One of the biggest names in cryptocurrency is hoping to become one of the biggest names in the burgeoning field of NFTs, that is artwork on the blockchain. Coinbase announced they are launching their own NFT platform later this year on their blog yesterday.

Of course this is big news for anyone in Crypto Art or using Crypto Art for Marketing purposes, and it is a good move by Coinbase since they are closely aligned to the crypto world already.

However, what was most interesting to me is the mechanism Coinbase has chosen to help spread the word about their NFT platform. When a user signs up to be on the waitlist for the NFT Platform they are assigned a number in line, mine is currently 356,905. That means 356,000+ other people will get a chance to join the platform before me. If I was interested in buying art early or getting my works listed before the platform gets congested, then I would probably want to be much higher up on this list.

Artists, marketers, and investors who really want to move up the list can invite their friends using a special link provided by Coinbase. The more of your friends accept the invite to join the waitlist using our link, the higher up on the waitlist you move. Coinbase doesn’t specify how much higher each signup takes you, so there’s a chance you move up only one spot or they could move users up over all of the others who haven’t referred anyone at all making the jumps much higher for those who refer even a handful of new users to the waitlist.

Not that you should use my link to sign up, but here it is just in case: https://coinbase.com/nft/announce/1PWF8C

For brands and marketers out there, since Coinbase has such a large userbase already there’s a chance that moving up the waitlist could score you some brand recognition points if you were able to get up towards the top and place a branded NFT for sale while others join the platform.

The post Coinbase is Launching an NFT Platform and They Are Using a Waitlist System to Drive Word of Mouth for It appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

Facebook is stepping up their business support with a button that allows you to directly contact them from Business Manager instead of finding the right form to fill out. pic.twitter.com/ue79pD2UhT

— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) October 8, 2021

It appears Facebook is finally taking direct customer service for business users seriously. After years of account closures, lockouts, and heavily-siloed customer service the social media giant just started rolling out a new way to access their customer support directy via Business Manager.

To get support from Facebook’s team you used to have to find the right help article in a sea of content and then hope that the article included or linked to the correct form, and that the form itself was still functional. Many times a search on Google or Facebook’s own Help Center would surface dated, incomplete, or just plain the wrong content for problems business users were having. Then chat support was introduced, which eventhough it is often hidden behind a dark pattern, made contact with the support team a lot easier (on most occasions) – as long as you know how to find and use it.

This new experience builds on and improves the past experiences, giving marketers, agencies, and business owners one singular access point for nearly all Facebook Ads and Facebook Pages customer support. The only catch appears to be that you have to have set up a Business Manager account.

To find the new Business Customer Support follow these instructions

1. Go to Facebook Business Manager on a desktop/laptop

(i.e. https://business.facebook.com)

2. Look for the help icon on the lower left-hand side and click it.

The icon is a question mark inside of a circle.

3. This will open up a new pane on the right-hand side of the page.

This pane showcases customer support content targeted to you. This pane includes A search bar for help documents, recommend articles, additional resources, a list of your past support cases, and a greyed out button that reads “Contact Support Team”.

4. Find and click the button.

It is the button we are most concerned with here. Currently the button is found between the “Recommended Articles” section and the “Additional Resources” section. However, Facebook likes to move things around so don’t be surprised if the button is in a new location by now.

Clicking the button will reload the right-hand side pane with a simple 3-step process to get support.

5. Select where on Facebook the problem is occuring.

Most likely you’ll see your main FB ad account highlighted in Step 1 titled “Where is the issue ocurring?”. If you click this you’ll be given a search box where you can look for other FB Ads accounts, Pages, Instagram accounts, and other Business Manager accounts.

6. Select the issue you are experiencing.

Under Step 2 “What issue are you experiencing?” there’s a dropdown of various issues that you might be getting impacted by, select the one that best fits your case.

Depending on which asset you selected you’ll see a different list of options. I’ve broken down all of the ones I can see below. The lists are often repetitive and sometimes include items that feel out of place.

Ad Accounts
– My ad was disapproved
– Other issue with creating and editing ads
– My ad is pending in review
– I need help changing my daily spend limit
– I need help with my Facebook pixel
– I have a question about my ad account status
– I have a question about the learning phase of ad delivery
– I have a question about charges on my invoice
– I need help changing my billing threshold
– My ad account is disabled
– My ad account was hacked
– I need help wit had account permissions
– I need to add a payment method for my Facebook ads
– I have a question about ad account spend limits
– I need help with rejected catalog items
– Why was I charged so much for the ad I ran?
– I have a charge on my ad account from someone else
– I want to request a pre-review of my ads
– I want to change the timezone or currency of my ad account
– My political ad was disapproved
– My Business Manager / Ad Account has advertising restrictions
– How do I set my billing threshold?
– I have a failed payment
– I need help with an ad I accidentally created
– Why are my ads still running?
– My ad account is disabled
– I need help with a failed payment
– I have a question about the dates of charges on my statement
– I want to create a new disclaimer to run ads about social issues, elections, or politics
– I have a question about a delayed bill I just recieved
– My ad account is disabled
– I think my payment method is restricted
– How do I ad funds to my ad account using a manual payment method?
– I need help with my disabled ad account
– I need help with my Boleto Bancário
– I have a question about creating and editing ads
– Other ad account issue
– I have questions about my ad set budget and schedule
– I need help with my ad account settings

Pages
– I have been blocked from using a feature
– I have been blocked from using a feature
– I want to change the name of my Page
– Content has been removed from my Page
– My Facebook Page was hacked or taken over by someone else
– I need help merging my Pages
– I want to request a Page verification
– I want to remove an impostor account
– I have an issue creating a timeline post for my Page
– My Page was unpublished
– My Page was unpublished
– I want to report an instance of bullying/harrasment
– I want to setup a Global Page
– I want to change the name of my Page
– I want to appeal a Page merge

Business Managers
– I want to create a new ad account in Business Manager
– I need help adding or removing a new admin of my Business Manager
– I want to add a page to Business Manager
– The button to verify my business is disabled
– I want to add an ad account to my Business Manager
– My Business Manager account has advertising restrictions
– I want to remove a page in Business Manager
– I want to deactive ad accounts in my Business Manager
– I want to verify my business

Instagram Accounts
– My Instagram was hacked
– I want to change my Instagram username
– My Instagram account has been disabled/deleted
– I want to request an Instagram verification
– I want to reset my Instagram password
– I want to remove an impersonation account on Instagram
– I want to report a fake profile
– My Instagram handle was disabled
– I want to report an instance of bullying/harrasment
– Other Instagram issue

7. Review Details and Contact Facebook’s Business Support.

Depending on your selection Facebook will give you more actions to take. Often this is requesting that you read a help article or taking an action that might fix your problem. However, with each response selected you’ll either be prompted to contact Facebook directly and ask for communication via Chat or Email OR there will be a button at the bottom that also triggers this option. In short, each selection you make gives you the opportunity to directly contact FB’s Business support. Which is a very new experience for business customers.

