We have a whooping ten test dossier for this April. We discuss all ten tests. Which is stronger, footer links, header links, or contextual links? Will having a continuously refreshing page through Ajax give you the ability to index and rank for multiple keywords? Can HTLM errors harm your site? Do exit pops have the same benefit as intro pops? Will adding a geographical reference point to other topics aside from the one we tested last month give a higher ctr?
We continue testing how unoptimized zones can affect rank in the three part series we have in this test. We test if having having the keyword in the meta description is enough to get in indexed and lastly. we verify the myth that getting your backlinks from the search console increases your links.
Tests this month
Test 184: Which is Stronger - Footer Links, Header Links, or Contextual Links?
Test 185: Continually Refreshing Content with Ajax
Test 186: Improperly Nested HTML
Test 187: Do Exit Pops Affect Rank?
Test 188: Expanding CRO: Applying Working Concepts to New Ads/Niches
Test 189: Does the Number of H4s on a Page Affect Rank?
Test 190: Does the Number of Un-Optimized Anchor Text Zones on a Page Affect Rank?
Test 191: Does the Number of Images on a Page Affect Rank?
Test 192: Will a Page Index with Keywords Present Only in the Meta Description?
Test 193: Getting your Backlinks Out of Search Console
April 2018 Dossier
Transcription Below:
Which is Stronger - Footer Links, Header Links, or Contextual Links?
This is a follow-up test that Ryan Hough led and this was built off of Ted Kubaitis’ theory that you can rank with footer links. We showed that last month – you could rank a page with site-wide footer links. The thing that conventional SEOs would tell you are the worst thing in the history things and they will completely penalize you or that they won’t pass juice and are a waste of time, etc. We found that they pass juice and affect rank as Ted has been screaming for months and I know, Dori, that you have done that as well and that these things work.
Then what we did is we pitted footer links against header links – that is a link that is sitting in the header of the page and the header page won. That makes sense with a lot of our other tests that a link above passes more juice and different zones have different weights, is kind of the concept. A header link, beats a footer link. This puts it together with the contextual links – that is the link within the body of the page. So now we have this test pitting header links against footer links against contextual links all at once to see which of these pulls out to be the stronger.
Graciously as before, Ted provided the links for this test and Dori your network as well, was used for the contextual links. The SIA PBN network is what is used for the contextual links. In the end, the contextual links were the strongest, then header, then footer. It was a consistent pattern.
This is a good thing. These are the common sense things in SEO except that the footer links would work, perhaps. But this is what we would anticipate but this is really proof of it. You know that the contextual link in the body is your strongest link even though it is below a header. It is not necessarily position on a page within an area or a zone. We know that Majestic will credit a header link, sidebar link, footer link, as the same juice pass, we saw that. But we know that it is actually a little different juice that is passed – that the header links has a little more to it and then the footer.
This was an excellent test that was run and is the third part of the series. One thing that Ryan noted is the footer links actually had the most consistent type of ranking, the least fluctuation. They pushed the needle and they stayed there but it was just a matter of the other links catching up and taking over. That is what he saw in this particular test which would be interesting if footer links kind of give you a more stable or quicker juice pass.
Dori: That is interesting but it makes sense because it is a site-wide link and it has more opportunity to be hit on a crawl.
I think that is a hundred percent right. So if they crawl those ten pages, it would get ten links vs the waiting for the header and the contextual link.
Dori: Yeah, contextual links is probably only one page especially if it is a blog and it rolls off the front page then the spider has to get to it to find it. But then it gives it more weight because there is content wrapped around it.
Continually Refreshing Content with Ajax
Last month, we looked at JavaScript and we saw that Google will in fact, read what is in JavaScript. Ajax is a form of JavaScript and this might be a completely imprecise definition but the idea is that JavaScript actually runs from the page that you are on so when JavaScript runs, they run from that particular page. What Ajax does, which is a form of JavaScript, is it actually calls content from somewhere else – another site, page, server – so when you render the page, it calls out and grabs the content vs regular JavaScript which has it contained within that page and displays the function when you pull up the page. That is the difference there between JavaScript and Ajax.
There are SEO tools that will allow you to constantly refresh your page and your page’s content to show Google new content to show different keywords. What I did for this particular test is I ran an Ajax function where we had 9 different sections that had a unique piece of content that would be loaded at one time – only one section will display but there were 9 different ones, each one has their own keyword. Every time the page is re-loaded, it would refresh that content.
