Optimize SEO: Almost a Decade into the Panda Update

Last updated on February 27, 2020 at 04:29 pm

Google has had its fair share of makeovers over the years that both seasoned and rookie SEO players have experienced. As the Panda Update celebrates its 9th birthday, it is an insightful effort to see how far it has come from its conception over a decade ago.

February 24, 2011, marks the date that Panda stirred the SEO world. Black and white-hat strategists alike restructured their perspective of how they present their site through their content. I remember the days when updates such as the aforementioned Panda or Penguin update kept us on our toes on what our next move will be.

This is what makes SEO exciting, it helps keep your mind sharp as you think of strategies and innovations that can help you build your visibility on the search engines. It is arguably harder to do SEO today with all the updates sprouting about but in the end, SEO is still a zero-sum game so you will be rewarded if you play right. Having said that, let’s take a look back at how the Panda update changed SEO as we see it today.

What is the Panda update?

Panda was launched for the purpose of hunting down content farms as they grew in number. Google decided that their quality should not be compromised because of this unethical method of publishing content. Their team branded the update as a way to find higher-quality sites.

The algorithmic improvement honored sites with original content and highly relevant branding. Furthermore, it tackled trust and authority. Looking at it now, this must-have served as a sneak peek for the E-A-T metric for sites.

Before it was known around the globe as the “Panda” update, it was first called “Farmer”. This is a subtle homage to content farms that have been dramatically hurt by the update. To rehash how the update shook most of the webmasters’ world back then, it is known as the major algorithm update that affected 12% of the English search results.

This is by far and large, a heavy percentage of the listings. Businesses came to a close as they were flagged down for using unethical techniques in increasing their site’s visibility. There were many casualties but this only proved that there is a right way to do SEO.

How did it affect our team?

We are a decade strong just like the Panda update and I have witnessed how it improved the search engine by a mile. The team I lead has always practiced the best for our clients with ethical and powerful strategies that help them secure a position on the first page.

The Panda update is a blessing to us because this has helped us rise above the ranks as a team that respectably practices SEO. Personally, my blog did not suffer from this update, but we felt its effect briefly as there is a slight dip in traffic after February 24.

Fortunately, it picked right back up again. Not bad for a site that’s not even a year old by this date.

Here is a comparison of our traffic from February to March:

Traffic was steady as February only lagged behind because it is limited in the number of days. This is no surprise since I have been very strict in the articles that I write ever since. I make sure that the blog’s content is relevant to the readers and will give them the value that can help them with their goals.

The Panda update proved to be an advantage for us because it went on to help us achieve an approximately 100% increase in traffic as its version 4.0 rolled out. Practicing ethical methods to win at SEO will help you stay afloat even if you are vulnerable to getting hit by an update. It pays to be a good guy and the Panda update is a testament to that.

Optimizing for the Panda Update in 2020

There’s no such thing as stagnant SEO. It is a common misconception that optimization is a passive chore. To help you stay on the winner’s side, you must adapt and work hard together with the updates that come from the system. More than that, optimize content for user experience and it will help you as much as you are helping your audience with the content you are generating. Here are some tips to help you stay on top of things in relation to the Panda update:

Design and develop a great website

You do not need extravagant web design, you just need to have a clean one. Your content would be put to waste if you do not have the right structure for it. Begin by having a clear vision of how your site will look as you insert your content. Although you can say that this is a vanity metric, having a clean and well-maintained site helps in improving the user experience of your site visitors

Publish original content

That’s all there is to it, really. Everything goes back to content. Creating content just for the heck of traffic will bite you in the butt when you’re least expecting it. Although we have algorithm updates to guide us on the right path, always keep in mind that you should create content for people. Provide useful, evergreen, unique, and quality content and be of value to your audience. Beware of risky content strategies that veer away from helping your site build up authority against competitors.