Sometimes the email option shows as unvailable and the wait times for a chat response might change too.

8. Have Your Problem Resolved (Hopefully!)

We haven’t had the chance to test out this new support experience. However, it doesn’t look like it will improve wait times for hearing back or the actual support itself, only make getting in touch with someone at Facebook / Facebook’s support contractors much faster. This has been one of the largest pain points for customer support on Facebook for years, so even if that is all this new experience does it is a welcome addition and it should still speed up total time until a problem is resolved, which previously could take weeks or months. There is a chance that some support requests are actioned on faster through this new system which would make it even better.

Have you used the new Business Manager Support feature? If so let us know in the comments how your experience went and if you discovered any quirks, issues, or tricks.

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The post There’s a New Way For Businesses to Request Support From Facebook appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

That means you’ll need to have a budget of at least $30,000 or more according to a form on their website. Reddit advertising has a fairly robust and well-explained document outling their policies around advertising financial products and services including cryptocurrencies and NFTs which you can find here.

Advertising an NFT or an NFT platform won’t just require working with the Reddit sales team directly or meeting the minimum spend requirements, but you’ll also need “proper licensing and registration from applicable government agencies and regulators”.

NFTs are hot at the moment, but the crypto space moves so quickly you never whats next. If you’re considering jumping into NFT marketing as a brand or you want help marketing your NFTs, or if you’re building the next level and want marketing / futurology consulting reach out and let our team leverage our expertise for your success.

Discussion on Reddit:

The post NFT and Crypto Art Ads on Reddit Have to be Managed Via a Reddit Ads Sales Representative appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

This has SEOs noticably a little on edge as carefully crafted title tags built to both attract clicks and higher rankings are now being swapped out for things they hadn’t really intended to be title tags. The new changes appear to have caught some even veteran SEOs off guard and scrambling for a way to track these changes (even though, again, this isn’t exactly new).

One of the funnier examples is how Google’s automated title tag changing system gets Mordy Oberstein’s current position wrong.

pic.twitter.com/ynBSMXs7ho

— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) August 25, 2021

• Google has updated their documentation on Title Tags here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/good-titles-snippets
• And started a forum discussion about their system automatically swapping title tags here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/122879386/your-feedback-on-titles-shown-in-search-results

How to Track Title Tag Changes

Europe based Sistrix, an SEO tracking and research tool, noticed the need and opportunity and dove in to create a solution for SEOs before any other tool. Within about a week of the first reports of this issue and inside 24 hours of Google admiting to the new change the tool provider released a new function which allows users to see what pages Google has swapped out title tags on.

Here’s what this looks like according to Sistix. The red words are those in the original title tag, the green words are the one’s Google has added to the title tag. In one of the below examples Google decided a page should be gender-neutral so deleted the word “male” and came up with a word to replace it with (“strength”) in another example Google appears to have decided it was keyword stuffing the title tag and updated it to use a keyword searchers might use to find the page.

Sistrix’s SEO module costs 100€ / month for tracking SEO data.

This is currently the only way to proactively track for title tag changes that I am aware of. In the near future it is likely other SEO toolkits will follow, at which point this article will be updated to include them.

Graphic showing how the Sistrix title tag change function looks via Sistrix from their official announcement

The post How to Track Google’s Title Tag Changes appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

When Google opened up their Shopping engine to organic listings in 2020 it marked a major shift in ways small ecommerce businesses could compete against major established brands such as Amazon, Walmart, and Wayfair. This new area of organic search though is not very well understood and we wanted to gather insights from the SEO community on what factors are believed to impact rankings the most in this new organic experience as well as in Google’s standard search engine when it comes to ranking a product page or product listing in the results.

These are the ranking factors or signals most important to ranking a product itself highly in Google’s standard search engine and in the new organic Shopping search experience according to top SEOs with recent experience in the field.

It is my hope and the hope of my staff and those SEOs who graciously helped us with this survey that the data below helps you better prioritize your ecommerce SEO efforts and helps power the success of your ecommerce business.

Product Ranking Factors for Ecommerce SEO in 2021

Top Product Ranking Factors for Google Organic Search by Category

Our first question asked SEOs and ecommerce marketers to select all of the the factors that impacted a product page ranking higher in Google’s standard organic search. Respondents were allowed to select all of the specific factors they believed had a positive impact on these rankings. Each specific factor was grouped into a category with other factors which helped us create a list of types of ranking factors or signals in order of most important to least important.

Top product ranking factors by category in order

1. Inbound Links – 29%
2. Product Information – 20%
3. Technical SEO – 17%
4. Reviews / Ratings – 17%
5. Social Signals – 6%
6. Product Media – 4%
7. Other Signals – 4%
8. Other Site Signals – 3%

Top 5 Specific Product Ranking Factors for Google Organic Search

When looking at the specific responses to this question our expert and highly experienced respondents clearly selected 5 ranking factors for products as more important than others. This is broken down by percentage of total respondents who selected the specific factor.

1. Keywords in the name of the product – 81.82%
2. Keywords in reviews of the product – 72.73%
3. Keywords in the title tag of a product – 72.73%
4. Number of inbound links directly to the product – 72.73%
5. Internal links from similar products on the site – 68.18%

Top 20 Specific Product Ranking Factors for Google Organic Search

And here are the top 20 specific ranking factors

1. Keywords in the name of the product – 81.82%
2. Keywords in reviews of the product – 72.73%
3. Keywords in the title tag of a product – 72.73%
4. Number of inbound links directly to the product – 72.73%
5. Internal links from similar products on the site – 68.18%
6. Keywords in the product description – 68.18%
7. Page load speed of the product page – 68.18%
8. Anchor text on inbound links to the product – 63.64%
9. Click-through rate from SERPs to the product page – 63.64%
10. Number of links to the product from trusted journalistic sources – 63.64%
11. Product availability – 59.09%
12. Total number of links to the website from trusted journalistic sources – 59.09%
13. Keywords in the meta description of a product – 54.55%
14. Category / Categories the product is in – 50.00%
15. Average Rating of the product – 50.00%
16. Number of reviews of the product – 50.00%
17. Linking domain aggregate value – 45.45%
18. Linking domain quantity – 45.45%
19. Editorial reviews of the product cited on the product page – 40.91%
20. Number of links to the homepage of the website – 40.91%

Top Product Ranking Factors for Google Shopping Search by Category

We asked our expert respondents to select all of the ranking factors they believe impacted how a product ranked in Google’s new organic shopping search which allowed us to group those ranking factors into categories and highlight the most important categories for product rankings in the shopping search experience. Unsurprisingly factors that are related to Google’s Shopping Feed (Merchant Center) are the top category as this is a critical component for being included in the Shopping search much like a Google My Business listing is a critical component for a local business to appear on Google Maps.

