Since I work for one of the so-called “boring niche” website, I’m still amazed on how much spam there is around, and how Google is rewarding it over “good quality backlinks”.

I’m not gonna mention the website that I analyzed but it’s one of the main competitor of the website I work for, and it’s ranking for A LOT of really good KWs with high search volume / high commercial intent, in a competitive country like United Kingdom.

Here is what I discover:

They built actively 87 (eighty seven) follow links in a porn website.

All 87 follow links are having exact anchor texts, for high SV and high commercial KWs.

These 87 follow links are created in a hidden board of the porn website.

These 87 follow links are created by 87 different profiles posting in the board.

Now, your question might be: “well, ok, we all created these links, what is the news? “

It’s not a news per se. But this is still showing how in 2017 Google is still not doing much for these spammy links. This isn’t also a new thing, but it’s making my job harder and harder when I need to explain I don’t want to replicate these links for the reason they are spammy and placed in a hidden board of a porn website, with spammy anchor text. There is simply no reason why I should create this, but seeing the results, I might think of doing it. #noiwont

The real news though here is that I discover a new porn website full of movies made by vegan and vegetarian people, and I’m vegan. So I was emotionally connected to the whole story.

So, no matter how boring linkbuilding can be, it’s always worth it. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : Things you can discover when linkbuilding
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

I was just making some searches (yeah, I should read a book next time), and I typed in “diet coke bad for you” in Google.co.uk from Germany.

Here is the result Google presented to me:

Now, wait a minute….what???

Google is showing a result where there is written:

“There are no studies that indicate any long-term health risks from drinking diet soda. Diet soda (defined as calorie-free carbonated beverages sweetened with aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame-potassium, or other non-caloric or minimally caloric sweeteners) is not harmful to health, well-being, or body composition.”

I was curious about this, because we all know the truth about this topic (that’s why lots of people are looking for that query… some sort of guilt in disguise). With the direct answer, the normal (and lazy) user, when finding this information provided by Google, is happy: “told ya, diet sodas are ok, so the fact I’m obese it’s not for that! Google told me!”

If you click the source of that answer (the link below), and you read the whole article, you see that the conclusion of that article is not straightforward as the part Google decided to put in the box:

Although swapping out soda for diet soda is a solid step in the right direction, the true solution is retraining and rewiring our body so we don’t need to chase that sugar fix; we can slay our addiction to sugar entirely.

Diet soda is better than normal soda (meh), but still, it’s better to eliminate completely the addiction to sugar and any type of substitutes.

Anyway, that blog is just reporting one out of 1000000000 opinions out there. For an important topic like this, it’s not right to show only one (wrong) extract of one blogpost giving one opinion, and put it in such prominence.

Lazy people of the internet will accept Google Direct Answer as solution to their doubts, and will act upon it. The topic is really important, and in cases like this, Google should not provide direct answers; it should provide the best information out there to allow concerned users to dig deeper into the problem and form their own opinion. 

Come on Google, you can do better!

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : Google Direct Answer is fucked up (sometimes)
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

Working in marketing since 5 years, I realized how much time you spend to always search for a new idea, “something that still doesn’t exist”.  I focused my career on SEO and content marketing, and god only knows how many posts per day are written about the next big thing or “what companies should do” or even better “definitive guide to win your customers”.

There is a constant race to invent something new, and yet many companies are doing it wrong. Companies are asking copywriters to write no matter what, because “content is the way to go”. You rarely focus on the quality, because there is not enough time or enough money, or simply the important part is the number of posts written per month (yeah, nice KPIs). Companies are opening blogs, social profiles and so on that quickly become ghost cities or even worse a dump of everything created.

I was going through Mackenzie Fogelson presentation called “Why content strategy isn’t enough” and a voice in my head (nope, I’m not crazy) was saying: why doesn’t marketing stop for a moment and look back, rather than always forward?

Let me explain. Look at this slide:

It’s a simple concept, but effective. And the sad thing is that apparently in 2016 we still need to encourage companies to be “honest about products” , “don’t let customers down” and “act with integrity all times”.

Wait, really? Those principles are basically the same thing my grandmother (ciao nonna!) always said to me and my family. My grandma never had a company but she was saying she was going to that shop, to that bakery, to that fruit stand because they were honest about what they were selling, they were kind and true and they were talking with clients understanding how to improve.