Focus on specific topics

It is easy to fall prey to writer’s block if you focus on a distinct topic but you should keep in mind that this will help you build authority for your site. One thing that the Panda update tackled is content focus. I recommend that you plan around the content themes that you know will give value to your readers.

Key Takeaway

It’s nice to look back on this and see how far SEO has come since its early days. Today, I am leading a team of over 50 people which is also a milestone since SEO Hacker was just a one-man team. Now, we have come a long way from having a few thousand readers to an average of 60,000 users. This is a fruit of the team’s labor in satisfying user intent and optimizing according to Google standard, we will be prepared for more updates in the years to come with powerful strategies that deliver results.

Optimize SEO: Almost a Decade into the Panda Update posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

Liquid Web Review: The Best Fully Managed Web Hosting Provider

Last updated on February 26, 2020 at 02:41 pm

We’ve all been there. Having an incompetent or below average hosting provider that did not perform up to par which led to our website’s malfunctioning or an intense slow down in page speed – both detrimental to SEO and your business website’s growth. Every minute that a website is down due to server problems, you lose traffic, you lose rankings, and you lose profit.

When looking for a hosting provider, there is a vast choice of companies that offer and promise the same thing – 100% uptime and 24/7 support. Until all sorts of problems come up and it takes days before you even get an initial response.

For this post, I’ll be reviewing the hands-down best hosting provider that I’ve ever had – Liquid Web. I’ve tried multiple hosting services in my decade of experience and thus far I had the best experience with Liquid Web. I’ve been a long time user of Liquid Web. In fact, I’ve used it for both my websites and my clients’ websites. Liquid Web offers fully managed web hosting and they are the best at it.

Before going into this review, I highly recommend that you give Liquid Web a visit and see what they offer. They have solutions that will fit your needs whether you are a freelancer, agency, or business owner.

Liquid Web: Fully Managed Hosting Provider

Liquid Web provides fully managed web hosting services and has been in business since 1997. They have more than 25,000 servers hosting more than 30,000 customers worldwide. They own three private core data centers; US-Central in Michigan, US-West in Arizona, and EU-Central in Amsterdam. Each data center has on-site security and highly trained technicians.

What is Fully Managed Hosting?

Fully managed hosting means the hosting company sets up everything for the customer; from the operating system, network infrastructure, hardware management, security scanning, plus 24/7 customer support and other additional services.

Fully Managed Hosting vs Unmanaged Hosting

Unmanaged hosting is like a DIY option. You just pay for the server and everything else is done manually by you. So if you don’t have any experience with IT, you’ll have to hire someone else to do it for you.

However, for fully managed hosting, you don’t have to go through all of that. To simply put it, you pay for the services and the company takes care of everything for you so you can spend your precious time doing something else for your business.

What Makes Liquid Web Special?

When it comes to hosting services, I always look for companies that I could trust. As an SEO agency with multiple clients and hundreds of tasks each every day, we have to trust that our hosting provider will take care of everything for us to save us time. And that’s what Liquid Web has been doing for us for a long time already.

High Performance and 100% Uptime

Liquid Web promises high-performance managed web hosting and 100% uptime. Currently, we are using Liquid Web’s dedicated server plan and we are hosting 50+ high-traffic websites on it. Everything is running smoothly and I could easily say we are getting what we paid for.

24/7/365 Customer Support

One of the things that I absolutely love about Liquid Web is their 24/7/365 live chat support. They brand their customer support team as the “Most Helpful Humans in Hosting” and I couldn’t agree any less. 

Liquid Web has a team of more than 250 highly-trained, knowledgeable, and friendly people who are ready to assist should you encounter any problems. They are Windows, Cisco, and Red Hat Linux certified so you are guaranteed to talk with someone who knows their stuff.

They have 3 options for support; phone call, live chat, and their ticketing system through email. For live chat, I usually get a response in less than 5 minutes at any time of the day. And for tickets, I get a response within 30 minutes after I send a request. This is REALLY good and an industry best.

For scale, most hosting companies outsource their support. I have experienced talking to people that have inadequate knowledge and would give generic, scripted answers.

