Six months. Weeks? Yeah. Yeah. A few months. Yeah. Because now, things are changing, changing, changing. And this just kind of popped into my head. Now that we did say, hey, Google, all the major search engines are indexing Facebook and Twitter, does that mean you want to run out there and just put, you know, at eWebStyle.com everywhere so that to get more links back to your website? No, I would not run out and do that unless I'm commenting, putting some relevant post about some web design or SEO. The bottom line, and one of the things in here, and I think we'll get to that in a little bit, it talks about negative factors. And one of the things, they make a really interesting statement, you know, things that would... Yeah, we're not going to get to that. Yeah, I know we're not going to

get to that. That's why I was skipping to... I want to talk. I'm like, that's... I want to talk. I think that's... Here it is. This is very interesting. You're going to steal my thunder, huh? You're going to steal my thunder. Yeah, I'm going to throw this one in, because it's relevant about what we're talking about. You highlighted that one. Cloaking with malicious, manipulative intent. And it's interesting that they made such a distinction. Cloaking is when you can actually determine whether it's Google's search engine robots that are visiting your web page, or is it a user? And you could say, you know what? If it's a Google robot, let me show this content. And if it's a user, let me show this content. That is cloaking, because Google thinks when other people, when users, typical users, go to those pages, or when they send traffic to those pages, that they're getting a particular type of content, and you're actually potentially showing them something different, their statement here is that negative ranking factor is cloaking with malicious or manipulative intent. Well, it breaks down into two components. There's malicious, and then the manipulative part of it, right? So malicious would be, I'm going to have information about puppy dogs and kitties, and I'm going to show a page of porn, right? So that's malicious. That's just, that ruins the Google experience. I would submit that- Well, that, I mean, I'm not going to be upset, you know? That's just me, though. As long as it's free. If I got to pay for it, you know, that's just, that's not right. I was looking for puppies and kitties, and I'm not paying for any porn. I'm not paying for it. So if you're cloaking, remember that. Make it free. Make it free. So if you did have, you know, content specific to puppies and kitties, but you wanted to show a flash thing of puppies and kitties and information or whatever, you know what? That's not really malicious. It is manipulative. So you can get, you know,

we don't recommend that, but there is a distinction. The reality is, is what Google really cares about is their user's experience. If I go out and search for puppies and kitties, and because of something that some webmaster is doing, Google sends that visitor to something unrelated to puppies and kitties, Google's not happy. That's not what they want to happen. So you think about that in terms of what content on the page. If I'm searching puppies and kitties, and then the title, it says puppy and kitty pictures, kitty with the T-T, not T-T-I-E, and the title says puppy pictures, and then there's another header that says kitty pictures, and it talks about puppies and kitties. You know, all of that is valuable information, and it's got links from Pets R Us. I don't even know what that is. It's not a store. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. If it's got links from Pets R Us into your page because you've got relevant, cute pictures, that's where Google finds value. That's the simplicity of search engine optimization. Your job is to provide a good experience to the users of Google. Wow. That's pretty profound. That, I could not have put that, I could not have put that, I could not have put that Quick, somebody write that down. Any better. I mean, that's it in a nutshell. Yeah. Damn. In a nutshell, that is exactly what, that's what we're trying to do. That's what everybody should be doing, providing good content for your users. Well, you've seen, if you're watching this video, that we've set our pieces of paper down because it is yet again time to leave this podcast. Now it's time to say goodbye to our family. M-I-C-K. You remember that song? M-O-U-S-E. Don't hold that against us. Please don't hold that against us. M-O-U-S-E. M-O-U-S-E. Some people are like, what the hell are y'all talking about? Mickey Mouse Club. Oh, anyway. All right. This has been another great podcast. Remember, send us your emails. You can clearly see we answer your

emails. This whole podcast was about answering emails. You can write to us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. You can still get a free website analysis. You just need to go to our homepage, e-webstyle.com, and then click SEO, and there's a place where you can call us. We're happy to hear from you on a phone call. If you're a little bit shy and you just want to send an email, there is a link to a form. Go ahead and fill out that form. And somebody here, often Paul, but somebody here will take care of you, get that analysis to you, and if you've got any follow-up questions, just like Darren did, we'll get those answered on air. And one more person who I forgot to mention, Todd. Todd at 2CostaRicaRealEstate.com. Todd sent a request on Monday. Todd has sent you an email. Check your email, fool. Hit me back. But thanks for your request, and thanks to the whole entire country. That's like number two contact from Costa Rica. To the entire country of Costa Rica. Awesome. Y'all are now my favorite podcast listeners. I promise. You just switched from Darren at the beginning. Darren's going to be so good. Why do you have to bring up the pass? All right, you guys. We love having you. By the way, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. This is the... Happy Hanukkah. Happy Hanukkah. Happy... Kwanzaa. Kwanzaa. Hey, we... Everything. Everybody. It's wonderful. It's just a little bit of love. Boxing Day. Yeah. If you're in Canada, I think. Yeah, that sounds cool, though. Yeah. This is the end of podcast number 43. You have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Check us out there. One of the people who wrote us said that they wanted to know where they could help us out. They can help us out by creating an iTunes account and submitting a review. Please do that. Anyone out there, wherever you found us, please submit a review. We love your reviews. Be honest. We want you

honest. We're... I think you get the impression we're really honest here. And we try to be. And until the new year, this is the end of podcast 43. I'm Chris Burris. And I'm Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.

This episode answers

Matthew Bertram, host of The Best SEO Podcast
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint

Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG® (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.

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