Top product ranking factors by category in order

1. Google Shopping Feed – 27%
2. Product Information – 24%
3. Reviews / Ratings – 14%
4. Inbound Links – 11%
5. Technical SEO – 10%
6. Other Signals – 4%
7. Other Site Signals – 4%
8. Product Media – 3%
9. Social Signals – 3%

Top 5 Specific Product Ranking Factors for Google Organic Shopping

1. Availability (Google Shopping Feed) – 72.73%
2. Product Title (Google Shopping Feed) – 72.73%
3. Keywords in the product description – 68.18%
4. Average Rating of the product – 59.09%
5. Country of Sale (Google Shopping Feed) – 59.09%

Top 20 Specific Product Ranking Factors for Google Organic Shopping

1. Availability (Google Shopping Feed) – 72.73%
2. Product Title (Google Shopping Feed) – 72.73%
3. Keywords in the product description – 68.18%
4. Average Rating of the product – 59.09%
5. Country of Sale (Google Shopping Feed) – 59.09%
6. Keywords in the name of the product – 59.09%
7. Product Availability – 59.09%
8. Page load speed of the product page – 54.55%
9. Click-through rate from SERPs to the product page – 50.00%
10. Keywords in the title tag of a product – 45.45%
11. Language (Google Shopping Feed) – 45.45%
12. Last updated date (Google Shopping Feed) – 40.91%
13. Number of reviews of the product – 40.91%
14. Condition (Google Shopping Feed) – 36.36%
15. Price of the product – 36.36%
16. Category / Categories the product is in – 31.82%
17. Keywords in reviews of the product – 31.82%
18. Recency of reviews or ratings – 31.82%
19. Linking domain quantity – 27.27%
20. Number of inbound links directly to the product – 27.27%

Top Product Ranking Factors for Google Organic Search When SEOs Only Select Their Top 10 Factors

Finally to figure out importance we also asked our SEOs and ecommerce marketing experts to only select their top 10 ranking factors for a product in Google Organic Search. While our previous question allowed us to see collectively what factors SEOs considered important asking a second question this way should validate the aggregate data from our previous question, challenge it, or add to it.

When looking at this data broken down by our ranking factor categories SEOs tend to put more emphasis on inbound links and technical SEO than the product related signals such as descriptions, reviews, and media.

Top product ranking factors by category when SEOs only select their top 10 overall ranking factors in order

1. Inbound Links – 40%
2. Technical SEO – 19%
3. Product Information – 16%
4. Reviews / Ratings – 10%
5. Other Signals – 5%
6. Product Media – 4%
7. Social Signals – 3%
8. Other Site Signals – 3%

Top 5 specific product ranking factors for Google Organic Search when SEOs only select their top 10 overall ranking factors

1. Keywords in the product description – 63.64%
2. Number of links to the product from trusted journalistic sources – 54.55%
3. Click-through rate from SERPs to the product page – 50.00%
4. Keywords in the name of the product – 50.00%
5. Page load speed of the product page – 50.00%

Top 20 specific product ranking factors for Google Organic Search when SEOs only select their top 10 overall ranking factors

1. Keywords in the product description – 63.64%
2. Number of links to the product from trusted journalistic sources – 54.55%
3. Click-through rate from SERPs to the product page – 50.00%
4. Keywords in the name of the product – 50.00%
5. Page load speed of the product page – 50.00%
6. Anchor text on inbound links to the product – 45.45%
7. Keywords in the title tag of a product – 45.45%
8. Number of inbound links directly to the product – 45.45%
9. Total number of links to the website from trusted journalistic sources – 45.45%
10. Internal links from similar products on the site – 40.91%
11. Linking domain aggregate value – 40.91%
12. Linking domain quantity – 40.91%
13. Number of links to the homepage of the website – 40.91%
14. Keywords in the meta description of a product – 36.36%
15. Keywords in reviews of the product – 31.82%
16. Linking document aggregate value – 31.82%
17. Customer images or videos of the product – 22.73%
18. Recency of reviews or ratings – 22.73%
19. Linking document quantity – 18.18%
20. Number of photos or videos of the product – 18.18%

Top Product Ranking Factors for Google Shopping Search When SEOs Only Select Their Top 10 Factors

Top product ranking factors for Google Shopping by category when SEOs only select their top 10 overall ranking factors in order

1. Google Shopping Feed – 26%
2. Product Information – 23%
3. Reviews / Ratings – 19%
4. Technical SEO – 14%
5. Inbound Links – 9%
6. Product Media – 3%
7. Other Signals – 2%
8. Other Site Signals – 2%
9. Social Signals – 2%

Top 5 specific product ranking factors for Google Shopping when SEOs only select their top 10 overall ranking factors

1. Keywords in the product description – 63.64%
2. Product Title (Google Shopping Feed) – 59.09%
3. Availability (Google Shopping Feed) – 54.55%
4. Recency of reviews or ratings – 50.00%
5. Average Rating of the product – 45.45%

Top 20 specific product ranking factors for Google Shopping when SEOs only select their top 10 overall ranking factors

1. Keywords in the product description – 63.64%
2. Product Title (Google Shopping Feed) – 59.09%
3. Availability (Google Shopping Feed) – 54.55%
4. Recency of reviews or ratings – 50.00%
5. Average Rating of the product – 45.45%
6. Number of reviews of the product – 45.45%
7. Keywords in the name of the product – 40.91%
8. Country of Sale (Google Shopping Feed) – 36.36%
9. Keywords in the meta description of a product – 36.36%
10. Page load speed of the product page – 36.36%
11. Language (Google Shopping Feed) – 31.82%
12. Product Availability – 31.82%
13. Keywords in the title tag of a product – 31.82%
14. Condition (Google Shopping Feed) – 27.27%
15. Last updated date (Google Shopping Feed) – 27.27%
16. Category / Categories the product is in – 22.73%
17. Price of the product – 22.73%
18. Keywords in reviews of the product – 22.73%
19. Linking domain quantity – 18.18%
20. Number of links to the product from trusted journalistic sources – 18.18%

Ranking Advice and Commentary from Ecommerce SEOs who participated

Todd Perry – Outdoor Gadget Review

“You’ll need to study the most common search terms used by people searching for your items to find the best keywords to target. Using Google’s automatic recommendations and “people even ask” features, you can find keywords. These give you a good idea of which keywords are the most common. You should also look at your popular rivals’ SEO strategies and see what language they’re using and imitate them. Amazon is just as popular as Google for e-commerce searches. Examining Amazon’s keyword tactics will help you learn from the best. Go to Amazon and type in keywords that define your products.”