This was happening 50 years ago for my grandmother, and it’s crazy to think that after all these years we are not able to do the same thing online. We are spending millions of euros in stupid marketing (interruption marketing anyone?), we are talking about “stellar” content or “awesome” customer experience, yet customers fly away at the first chance. We are preaching to create a stellar content, and what about when all the companies will create stellar content? Are we going to suggest to create “interstellar” content? Apocalyptic content maybe?

Here is my suggestion: rather than always push forward, stop and look back. Go back to what was making the world a better place, because all online marketers have a lot to learn from traditional marketers; all big companies have a lot to learn from small shops and retailers. Traditional marketers weren’t even aware of the term “marketing”, but yet they were better than us, online marketers.

I’m asking modern marketing to go back to the roots of what was making a product a great product, an experience a great experience, and try to recreate that online. Rather than scream, talk. Talk with your customers, talk with the people in your company, talk with people who was doing the same thing years ago (before all this online craziness). Just because you are online and you have millions to waste doesn’t mean you are cool. Because in the meantime, people are still going back to the small cozy shops down the street, because they trust the people inside or they go online to shops where they can talk with real people on the phone or where there is a human contact. You can have the “stellar” content as much as you want, but it’s not enough. You know what? 78% of companies can even stop writing, can shut down blogs and social media, and they will never notice a change. The rest of the companies are doing just fine without writing 13 posts per week, and without spending money in interrupting the very same customers you are trying to impress.

My grandmother didn’t go to that retailer because he was interrupting her on her way to the church or home by screaming at her a different offer every day.

Looking back is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign that you care. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : Marketing should look back rather than always forward
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

I often hear SEOs say there is a link between a page’s crawl frequency and its visibility on the SERPs, like a spider request is related to a boost in visibility.

Even if it’s true that websites with high PageRank are crawled by Google more often and deeper, we cannot think there is a correlation with rankings. A resource is only crawled more often by the spider to check if the content has changed.

If a page has had the same content for years, there is no point asking the spider to crawl the page over and over, as the search engines already have the content of the page. If the content of a page changes often, then the spider should crawl the page more often in order to always have the up to date version.

Search engines are able to approximately calculate how often a resource changes its content. In this way, the spider can crawl pages that regularly change more often, and pages that don’t less.

Theoretically, webmasters can contribute to the spider’s decisions by creating an XML sitemap, adding the “changefreq” attribute to each page with the frequency the resource changes. This attribute, however, has been overused by webmasters previously, so Google no longer takes it in to consideration as much.

This post is the English translation of a chapter of the italian ebook “Mitologia SEO” written by Enrico Altavilla. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : SEO myth: a page loses visibility or relevancy if not crawled frequently by the spider
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

When you perform a search like [site:nameofthewebsite.it], Google shows the resources of the website in no specific order. If it’s true that, generally, on top of the list you will find the homepage, it’s not true that the other resources are listed in order of importance.

Many years ago it was possible to use a hack to see all the resources from the search engine in order of PageRank, but this function was eliminated by Google a long time ago.

A similar thing happens when you use the operator “site:” with keywords. In this case, Google shows the pages of a website in order that could be of relevance. However we need to bear in mind that this order is not the same as what Google would present on the SERPs for the same query, without the “site:” operator.

When using the “site:” operator, it is important not to reach conclusions to apply to normal rankings of resources, as the results of a query with a “site:” operator are following a different set of rules.

This post is the English translation of a chapter of the italian ebook “Mitologia SEO” written by Enrico Altavilla. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : SEO myth: Google search operator “site:” is showing resources of a website in order of importance or relevance
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

Until a few years ago, webmasters could use the “noindex” instruction to request that Google does not index a page. Usually this instruction was given through a metatag called “robots” in the <head> part of a page.

Google would not index a page where it found the tag “noindex”. This meant Google was not adding to its index any link between the words in the page and the page itself (as happens in a book index). Without indexing, the user was not able to find the page with a query to the search engine.

However Google has changed the “noindex” instruction in recent times. Today Google is even indexing pages with the “noindex” tag, but they are not shown in the search results.

In other words, the “noindex” tag affects the visibility of the page in the search results, but is not affecting what Google actually indexes. A consequence of this is that Google can use resources in noindex as it wishes.

This is something to consider, especially when we don’t want to allow Google to understand what a page is about. The “noindex” instruction is no longer sufficient. The appropriate alternative is to ask the spiders not to download the page through a “disallow” instruction in the robots.txt file.

This post is the English translation of a chapter of the italian ebook “Mitologia SEO” written by Enrico Altavilla. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : SEO myth: “noindex” tag means Google is not indexing the page
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

A Google penalty is a punishment given to a website that has acted against the search engine’s webmaster guidelines.