Free Migration

I initially hosted just SEO-Hacker.com on Liquid Web to test the waters. And when we decided to transfer all of our sites here, their team assisted us all the way to migrate our sites from our old host. The best part of it is it’s free.

Website Security

Prior to Liquid Web, our websites regularly get cyber attacked and rather than focusing on developing and improving the websites, our team would spend hours cleaning malware. Liquid Web guarantees protection from any cyber threats and regularly scans for vulnerabilities. This is crucial because I have seen websites get penalized due to hacked content and that is an SEO’s nightmare.

Managed WordPress and WooCommerce

If you are building your website on WordPress or setting up an e-commerce site on WooCommerce, Liquid Web offers complete solutions for that.

Liquid Web’s Managed WordPress plan offers no traffic limits so you don’t have to worry about people slowing down your website, an automatic SSL, and daily backups. They also provide full server access that allows you full control of your website.

For WooCommerce solutions, Liquid Web gives you access to thousands of themes and flexibility to make your site look great plus its mobile optimized. Liquid Web also makes it easier to customize product categories and pages so you don’t waste that precious crawl budget. And since WooCommerce is built on WordPress, everything is SEO-friendly.

The best thing here, in my opinion, is speed. Liquid Web’s platform is built on PHP7, SSL, and Nginx that optimizes WordPress speed in its full potential. Website speed is one of the most important ranking factors for SEO and it keeps users from exiting the website even before the website loads.

Liquid Web’s Products

Unlike other hosting companies, Liquid Web does not offer shared hosting plans and only offers advanced plans. They also run their servers on SSDs (Solid State Drives). They are more expensive HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) but SSDs run faster and delivers better performance. Liquid Web offers:

• Dedicated Servers
• Virtual Private Servers
• Cloud Dedicated Servers
• Managed WordPress
• Managed WooCommerce

Each product has pricing options depending on your needs and you save more with annual plans than monthly plans. To get more information about the products they offer and find what suits your needs, take a look at Liquid Web’s Hosting Plans.

Final Thoughts 

When it comes to hosting services, I would never settle for less and I would always want the best. As an SEO, I highly depend on my web hosting company to make sure that our clients’ websites are up at all times. Liquid Web has been the most reliable hosting company that I have tried. If you’re hosting company is giving you headaches with server problems and unresponsive customer support, I highly recommend that you check out Liquid Web and let the folks there do the work for you.

Liquid Web Review: The Best Fully Managed Web Hosting Provider posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

Google Releases Update to Change of Address Tool

Last updated on February 20, 2020 at 07:28 pm

As Google slowly migrates old tools they had to Google Search Console, they’re also coming up with new updates that will help webmasters and SEOs do their work, monitor changes, and accurately track their website’s performance. Now, with their recent update to Google Search Console’s Change of Address Tool, we’ll now be able to update and monitor our site moves. Here’s how:

Google Search Console Change of Address Tool Update

Through the change of address tool, you can notify that you’re moving your old domain to a new one. This leads to them prioritizing the crawling and indexing of the new domain as opposed to the old one. The change of address also tells Google to forward the authority and signals from the old domain to the new one. 

So, aside from redirecting the pages of your old domain to the new one, it’s necessary for you to use the change of address tool to fully and securely migrate your website. But Google rolled out an update that we’ll all like: 

Redirect Validation

Since redirects are a massive and integral part of site migration or moves, it makes sense that Google will come up with this new feature in Google Search Console’s change of address tool. With this new feature, you’ll be able to validate if the redirects you have for your top URLs are valid or are erroneous. 

As you can see from the screenshot above, it’ll show you the validity of your redirects and if there are pages from the old site that currently don’t have redirects. This could potentially be of massive importance in assuring that all of the pages you want to redirect are properly redirecting. 