Oliver Andrews – OA Design Services

“Make sure your content is on point. Good copy, great photos. This will lead to higher click-through rates and will allow you to target keywords more effectively. For e-commerce, that means writing thorough, vivid product descriptions with beautiful, eye-catching photography and plenty of reviews to help visitors make a purchase decision. It also means making it easy for visitors to purchase by making the buttons big enough, keeping your site jam-free, and showing social proof of your best products.”

Nick Chernets – Data for SEO

The most important thing for an ecommerce website’s ranking is thorough keyword research. Once you choose the right keywords, it’s much easier to rank well. One of the very useful tools for this type of research is the Amazon Keyword Tool that shows all variants of a specific word. Also, it’s good to research keywords through a competitor’s list. You can simply find several websites that have a similar offer like yourself and check which keywords they are using. This is an important part of the analysis as you will get a better perspective on what people search and how your products fit in the story. The goal is to choose a keyword that is strong but not too much because you want to be able to rank for it. this can be quite hard for popular products but it’s not impossible to find a combination of keywords that people organically search for and that leads directly to your products.

Max Allegro – Intuitive Digital

“One factor that helps with product ranking is image optimization. Making sure your product images are optimized for file size, file name, and alt text is essential to having your product pages perform better. Avoid putting unoptimized, or excessively large images on your site, as it will slow your site down. Adding a descriptive file name can also help your chances of ranking in Google image search. Lastly, alt text is one of the most important image SEO factors and helps search engines understand what an image is all about. Adding relevant, ADA-compliant, and keyword-driven alt text is an essential tactic for ecommerce seo.”

William Alvarez – Catalyst Digital

“Rewrite all the product information as much as you can to make it unique once your receive it from manufacturers.”

Isaac Bullen – 3 White Hats

“I think that things like product ratings, reviews, availability, etc. all play a vital part in ranking higher in the results. A lot of ecommerce site owners we work with don’t know how to get these things showing up in the SERPs, so we do a lot of schema markup for clients. For sites on Shopify, the Schema Plus for SEO app is a great way to take care of schema markup. For sites on WordPress using Woocommerce, some good options include the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin and the E-commerce SEO plugin by WordLift.”

Jack Shepler – Ayokay

“Create unique, SEO-optimized content for every single product page on the site. When a brand has a lot of products, it’s tempting to either use a standard description for everything or to half-ass it and only properly do some of the products pages. Resist this urge. Make sure to take you time writing these on-page descriptions so that they are well-written. Include your target keywords as well as some LSI keywords. And if you’re selling the same products on Amazon, make sure that you have unique descriptions across the two sites and don’t just use the same product copy on Amazon and your site.”

Michael Anderson – SIGNAL+POWER

“Spend time improving product title tags (for organic search ranking) and product titles within your Google Shopping feed (for Google Shopping search rankings).”

Charlie Worrall – Imaginaire

“One thing that so many SEOs and designers will overlook is the importance of a product code. If your product pages have product codes on them and you’re actively implementing an SEO strategy, anyone that searches for a product code is likely to find their way to your website and go directly to a product page. This is great because so many people just search for product codes when they need something in particular. For example, if you’re working on a car and you need to purchase a certain product but don’t know the name of that product you can just search for the product number on the piece itself.

The best thing about this is that so many people overlook it as a valuable piece of information to have on the page. This means that it’s often a really low competition target for each product code and should be easier to rank for.”

Sam Wright – Blink SEO

“I’d always be wary of declaring something a definite ranking factor outside well-known elements such as page titles in terms of SEO. Google have even said multiple times that structured data, for example, does not directly impact rankings. It’s important to get stuff like this right – FAQ schema in particular can work brilliantly – but the most important element by far is the quality of your product description. The approach you take here will depend on your business – DTC retailers may focus on their brand story, or pushing unique attributes, while multi-brand stores could instead concentrate on providing detail and insight that their competitors don’t have. We’ve already seen that Google’s product review update punishes sites that don’t add any value with their review content. The same principle applies to product descriptions – the more you can show that your site has the best content on each product, the better. If you take this approach it’s likely that you will tick all the right boxes in terms of ranking factors, both direct and indirect.”

Kaleb Ufton – EKOH Marketing

“The backlinks on websites to other products is another important factor. This can be seen by the fact that these pages are usually ranked higher for search engines, and this draws in more traffic from potential customers. This means that it’s not only what you say about your product online but also how many people link to them!

There is, of course, a whole heap of technical factors including metadata, for Google specifically schema is very important.”

John Frigo – BestPriceNutrition.Com

“One area I think many businesses are lacking is product reviews, do something to encourage customers to leave reviews.”

Geraldine Orentas – Gerie Media

“Spend most of your time structuring and getting reviews on your site. Make sure you’re using white hat tactics to receive new, genuine, and valuable reviews that include signals like “verified buyer,” “sponsored,” or “gifted.” Add UGC content with photos, videos, and links to their social accounts to improve credibility and build consumer trust.”

Definitions

Google Organic Search / Google Search – The standard search engine accessed at Google.com and the more classic results from the web.

Google Shopping Search / Organic Shopping – The shipping search engine accessed by users on the “shopping” tab of Google’s website where data comes from information entered by a merchant or brand into Google’s Merchant Center.

Methodology

We surveyed 35 SEOs and ecommerce marketers about what they thought were the ranking factors for each organic experience and collected insights and advice from 18 of these SEOs. We gathered the responses through late-2020 and early 2021. To gather responses we used a variety of online channels including Reddit, Twitter, Facebook Groups, and HARO to help us find SEOs to contribute to this survey, no standard survey lists or communities were used as we sought out those with recent experience in the field. We excluded 13 responses for not being of high enough quality which we defined as not being involved enough with ecommerce SEO, offering low quality insights simply to gain a link, or failing other antispam measures.

The results of this survey taken by vetted subject matter experts are the data highlighted in this study.

The data should be considered collective opinions of SEOs who work in ecommerce frequently and during the period under study and not exact ranking factor signal weight or strength as applied by Google’s series of algorithms.

We did not ask specifically about “Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness” also known to SEOs as “E-A-T” and instead attempted to discern factors that might lead to this giving SEOs a more generic option of “Brand of the product creator” to select if they wished to collectively identify signals of a trusted or authoritative brand of merchandise.

The post Product Ranking Factors Study 2021 appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

There is one fairly large downside though, and that is that Redditors tend to despise advertising but Reddit itself thives on advertisments ran across its thousands of communities. Unlike other social platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Reddit has also never offered users a way to make money from the advertisements themselves on the site and instead asks them to participate by moderating communities as volunteers.

“Yeah, I suppose that’s possible! I would hope that the user would be able to successfully appeal the ban.” – /u/c_jl, Reddit Advertising Staff

Moderators are tasked, as volunteers like most human involvement in digital tech, with keeping communities orderly and making the users of specific communities happy. In turn this helps Reddit itself by keeping engagements on the site/app growing which improves ad impressions, clicks, and of course revenue. The one thing Reddit moderators do not control is the advertisements shown inside of their specific community or ‘subreddit’. This can lead to a sticky issue where users of a community report an advertisement as being spam and the moderators then block the user from participating in that community.