It’s not against webmaster guidelines to have 404 errors in a website. Therefore there is no penalty related to 404 errors, and Google has confirmed this many times.

The HTTP 404 status code is just a tool, and because of that, is absolutely fine for webmasters to use. For instance, a 404 page is the correct status code to present the user if they are looking for a non-existent resource.

Best practice dictates that a website should not have internal links pointing towards non-existent resources, as this leads to a poor user experience. At the same time, a webmaster ought to be aware if any resources are returning a 404 status code by mistake.

In Google Search Console, webmasters can find a list of 404 errors (not found). It is good practice to periodically go through the list and examine each error, to understand if it is correct that that specific resource is non-existent. If not, then that resource should present a 200 status code.

Another good practice is to crawl the website periodically with a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to look for any 404s missed by Google.

This post is the English translation of a chapter of the italian ebook “Mitologia SEO” written by Enrico Altavilla. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : SEO myth: Google penalizes websites with 404 errors
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

One of the more fascinating examples of smoke and mirrors in SEO is the idea of a formula to decide how often a keyword or phrase should be repeated within a page to increase the page’s relevancy to that word or phrase.

Documentation about information retrieval (the discipline that explain how search engines work) shows that the formulas used by search engines to calculate the relevancy between keywords and documents are far more complex than those invented by SEOs.

The use of artificial formulas by SEOs, for example the crude calculation known as ‘keyword density’, is wide spread in the SEO world. This is because SEOs wanted to industrialize the process of content optimization. Formulas also provide a pseudo-scientific touch, even if there is nothing particularly scientific about it.

SEOs would not be able to work with the same formulas actually used by the search engines, since they use parameters which are determined by data only the search engines have.

When writing content, it is best to use copywriting techniques, rather than insignificant arithmetic formulas. For example, including in the text the keyword and phrase you wish to rank for, without repeating to the point of making the text unreadable to the user.

This post is the English translation of a chapter of the italian ebook “Mitologia SEO” written by Enrico Altavilla. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : SEO myth: keyword density
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

Many years ago, search engine results were pretty much static. For a specific query, the SERPs were almost the same for every user. Going forward, search engines became more sophisticated and now the results for a specific query vary, taking many factors in to considerations.

One of these factors is the location from which the user is making the query: two people in two different places might receive different search results for the same query. Other factors taken in to consideration by the search engines include what the user searched before and what the user actually clicked before. Nowadays, the SERPs are very different and are personalized based on the user.

The goal of a rank tracking tools is to make one or more queries to the search engine and report on the position of the website being monitored. The position, however, is what the search engine decides to show to the software, and is not necessarily will see. All rank tracking tools present artificial results, in the sense that they are not what the user actually sees.

The concept of “position” as we knew it has become completely outdated thanks to the personalization of the SERPs. For this reason, SEOs started using the concept of “average position”. This is an average of all the various positions a website occupies, as seen by different users. But Only the search engines can accurately measure average position.

Webmasters can use a Google tool called “Search Analytics” to see the average positions of a website for specific queries. Even if Search Analytics data is not complete, the average positions provided should be considered the more accurate representation of what users actually saw in the SERPs.

This post is the English translation of a chapter of the italian ebook “Mitologia SEO” written by Enrico Altavilla. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : SEO myth: rank tracking tools give real and correct website position in the search engines
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski

A fairly widespread belief is that Google simply searches for what the user writes in the search field or pronounces to their mobile device.

In fact, one of the main tactics used by search engines to produce more accurate SERPs is to use the user’s keywords only as starting point to understand what the engine needs to search.

The keywords given by the user to Google goes into what has been called a “revision engine”. This is where the search query of the user is reviewed and possibly expanded with new words / concepts, or simplified. This reviewed query is then used to identify the relevant documents in the search engine index.

When SEOs are facing the task of optimizing a page for a certain search phrase, they should not only consider the keywords in it, but also try to understand which other keywords and concepts Google might use to give better meaning to the query.

This is easier said than done, as there is no way of knowing how Google reviews queries; many SEOs are prone to adding related words and synonyms when writing text, in the hope that they will be used by Google in the review process.

This post is the English translation of a chapter of the italian ebook “Mitologia SEO” written by Enrico Altavilla. 

Same crazy stuff, right?. Read the whole story : SEO myth: Google searches for what user writes or pronounces
Do you want to know more? Visit the whole site: Alessio Madeyski