Prompts

Once you’ve started with your change of address request, Google Search Console will have prompts that will remind you that the site is moving to a new domain. You will see the prompts once you log in to the dashboard of the website you’re migrating from or the website you’re migrating to. 

Our Experience with the Change of Address Tool

The primary reason why we’re particularly excited about this new update is that migrating websites to new domains is a difficult undertaking just because it involves too much monitoring and quality assurance just to get the best results. 

Of course, we’re not exceptions to the failures of site migrations. One of which happened a year ago with one of our clients. To give you an idea on what happened with our site migration here’s a graph of their movement for one of their most important keywords:

8 months. 8 full months of missed opportunities for traffic, conversions, and growth. While this was happening, we did a deep dive on why this was happening and we found out that the old website’s pages were still ranking for the same keywords even though we’ve redirected them properly and we’ve used the change of address tool to signal to Google that our website is moving. Fortunately, we still recovered. 

However, it makes me think that if we had these new features, we’d be able to track better and monitor better our migration since we also had pages that weren’t redirecting properly, etc. 

Key Takeaway

Although this might not seem like a large update – it isn’t – we can’t deny the fact that this update is a massive help for SEOs and webmasters alike. Google also advises us that site moves or migrations will take up AT LEAST 180 days or more. This is what they said regarding the 180 day period:

“After the 180 day period, Google does not recognize any relationship between the old and new sites, and treats the old site as an unrelated site, if still present and crawlable.”

Do you have any stories about a site migration gone wrong or are you just excited about this feature? Comment your stories and opinions down below!

Google Releases Update to Change of Address Tool posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

How to make a traffic-boosting content structure

Last updated on February 18, 2020 at 05:18 pm

How often do SEOs repeat time and again in their minds that content is king but fail to make it convert to traffic? It all boils down to SEO site structure and how content plays a role in leading users through a significant experience on their website. I have been in the industry for a decade now and I have learned that your content is just as good as its value for promotion. If your content is all over the place with no foundational basis on how you can use it to boost traffic to your site then your efforts may well be wasted.

You must be asking, “How do I know that content is really the key ingredient for winning at digital marketing?” Well, you have your tracking tools to give you the numbers you need to justify success but in times when you need a more human approach to your analysis, you have to look at the way you have structured your content for users to see.

Let’s talk about how you can start building a strategy centered around your content’s overall structure on your SEO site.

Keyword Planning for SEO Site Structure

Keyword research is a perpetual effort. You should have a well-rounded approach to your approach to discovering keywords that give you ROI. As an SEO specialist, I never stop looking for keywords that work well for my clients. Especially since search engines can update in the blink of an eye, you too should adapt just as quickly. Even better, if you plan keywords for prevention of getting hit with an update, this would require sticking to topically relevant keywords to match evergreen content.

Special shout out to Mangools for their new dark mode visual, looks great guys! Anyway, back to the subject, a well-planned content structure would start with your initial research for seed keywords. From there, you have to plan for your vision of content. Begin with the very purpose of your online presence. What do you plan to give to users? How are you going to provide them with value? If you’re an SEO webmaster like I am, of course, you have to search for SEO keywords. Start from there and segment your keywords per product, service, or whatever section you would be creating landing pages for.

Consider SEO Siloing for Content

SEO siloing is one of the strategies that you should consider if you want to fix your site’s content structure. There are two kinds of siloing: Physical Siloing and Virtual Siloing.

Physical Siloing is mainly about making a subfolder for each topic you have for your content. An example would be www.helloworld.com/digital-marketing/seo/seo-strategies. This ensures that you have your content all segmented through its URLs. It would become as specific as you go along but you can also risk messing up your site structure if you get confused about the subfolders you create. To avoid that, just make sure to highlight the most important sections in your navigation bar. This way, you can create silos more effectively.

For this article, we are going to focus more on Virtual Siloing. This is when you use your internal links on your website to maintain connections for your content, therefore increasing relevance and structure for it. Hyperlinks can do a lot more for your site than you let on and if you put in the hard work to organize them then it can significantly boost your traffic. This would be advisable if you do not want to create physical silos for your site.