For any brands or users on Reddit wanting to run ads, this presents a unique quandary and one that Reddit Admins (Advertising staff) have agreed could create a possibly bad scenario for an advertiser.

If your brand is participating in conversations on Reddit by commenting or posting content into subreddits AND that same brand runs advertisements, it is possible then that Reddit users will report your account for spamming and that the moderators of those subreddits will ban your account. While this has no impact on your advertisements running through a community, it will make it so your branded or user account is unable to participate in a subreddit. According to the rules of Reddit you cannot circumvent this ban by creating a new account to participate, if you are discovered to be doing so Reddit Admins will take even harsher actions such as shadowbanning your entire account; a process where your account is banned sitewide, you appear to be able to post content to subreddits, but your user profile is invisible to everyone but you and your content is immediately filed away as spam.

Reddit Advertising staffer /u/c_jl confirmed this probability earlier this year although they added that hopefully any bans or shadowbans would be successfully appealed. In my opinion being banned on Reddit, especially as an active spam fighting moderator, even for a few days or weeks is a worse case scenario.

Instead, you should create a branded user name SPECIFICALLY FOR ADVERTISING on Reddit. For example if you are Microsoft you might create the user name /u/Microsoft_Official or for Google you might use /u/ChooseGoogle.

Importantly this account should NEVER be used to make organic posts or engage with communities in any fashion or it may be deemed as a spammer by not only Reddit users but also possible Reddit’s volunteer moderators and Reddits staff themselves (at least temporarily). If you do use this account to make any organic posts or to engage with any community it should be a subreddit where you or someone in your company is the top moderator, preferably a branded subreddit.

It should be noted that while this might sound like it violates Reddit’s rules about creating a new account to circumvent a ban, this is exactly how Reddit’s internal sales team handles large advertising accounts for big brands. No where in any Reddit documentation is it ever mentioned that having a separate account for advertising on the site is bannable offense and even if you do get shadowbanned by Reddit’s staffers this would likely be a far easier thing to appear than to Reddit’s army of unpaid volunteer moderators who are already anti-advertising. We also have let Reddit know this our new guidance and while the response wasn’t a total endorsement, it was implied as you can see in the thread (below).

Here are a list of some branded user accounts that appear to be used largely for advertising only:

• Google – /user/google
• Swiffer – /user/Swiffer_Official
• Paramount+ – /user/ParamountPlus
• Coors – /user/CoorsBanquetBeer
• Microsoft Surface – /user/Microsoft_Surface
• Orkin – /user/OrkinPestControl
• MasterClass – /user/masterclass_official/
• SKYY Vodka – /user/SKYYVodkaUSA
• Volkswagen (USA) – /user/VWUSA
• Jefferson’s Bourbon – /user/JeffersonsBourbon
• Samsung Mobile (USA) – /user/SamsungMobileUS/

Notable exception: Pizza Hut has done a pretty great job at using Reddit over the past year by participating organically in related communities like “Random Acts of Pizza”. Using this account for advertising might be a better idea than using a new one just for ads, especially if they are targeting users of that community, though they still run the very real risk of being banned from future organic posting. – /user/PizzaHutOnReddit

Thread on /r/RedditAds

This article is based on a Reddit Ads post we made in January of 2021 and is based on our constant evaluation of the Reddit Advertising system. If you want a digital advertising agency that stays on top of Reddit Ads and keeps your performance moving up and to the right, contact us and lets talk about your needs.

The post Why You Should Create a Separate Account for Reddit Ads appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

The page experience rollout is complete now, including updates to Top Stories mobile carousel. Changes to Google News app have started to rollout as well and will be complete in a week or so.

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) September 2, 2021

Google’s much anticipated Page Experience Update is now rolling out globally, meaning it could hit any site anywhere in the world across Google’s search engines. The roll out will be slow and steady and is aimed at promoting websites that provide a better user experience. The new ranking factor is called “Page Experience” and it bundles a few past ranking factors along with new ones. HTTPS, Mobile Pop-up Penalty, Safe Browsing, and Mobile Friendliness have impacted rankings as far back as 2014. Now they are being grouped with “Core Web Vitals” as part of the Page Experience Ranking factor.

In this update Google will consider various page experience factors for rankings and will drop an eligibility factor for the Google News Top Stories carousel.

The update has been used by hucksters to sell unneeded SEO services (or claim an SEO is not doing their job) and been the talk of the SEO community for months debating how this will impact SERPs. As with most SEO updates there are a lot of unknowns, however, Google has been fairly upfront with this one and has given us quite a bit of information to work with. Undoubtedly SEOs or researchers will uncover more as the impacts become fully known. When there is a large enough consensous or our own research shows something previously unknown it will be included in this document.

Here is everything we know about the Google Search June 2021 Core Update

Page Experience (2021) Update Vitals

• Date Started: June 15th, 2021 (Global)
• Date Completed: September 2nd, 2021
• First Impact Reported: Unknown
• Most Impacted Industry(ies): Unknown
• Most Impacted Site(s): Unknown
• Most Impacted Website Types: Unknown
• Most Impacted Content Types: Unknown
• SEO Change Proven to Improve: Unknown

Known Issues

One problem with this update is that it is rolling out at the same time as Google’s June 2021 Core Update and just before the July 2021 Core Update. This may make it difficult to understand what is happening to your website as your rankings decrease or increase.

Documentation

Google’s Original Announcement – November 10th, 2020: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience

April Updates Announcement – April 19th, 2021: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/more-details-page-experience

Core Web Vitals documentation – July 21st, 2020: https://web.dev/vitals/

Changes to Google

This update releases several Algorithm Changes (eligibility or ranking factors), New Features, New Tools, and UX Changes. Here is a brief list of everything we are aware of.

1. Ranking Factor – Google now has a new ranking factor which considers; Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift (collectively known as Core Web Vitals) in determining the ranking position of a document.
2. Eligibility Factor – The Top Stories carousel in Google Search results will no longer required AMP (owned by Google). Instead all news stories / pages are now eligible as long as it meets Google News policies.
3. UX – AMP badges will no longer be shown in search results for AMP content.
4. App Updates – Google News will use more non-AMP content in the app than before (though Google doesn’t define how much more).
5. Data – There is now a Page Experience report in Google Search Console.
6. Data – The Google Search Console Performance Report has been udpated to sort by pages with a good experience.
7. Google Search also added support for non-AMP signed exchanges (SXG) in search.