Make an Interlinking Database

It would be easy to keep track of your virtual silos if you are just beginning to publish content on your site but what if you have more than 50 blog posts already? You should come up with an interlinking database for your site.

Here’s an example:

You can organize it by anchor text like the first selection on the list or you can try organizing it by links. If you plan on optimizing anchor texts, take note of them and see if you are doing a great job of making your content rank for those keywords. This can also help you evaluate what anchor texts bring in the most traffic to your site which you can use for your linkbuilding efforts. It would be a great tracker for the interlinks you plan on organizing for your site. As you may well know, Google gives importance to your links. This is not just about backlinks but internal links as well. It would be advantageous for your site if you organize your content through silos. Search engines will detect your site’s topical relevance if you connect your pages to each other. Think of it this way, don’t expect other sites to link back to you if you do not regard your content worthy to be interlinked to. This creates urgency for you to organize your links.

Key Takeaway

You should never leave out content when organizing your SEO site structure. More than satisfying the search quality rater guidelines, you also give your audience more knowledge about what you do. With all the chaos that happens in the SEO world, it is important that we seek security in structure. Knowing this helps you focus on your goal to help you keep winning in your digital marketing efforts.

Comment down below and let’s talk about how you trained your content to work wonders for you.

How to make a traffic-boosting content structure posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

How to Handle Pagination for SEO

Last updated on February 14, 2020 at 07:27 pm

Handling pagination is often a tricky task for SEOs. If you’re using crawling tools for your on-page SEO, I’m sure you’ve experienced seeing warnings that you have duplicate page titles and other meta tags only to discover that all of those are coming from paginations. 

The famous belief is that pagination is bad for SEO – well, not really. It depends on how you handle it. There are a lot of myths surrounding how pagination can hurt SEO but the truth is, you can never avoid having pagination on any website at all because it is completely normal for a website experiencing growth.

In this post, I’ll cover everything there is to pagination: the good, the bad, and the view from Google’s eyes.

How does pagination work?

Pagination is when a series of related content is divided into multiple pages. This is often done for a list of blog posts or a list of products for e-commerce websites. The main purpose of having pagination on a website is to have a better user experience. Pagination is implemented by having links that allow users to jump from page one to page two. Paginated pages should also be easily identified through the URL.

When is Pagination bad for SEO?

Improper Canonicalization

The most common mistake in handling pagination is when webmasters canonicalize all pages to page one. Take note that the canonical tag is only used to avoid duplicate content if two pages have almost or exactly the same content.

Unnecessary Pagination leading to thin content

This is a rare occurrence, but there are websites that use pagination to force users to view more pages to gain more ad revenue. Not only is this bad for user experience but it commonly causes thin content.

Adding Noindex Tag and Blocked from Crawling Through Robots.txt

Another famous belief is that pagination dilutes ranking signals and link juice. So what a lot of SEOs do is that they put a noindex tag on paginations or block them through robots.txt only allowing the 1st page to be indexed and crawled by Google.

This is bad for SEO because Google can use pagination links to better understand the site architecture of a website. And since paginated pages don’t contain the same content, it is also a lost opportunity for rankings.

How does Google handle Pagination?

In 2011, Google announced that webmasters can now use the HTML attribute rel=prev/next to indicate that a group of URLs belongs to a paginated series. The rel=prev/next tag should be found at the <head> of every page in a series.

The first page should have a code like this:

<link rel=”next” href=”https://example.com/blog/page-2”>

And the second page should have a code like this:

<link rel=”prev” href=”https://example.com/blog/”>

<link rel=”prev” href=”https://example.com/blog/page-3”> 

However, SEOs were shocked last March 2019 when John Mueller said that Google hasn’t been using rel=prev/next for years already in a Twitter thread.

Hours later, the official Google Webmasters Twitter account then announced that they are officially stopping support of the rel=prev/next.