Media Coverage of Google’s Page Experience Update

• Search Engine Land – Google page experience update now slowly rolling out
• Search Engine Round Table – Google Page Experience Update Rolling Out Between June 15 & End Of August

Google Page Experience Update Help

What to do if you were impacted by the Google Page Experience (2021) Algorithm Update

While Google has said to not expect large changes, it is possible some sites will see a big drop in rankings OR a small drop in an important ranking that leads to a big drop in sales, revenue, traffic, or inbound leads. To rememdy this you likely need a faster loading / more user friendly site.

WP Rocket wrote up a great piece on this to aid the SEO for WordPress websites here: Google Page Experience Update 2021: How to Prepare Your WordPress Site

Here are some of our tips:

1. SSL / HTTPS – Make sure your website has at least a free SSL certificate. This should be something that auto-renews. Talk with your hosting provider to make sure you have this capability to avoid future headaches.
2. Pages should be built for Mobile-first – Look at your site on mobile, would you convert? Make your site look better for mobile users with an emphasis on the vertical smartphone style screen display type.
3. Compress your images – Use a service like Kraken to compress images on the web before you upload or like Imagify to automatically compress images when you upload them.
4. DNS Prefetch – Use DNS prefetch tags to ensure all required third-party content is loaded before your page code, this makes your pages appear faster to users. [how to do this on Shopify]
5. Use fewer apps / plugins – As a general rule apps/plugins for a CMS tend to slow your site down. Not all of them do this, so be cautious about what you remove in hopes of improving for this new ranking factor.
6. Use VPS hosting at a minimum – While more expensive than shared hosting, VPS hosting will avoid nasty issues that often come with shared plans (especially Host Gator or Bluehost). Cloud hosting can also be a viable option.
7. Use a CDN – Cloudflare is probably the most familiar and is a great choice, but there are others too.
8. Do not display annoying interstitials – Used by gurus and news sites alike, these tend to degrade the user experience but can also be an effective marketing tool. If you do use them make the close button highly visible and give a few moments before showing them.
9. Keep an SEO in the loop – An SEO that is up-to-date on Core Web Vitals / Page Experience should be included at all stages of UX, design, and marketing when it comes to adding things to your website. If you do not include them until after decisions are made you will run the risk of harming your website’s rankings.

The post Everything We Know About Google’s Page Experience Update appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

Last week the startup developer website Hacker News lit up with an SEO issue, an incredibly rare event for the more dev focused site where startup and open source tech seem to dominate. The post was titled “The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam”. If there is one thing web developers appear to despise and assume is frequently a scam, it is SEO. The sensational title plus the community’s ingrained distaste for the craft of search engine optimization sent it skyrocketing to the top of the rankings racking up over 1,700 ‘points’ and 392 comments.

The post linked to an article by a web developer who was frustrated that their project was not ranking #1 in the search results for what they claim to be the coveted keyword in their industry, instead only ranking #2 for the past year. The article dives into the details of a link injecting scheme used by a popular online HTML editing website that allows users to export HTML code from a visual WYSIWYG based editor.

“Some highly-ranked online tools for editing or “cleaning” HTML seem to be secretly injecting links into their output to push themselves and affiliated sites up the search engine rankings. This scam is highly successful and appears to have gone undetected so far.” – Caspar von Wrede, Casparwre.de

When I saw the post it reminded me of the whole J.C. Penney debacle from 2011 where they schemed to get keyword-rich anchor text links, sending their rankings soaring. The link scheme was concocted by Dallas-based SEO firm SearchDex. When the scheme was eventually reported on in the NY Times, Google blacklisted the company in SERPs for 90 days, something the retailer never recovered from.

Here is my comment to the Hacker News community on the issue with the J.C. Penney situation firmly in my mind:
SEO professional here, I can’t see the article due to the wide-spread outage but have reviewed the comments here, comments in closed FB groups, and injected links on sites from this tool, as well as the tool’s admission of such links on their site. This tool is most likely owned by a publisher attempting to steal SEO link value from user websites, it is also possible they are selling these links outright or via a PBN system. This type of link building was a common practice in the early 00’s used by CMS theme developers and tool makers alike to gain link value. Google took a stand against “widget links”, which is likely what these would be classified as, and as recent as 2016 even warned against their usage.

At our agency we advise clients against this type of link building as it has no long-term value for a brand and could cause long-term pain instead. SEO should be used to help new brands gain a competitive advantage against more established incumbents such as a startup taking on Amazon or a new SaaS tool providing valuable data to an industry.

How did Caspar, a non-SEO, come across this link scheme? According to the article he decided to purchase an Ahrefs account and used it to examine his competitor’s backlinks. Of note, his competitor was not the HTML editor website itself but appears to have been affiliated with it in some way.

What Caspar uncovered was that each time someone used the free version of the HTML-Online.com editor they would inject a link to a website or article affiliated with their website / core business. Often times this had nothing to do with the HTML-Online.com website or with HTML at all. In Caspar’s case the links were sometimes to his top competitor ScoreCounter.com. The links were scattered across websites likely to be of high quality including NBC Sports, Intuit Quickbooks, Rice University, and Macworld.

Note: The NBC Sports link Caspar found is just the word “score” and is found in the middle of a paragraph. This was clearly placed by the writer/editor and has no relation to a link injection scheme or an embedded scoreboard.

HTML-Online.com for their part fully admits to this in a disclaimer on their website telling free users that they will have links injected into their content unless they pay a monthly fee.

Their disclaimer message located in the footer states: “You can use this website absolutely free but by using this tool you accept to link to this website or our partner sites. If you don’t want this, please subscribe for a pro HTMLG license and you get even more HTML editing features.”

Caspar kept digging and found the same business owned a variety of websites that also injected links, one of those appeared in a Kaspersky article on COVID related phishing scams.

Frustrated with what he saw as an ethical abuse of other people’s websites and of Google’s algorithm to aid their SEO Caspar gathered all of the evidence he could and wrote a post on his personal blog about the experience. He then submitted the blog post to Hacker News on June 7th where it became the most upvoted and discussed topic of the day. Four days later on June 11th Caspar noticed that Google had manually penalized HTML-Online.com as the owners had placed a message stating as such on their website.

As of today, June 14th 2021 both HTML Online and ScoreCounter.com miraculously still ranked #1 in Google for their keywords “html editor” and “online scoreboard” respectively.

Caspar may have succeeded in getting his competition hit with a manual penalty, but he has a lot more work to do to win the #1 spot (unless things change soon).

SEO Takeaways

• Google still penalizes for “widget” / embed / injection links, especially those without nofollow attributes and designed to manipulate rankings and when they are not consentual.
• Google’s manual penalty did not impact rankings for the two keywords and websites being examined.
• Your competitors are actively trying to make sense of your SEO and will take action to harm yours and help their own.
• Link building at scale is difficult and challenging, tread carefully.