So what do SEOs do with pagination now without rel=prev/next?

Best Practices for Pagination

There is no clear answer on how SEOs should proceed with paginations because of the confusing message from Google. Users prefer single page content but they stated that webmasters should do what is best for their users – and pagination makes it easier for users to navigate.

The reason why Google stopped supporting the rel=prev/next attribute is that their AI is smart enough to detect paginations on a website and it will automatically select the 1st page to show in the search results. However, Google never mentioned that rel=prev/next is good or bad for SEO and they will only stop using it for indexing. 

My advice is to keep on using rel=prev/next because search engines can still use this for site structure and crawling of content. Here are other tips to make sure you implement pagination right.

Use Self-Referencing Canonical tag

All pages in a pagination series should have a canonical URL to itself. As I have mentioned earlier, only use the canonical tag for pages with the almost or exact same content. Having two pages with the same content in pagination should never happen. With that being said, use self-referencing canonical tag for all pages and properly implement rel=prev/next. 

Change the Meta Tags

In a Google Webmaster Hangouts session, John Mueller mentioned that they still treat pagination as normal pages. So should Google choose to index paginated pages from your website, it is a good practice to optimize the on-page SEO of paginations as you do with normal pages.

Don’t Include Pagination in XML Sitemap

The XML sitemap of a website should include URLs that have priority in crawling for search engines. If you want to save your crawl budget, it is best that you don’t include pagination in your XML sitemap rather than blocking them through robots.txt.

Use Faceted Navigation

If you’re handling a huge website or e-commerce site with thousands of products, I highly recommend that you use faceted navigation. Faceted navigation allows users to filter content using the attributes that they prefer. Although it is also tricky to implement, this is the best way to handle websites with thousands of pages and avoid the same problems caused by improper pagination. I wrote a guide on how faceted navigation affects SEO and you should definitely check that out.

How to Handle Pagination for SEO posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

Review Rich Snippets Now Available in Google Search Console Reports

Last updated on February 11, 2020 at 03:18 pm

Knowing what users and customers think of your business is an immense part of growing and increasing your business’ reputation. This is why such a large number of websites use the review or “AggregateRating” schema markup on their websites. Having a rating displayed or a short review is what most webmasters want since it makes their search engine listing look better than the rest which results in a click and a potential customer. However, tracking all the pages that have these review markups can be a hassle, especially if you have an eCommerce website that has thousands of products, all of them having a review schema that could lead to a review rich snippets. But Google has now released something that can help all us webmasters and SEOs.

Review Rich Snippets Report

In a recent post in Google’s Webmaster’s Blog, they announced that Google Search Console now enables support for Review Snippets. This means that you can view the reports to monitor the performance for your review rich results, how you can improve its performance, and to check the issues with how you applied the review structured data. This report might have stemmed from the fact that Google updated how their algorithm understands review rich results in the search listings. Here’s what it looks like in Google Search Console:

You can find the “Review Snippets” report in the sidebar under the “Enhancements” tab. As you can see, the report started tracking and displaying data last February 3. Additionally, through this tab, Google mentioned that after you fix an issue with your review structured data, you can use this report to validate your fix. This leads Google to re-crawl the error page and will verify if the fix you made is correct.

You can also now see the performance of the pages that have the review structured data in the performance tab of Google Search Console as announced by Google. However, when I tried it out for our business website, there were no choices for review snippets in the search appearance filter. As you can see in the screenshot below, Review Rich Snippet search appearance isn’t included in the choices.

However, I believe this can be attributed to the lack of data in Google Search Console since they only started tracking our website’s review rich results about a week ago. Hopefully, in the near future, the data becomes available so we can see how our pages that have the review rich result are really performing. 

Lastly, Google mentioned that you can test out your Review rich results snippet structured data in their Rich results test tool. Through this tool, you can test the structured data or code of a page to check if it has any errors or if it needs improvements. Here’s what it looks like when I tested our business website’s structured data in the tool:

As you can see, the review snippet structured data is complete according to Google. However, our search engine listing used to display the star ratings for our homepage, it has been quite a long time now since they were removed. 

While investigating it, I noticed that there was a difference between the review rich results structured data that Google uses as an example and the way we use the specific structured data type. The primary difference being that we use the “AggregateRating” structured data while Google uses the “reviewRating” structured data. In hindsight, there aren’t a lot of differences between the two, but we’ll be tinkering with these things a bit to check what does and what doesn’t and I recommend you do the same since Google already gave us everything we needed to play around with our structured data implementation.

Key Takeaway

This is not massive news from Google but it does help us better understand one of the most underrated factors inside our websites. Structured data implementation is a technique widely known by webmasters and SEOs but is severely undervalued in the industry. Through these updates in Google Search Console, hopefully, we’ll have a deeper understanding of how structured data can help improve our search presence and how properly implementing them could lead to wonderful results in the search market. What do you think about this recent addition to Google Search Console? Is it helpful or not? Comment it down below!

Review Rich Snippets Now Available in Google Search Console Reports posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

How to prepare your site for Google’s Manual Review

Last updated on February 6, 2020 at 03:20 pm

Google Manual Review is made possible by a dedicated team of evaluators that help their team in making search fresh and relevant to users. Of course, you would want to be on their good graces even if a positive quality rating does not directly affect rankings.

Most businesses start going into digital marketing without knowing about Google’s guidelines for sites and the standards of quality they require. The worst-case scenario would come in the form of an immediate disappointment to find that you are at risk of having your whole site’s footprint deleted off the bat with just one penalty.

How would you know if Google is peering at your site for a manual review? Check out some of these tips and a guide on how to avoid being a bad egg in Google’s eyes.

What is a manual review?

Google has a dedicated team serving their purpose as quality evaluators that can help in determining if a particular site is following Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. A manual review is a measure to maintain efforts in improving search for all users. With that said, you should also take manual actions into account.

A manual action is prevalent for those who unethically control the search index so if you are doing white hat tactics then you wouldn’t have anything to worry about. Manual actions are seldom handed out by Google so if you receive one, then that means you’re into shady tactics to increase your rank in the SERP.

Starting a Manual Review Diagnosis
If you suspect that a manual review has been bestowed upon your site and has negatively impacted your site’s performance then you should know where to look. Performing a diagnosis for your Google Manual review starts at looking at one or two of these metrics:

1. Traffic Drop – Check to see if your traffic is drastically affected. This can mean that you fail to satisfy an algorithm or you did not employ the right measures to be satisfactorily evaluated not just by Google but by your users. If you did not receive a manual action description on your Google Search Console panel, then you might want to check out other root causes of this traffic drop.
2. Perform a Link Audit – If you are flagged for unnatural links and you are not using black hat linkbuilding strategies, then opt to check your link profile. The quality of links pointing to your site can harm your site’s reputation in Google’s eyes. Links with duplicate content, spam, hidden anchor texts, banned websites are what you should look out for.There’s a possibility that link injectors targeted your site for these dirty links, therefore, warranting a manual action for your site. Once you have collated all these bad links, prepare a disavow file and request action from Google.
3. Make use of advanced search operators –  This is a nifty feature that not everyone keeps in mind. I always see to it that I use Google’s advanced search operators to do my site audits. Although it is very helpful to have a crawling spider to help you see what pages are indexed from your site, the advanced search operators give you an explicit view of those pages. There are instances when hackers take advantage of your weakness through site plugins that are not updated, login page vulnerability, or link injection. The advanced search operator will help you see if there are new pages with unethical content through these attacks so this is one of the things that you should consider in your manual review diagnosis.

How would you know if a quality rater visited your site?

For this selection, I’d like to give props to Neil Patel for the awesome idea to create a segmentation for the Quality Raters in Google Analytics. This is especially useful if you’re wary of the search quality raters who will visit your site. It also helps to know which pages they are sampling on your site based on their behavior measured on Analytics.