The post How Hacker News Took Down a Black Hat Link Building Scheme appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

In the early 10’s I tried convincing a finance client to be the first one to install a Bitcoin ATM machine at a physical location as part of a big PR / link building campaign but ultimately got little buy-in from the executives where I worked (they actively laughed at the concept actually) and the client decided it was not the right fit for them. Fast-forward nearly a decade and Bitcoin’s price is still surging and dropping and grabbing headlines as it goes, typically the doom and gloom type of headlines, and I am still watching businesses make the same mistake of understimating it and losing out on potentially millions in earning.

Recently there has been a lot of movement in terms of empowering independent ecommerce merchants to accept Bitcoin across various shopping platforms and merchant processing platforms. We have gotten dozens of questions thanks to media coverage of companies like Tesla and MicroStategy in recent months asking if they should accept Bitcoin at their ecommerce store.

Instead of all of that hype though, the positive and the negative, I wanted to answer the most important question of them all for ecommerce store owners. That question is – Should your ecommerce business accept Bitcoin?

Will doing this actually help grow your business or will it just give you one more annoying thing to babysit?

Here are 6 reasons your ecommerce website should accept Bitcoin.

1. Consumers Are Using Bitcoin More and More to Buy Things

In Q1 of 2021 the online merchant system Square reported a record shattering $3.51 billion usd in Bitcoin sales via ecommerce merchants and real-world Square merchants. In Q1 of 2018 this was only $34 million usd. That’s a growth of 10,223% in only 3 years time or an average yearly growth of 3,407%.

2. The High Rate of Deflation

“A few years ago someone paid me $5,000 with Bitcoin for an order they placed. Today that same Bitcoin is valued at $20,000. It always brings a smile to my face when someone pays with Bitcoin.” – Gary Leland of 4 Minute Bitcoin, BitBlockBoom, and famous ecommerce entrepreneur of SoftballJunk.com

Bitcoin’s price has a now decade-long history of increasing by incredibly large percentages. There are very few assets that can say that. Since the price began getting listed on exchanges in 2013 the price of one Bitcoin has risen dramatically from roughly $132 to a price of $36,669.44 at the time this was written. This is an ‘all time’ increase of 27,679%, a mind blowing number for any asset. This does not include the price of $0.000001 in 2009 or the price of $1 in 2011 which produce even more insanely difficult to comprehend numbers.

One crazy way to look at this is to consider that if you purchased $100 usd worth of Bitcoins when they were $1 in 2011 and had them still today, they would now be worth approximately $3.6 million.

Usually the argument against accepting Bitcoin goes something like this “Yeah, but the price fell last week / month / year it will be worth zero soon enough!”. The history of Bitcoin’s price does not really back up this scary narrative though it based in some truth. The price is incredibly volitile, absolutely, and it has suffered some huge drops. But, when Bitcoin fell from its all time high price in 2017 if you had began accepting Bitcoin when it was at its lowest value following this event (around $3,617 usd) and sold at its new all time high value in 2021 of $63,558 usd your earnings would have risen 1,657%. If you started accepting Bitcoin sales at the precise moment of the 2017 all time high (a.k.a “the 2017 ATH event”) and then sold at the 2021 all time high your earnings would have risen 262%. That means an ecommerce merchant accepting Bitcoin between December 2017 and April of 2021 could have cashed in a return on investment of anywhere between 262% and 1,657%. Your bank account will never do that and your sales only if you go viral.

To get those earning though you have would need to be able to practice patience or as Bitcoiners call it “HODLing”. Selling off only the amount of the cryptocurrency that you need to in order to cover bills, inventory, etc…if that sounds too good to be true, that’s because in a way it is. At least in the USA exchanges are required to report earnings and you / your business will be taxed when you sell your Bitcoins off in order to raise funds to pay bills.

This does cause a bit of a conundrum for some small businesses, if you have too many sales where Bitcoin is used, transitioning your money out could cause additional taxation. Some countries are moving in a direction to eliminate this extra taxing but these could be years off since politicians tend to move slowly. If you do decide to accept Bitcoin, try to avoid selling in order to lock in the longer-term increase at the next all time high event. Also consider consulting a tax professional in your country/region familiar with Bitcoin.

Chart courtesy of Statista

3. Major Corporations are Holding Bitcoin as a Liquidity Strategy

Large publicly traded companies like Tesla and MicroStrategy are holding Bitcoin on their books as what are commonly referred to as “highly liquid assets”. Why do companies do this? Well it is actually part of an older strategy to ensure a company has financial assets that can be quickly liquidated (sold off for currency) should they need operational expenses in a pinch or if they want to go on an acquisition spree. Usually companies do this with things like Treasury Bills, but cryptocurrency arguably offers a much better alternative. Treasurys do not appreciate in value but are sold at a slight discount so they mature to face value. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin can increase in value, can be quickly traded, and in some cases can be used as actual real world currency. That places Bitcoin in some situations as a type of asset known as a “cash-equivalents”. The only scary issue here is the potential decrease in value, for example Treasury Bills will not decrease in value.

“Tesla made it clear in its statement filed with its regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission that it sees bitcoin as a chance to diversify its cash and cash-equivalent holdings. – MarketWatch. February 9th, 2021“

Here’s a chart showing known corporate holdings of Bitcoin

4. You Can Gain Valuble Links

One of the more interesting things about Bitcoin (and some other cryptos) is how incredibly well it feathers in with SEO efforts or PR efforts. While it is getting harder and harder to use Bitcoin to snag headlines than it was back in 2012, it is still possible as both Elon Musk and MicroStrategy have shown us lately.

Some of the websites where getting links is possible include niche sites that serve the Bitcoin and cyrptocurrency community such as CoinMap, CoinDesk, CoinTelegraph, CryptoNews, and Bitcoin Magazine. You have to do something interesting with Bitcoin to get more media coverage as with any PR, but even just accepting Bitcoin can gain your ecommerce shop links from forums and social websites over time.

Make sure when you accept Bitcoin to have a PR or distribution strategy in place to get the word out and gain those valuble inbound links.

5. It Gives You an Attentive Audience Instantly

In many cases simply accepting Bitcoin can quickly get your brand attention from an audience of Bitcoin fans and users. As shown above these fans and users are increasingly spending their Bitcoins to buy things (at least via Square). Recently Tesla began accepting Bitcoin as payment and then a few weeks later abruptly reversed course. When they announced they would accept the cryptocurrency its price skyrocketed to a new all time high and then began to decline after they changed directions. For this Bitcoin fans largely turned against both Tesla and their CEO Elon Musk, even though both still are supposedly holding on to Bitcoin.

This shows a passionate fan base that will, hopefully, encourage friends and family and other Bitcoiners to do business with your ecommerce shop.

There are two caveats here. First, obviously the community’s passionate reactions have shown that your brand / company should tread lightly when starting out accepting Bitcoin, make sure it is something you want to do and not just a gimmick or it could come back to hurt you.