Here’s how you should do it.

Step 1

Go to Audience > Overview. Click + Add Segment then go to + New Segment

Step 2

Go to Advanced > Conditions then copy the names found on the screenshot below

Step 3

Check the audience overview for this particular segment. Currently, I do not have raters visiting the site yet but I expect it to have 2 – 3 users that will come once this has fully rolled out. You might have noticed that it has a green symbol beside it since the duration of tracking is condensed.

Step 4

A yellow shield symbol is an indicator that your data is sampled. This means that when Quality Raters view your site, this will help you identify them.

Key Takeaway

I don’t like cliches but it is always true that prevention is better than cure. Preparing for a manual review may seem tedious for some but it is a good effort in itself nonetheless. With this Google Analytics feature, it would be a great performance report and evaluation of your optimization efforts on the site. Content will be your best bet to pass a quality evaluation with ease. Make sure that you are constantly augmenting it for users and for Google’s standards as well.

How to prepare your site for Google’s Manual Review posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

How to Track Youtube Rankings with Accuranker

Last updated on February 4, 2020 at 06:41 pm

With more than a billion active users, YouTube is the second-largest search engine which makes it the place to be for content creators and marketers looking to get more search traffic. 

This makes YouTube optimization a necessity for content creators and marketers alike that don’t want to miss out on the opportunity of growing their audience. I wrote a YouTube SEO guide if you want to know how you can further optimize your videos. 

Just like in any other search engine, tracking your rankings on YouTube and being aware of how you are doing against your competitors is crucial. 

Lucky for us, Accuranker just released an awesome new feature that makes monitoring YouTube performance easier – you can now track your keyword rankings for your YouTube channel. Knowing where your channel currently stands gives you a better understanding of our channel’s performance and gives you more opportunities to optimize.

Before I get going with the review, I highly recommend that you check Accuranker out. They provide a 14-day trial so you could take a look at what they have to offer. You could get your Accuranker free trial by clicking this link.

Track your Video Rankings

Setting up keyword tracking for YouTube is pretty much the same with keyword tracking for SEO. The setup is easy and won’t take more than 5 minutes to set up tracking for a channel.

The first thing to do is to open up Accuranker and create a new project. Rather than putting your website’s URL, this time you have to put your YouTube channel’s URL.

Next, you can select the locale and location you want to track and select YouTube on the list. You can track both Desktop and Mobile rankings.

Finish up by adding keywords you want to track. It will take a few minutes for Accuranker to check the rankings depending on the number of keywords that you put. Here’s how it looks:

In the dashboard, you could immediately see the current rankings and the URL of the video that is ranking for the keyword. Accuranker will also give the average monthly search volume of the keywords.

YouTube SERP Features and Competitor Analysis

What I like about most about this update is that Accuranker also shows if there are YouTube SERP features for the keywords you are targeting such as:

• Channel 
• Playlist
• Related searches
• Promoted Video

This already gives me an idea on how I could further optimize my channel and videos. Similar to how featured snippets can greatly increase click-through rates, grabbing a YouTube SERP feature can boost your videos’ traffic. If you want to know more about YouTube SERP features, you could click the icons on the further right column in the dashboard under ‘SERP’.

Track Rankings Across Search Engines and Monitor Competitor Performance

Aside from YouTube search results, Accuranker can also track the performance of YouTube videos in search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. It is available for both mobile and desktop.

You could also add up to 10 of your competitors and Accuranker will also check their rankings. This allows you to compare your competitors’ performance to your own.

Key Takeaway

Whether you are a business owner looking to improve brand awareness and attract leads through video marketing or a solo-content creator aspiring to be a YouTuber, tracking your rankings on the search results for the keywords you are trying to rank for gives you a bigger perspective on just the numbers on your videos’ engagements.

 

How to Track Youtube Rankings with Accuranker posted first on https://seo-hacker.com