Second, you have to really buy into the entire concept of Bitcoin and work to be a member of the community for this to really have the impact (assuming you are not already internet famous of course). For example if you run a small shoe store you should be using your personal or brand Twitter to tweet about Bitcoin from time to time (at least one a week if possible) to show the community you are invested in the future of Bitcoin. You might even do small video chats, podcast interviews, and HARO responses about Bitcoin to help bolster your commitment and visiblity within the community.

6. It Opens Up Interesting Specials and Deals

If we are being honest, the tools for really unlocking the potential of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy. There is so much more potential that has yet to be tapped. For example there could be a Bitcoin payment app that gives users a discount based on the price BTC/USD price at the time of purchase in order to encourage shoppers to purchase more with Bitcoin. Why would this be a good thing? Back to point #2, the deflation rate. If you wanted to gain a bunch of highly liquid assets for your reserves, lowering your pricing for Bitcoin shoppers only could help you gain more Bitcoins or Satoshis which would be worth anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand percent more than when you first accepted them in a few years time (if the price increases continue). Your business would basically be investing by simply performing normal sales functions.

While none of this is a reality quite yet, you could in theory offer such deals manually or find other creative ways to make the offers to Bitcoiners by providing coupon codes for them to use or doing something else special for the Bitcoin community.

Conclusion

If you are ready to accept Bitcoin and you want to work with a forward thinking Shopify SEO agency or WooCommerce SEO agency we would love to work with you and bring your store to the Bitcoin masses. We are not just experts at SEO but also at integrating BTCPay, OpenNode, Coinbase Commerce, BitPay, GoCoin, Square, and other payment solutions that allow you to easily accept Bitcoin and power your marketing to this passionate community. Get in touch and lets start building a successful Bitcoin or Crypto marketing campaign for your ecommerce shop today!

What do you think? Agree or Disagree? Are there other reasons an ecommerce merchant should accept Bitcoin? Chat with me in the comments below. Or, if you write a rebuttal article refuting anthing I have published I will happily review it and link to it from here for others to find.

The post 6 Reasons Ecommerce Merchants Should Accept Bitcoin appeared first on Joe Youngblood.

Simple version:
Add this code to your theme’s theme.liquid page in the section

{% if handle contains 'example-page-url-goes-here' %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
{% endif %}

Below are step-by-step instructions using screenshots from the Shopify backend.

Step #1: Login to your Shopify admin panel

Hopefully you know how to do this, if not make sure you can login before you can complete the rest of these steps.

Step #2: Navigate to your Themes section. (Online Store > Themes)

To get here click on “Online Store” in the left-hand column and then navigate to “Themes” below it. This is the are of your admin panel where you can search for new themes, switch out your store’s current theme, customize your current theme using various options, or make edits to the current theme’s underlying code.

Step #3: Navigate to the Edit Code section. (Actions > Edit Code)

On the right hand side of the page there should be a dropdown that appears next to the “customize” button for your current Live Theme. Open this menu and then select the “Edit Code” option as shown in the graphic below. This will take you to the part of your admin panel where you are able to make code edits to the current live theme by writing new HTML or Liquid code.

Step #4: Edit the Theme.Liquid Layout file. (Layouts > Theme.Liquid)

All Shopify themes will have a Layouts folder and inside of this folder a theme.liquid file. This is the main layout file for Shopify’s Liquid Templating Language and instructs the platform on how to construct various pages on your website using Shopify components and components from your theme. This is the same file we used to add DNS-prefetch tags to our theme, if you have done that you are familiar with this file.

The Layouts folder and the theme.liquid file are generally at the top of the navigation menu in the edit section as you can see below. Once you select the theme.liquid option you will be able to make edits to it.

Step #5: Add the code to remove a specific product / collection / URL from search results

To remove a page from Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo as well as most other search engines we are going to use the meta robots noindex, follow tag. An important side note here, in some instances a search engine might not respect the meta robots noindex directive and instead require a block in robots.txt. Shopify does not allow you to edit your Robots.txt file, one of the many technical hurdles the platform offers to ecommerce merchants.

Shopify has provided the code we will need to use in their help documentation here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/hide-a-page-from-search-engines

For example purposes only we are going to noindex the “Lady Claus Christmas Leggings” on our test store. These haven’t been great sellers and it is June, so there are few buyers. This is not a great reason to noindex a product, but this URL was easier on the eyes than others and makes the concept simpler to understand.

Here is our live product page that we are going to add the noindex tag to in order to remove from search engines.

In our theme.liquid file we are going to add the following code to the section. Since this is on theme where we’ve already added DNS-prefetch tags, we are going to add this directly below that to keep our edits to this file a little organized in case we need to change the theme in the near future or ask the developers for assistance.

Here is the full code we are adding to the theme.liquid file’s section:

{% if handle contains 'lady-claus-christmas-leggings' %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
{% endif %}

Here is what it looks like in the editor screen:

Step #6: Click the Save button

In the upper right-hand corner there is a green save button. You have to click this to ensure your edits are saved and take effect.

Step #7: Confirm your changes are live

Navigate to the product, collection, or URL you have noindexed and view the source code to see if your changes took effect. You should be able to find the code easily because of where we placed it or you can search for it. Here’s what the live code looks like on our example page.

You should also take a moment and check any pages with a similar URL slug / structure to make sure they were not erroneously noindexed by adding this code.

Step #8: Remove the URL in Google Search Console (Optional)

Now that we have the URL removed using noindex on Shopify, you might want to speed the process up on the biggest search engine – Google. To do this you will need to have a Google Search Console account and have the domain verified. If you have that all done, go to GSC and select “Removals” on the left-hand side. Then click the red “New Request” button on the right-hand side and enter the URL you want to remove. Finally select “Remove this URL only”, click the “next” button, and then confirm by clicking the “submit request” button.

Step #9: Remove your internal search pages from search engines (Optional)

Shopify stores all come with a search engine to help your customers find a product they are looking for quickly. Unfortunately Google and other search engines tend to frown upon indexing search pages of other websites and instead would rather focus their time and attention on your actual product or collection pages. Search Engine crawlers, however, tend to crawl and send back all data they can for consideration, which means there’s a chance your search pages could be reducing the time a search engine spends on things that might increase your rankings and traffic faster.

To fix this SEO problem we can noindex the Search pages Shopify creates by adding the following code to the theme.liquid file:

{% if template contains 'search' %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
{% endif %}

Note: Google has gotten considerably better at ignoring these types of pages over the past few years and this may not have a large impact in improving your rankings in their engine. However, various other search engines may still index and your search pages and it is a best practice to ensure only content you care about is indexed in major search engines.

Now you can excercise full control over what products and collections on you Shopify are indexed by search engines. If you have any issues with this code or questions about it, please leave a comment below.

The post How to Noindex a Collection or Product Page on Shopify appeared first on Joe Youngblood.