The idea is that we have the opportunity to rank for 9 different keywords by doing this Ajax refresh. This concept is big part of where a lot of web content are going, what tools are doing, but it is kind of a black hat thing to be doing as well. There is also the idea of you need to continually refresh your content and a lot of people advocate refreshing it quite regularly so that is what we are looking at in here. Can we get one page to index for 9 different keywords where they are constantly refreshing that content every time the page is loaded.
Those are the keywords there. What is a lot of fun in this screenshot here – this is from fetch and render. When you do fetch and render in search console, it will show you how Google bot sees the page and they will show you how your visitors see the page and you can kind of see if there are problems with Google Bot rendering anything.
You can see in the bottom section, that is the section where it is getting the refresh content. What is really cool, and I didn’t know this about fetch and render, is that it run it twice and the reason that we know that it run it twice is because it has a different keyword and this Ajax is set to refresh every time a crawl happens. I thought that was pretty cool – I had no idea that when Google is doing a fetch and render, that it would actually crawl the page two times.
The page cached and it has been cached since March but this is to show that it is cached and that is the page title. However, none of the keywords are indexed. That is one of the particular keywords, none of the nine is indexed.
What I think is going on here is that the page is refreshing too quickly. Because it is happening every time Google bot is coming, what this tells me is that it can cache the page, it can take a picture of it, but it can’t index it appropriately. It cannot index it for those keywords which tells me that indexing requires several crawls – more than one. Probably 2, 3, or 4 and those are not recorded by cache date.
The bot is going more than what we can see in the cache which is this firm date right here that we can confirm that Google came to this page on this day because it has the cache but clearly, Google is coming more than that and I am sure you can see that within the server logs. But if you are doing some black hat thing where you are refreshing the content every time, you are probably doing yourself a disservice.
In fact, if you are refreshing it every couple of days, you are still probably doing yourself a disservice. I would wager that in order to get your content to index properly and for it to rank, you would need several Google crawls, several processes to get it in and I think that is what this test is showing us.
Dori: This is really important because I would have thought that it would have cached it and indexed it with all these keywords and when we used to cloak, we used to refresh all the time and so, this is telling me that I was doing a disservice to myself – that static or at least some time is going to out perform a dynamic page, perhaps.
I thought so too. I thought, most of them, not all of them would index but I think the problem is that the refresh was happening too quickly and the bot came one time and it sees the content and it starts part of the indexing process but it needs a couple more crawls to get in there in order to make it stick but every time the bot came back, it got a new page. Things change, I do not know how to index it.
Dori: This is really important. I think the non-indexing is just as important. I kind of wished it had, it would be cool to hit all kinds of keywords with Ajax but knowing that it is not is just as important. Getting the sense that it needs to be static at least for a certain amount of time to rank. Pretty critical, actually.
Is this test affected with the issues of getting content indexed lately?
I think that is a certain thing to consider, for sure. The only reason or one of the reason I think this is valid as is even despite the indexing issues is that Google announced the update that we were looking for, that we were talking about – hey this update is coming – that hit on the 16th. We’d had 10days since then and at least in a lot of the test that we had that had indexing normalized. It is still difficult but that certainly is a possibility.
I think after that 16th day, we are still getting the same results, none of those keywords have indexed. I think we are seeing true results but I am considering to let this run to see if we can actually get any of those to index. It is possible that it could. We are letting this go but I feel good about showing this now because I had all those days after the announced update.
Improperly Nested HTML
Last month, we looked at unusually nested HTML where you’ve got an H1 wrapped in paragraph text. That is pretty unusual and I was informed by HTML purists that that is not mis-formatted. We call them miss-formatted but HTML tags are meant to be nested. That is nesting. Even though that is weird and there is no reason to do that, it is not necessarily mis-formatted.
What I Iearned is mis-formatted is the next one and you can see that the <p> and the <h1> is switched. The first one is proper where the h1s are closest to each other and the <p> are on the outside. The second set of <p> and h1 with them switching, that is actually the mis-formatted.
Browsers and bots have this script called tidy and what tidy does is it fixes this thing so that even though you have written this incorrectly, tidy comes in and then goes and displays the webpage correctly. One of the concepts that we have talked about SIA is these things that affect rank, some of those things are the cost of doing, processing, using Tidy if Google were to use that costs money.
Because that processing power for them and they have to make decisions on how much they need to process. Are they actually going to take the time to fix your html when you could not get right in the first place, is the kind of the idea. Because that costs them money to do, is it worth it for them to do it. That is what we are trying to look at here. If you have these mis-nested html, is that going to harm you?
Here is what we’ve got. I the middle one, we did it incorrectly, in the other ones, it is correct. Initially, there was no movement then boom, it dropped to the bottom. What that means is that on that page, Google is not counting that h1 as an h1. The control pages all have an h1 and I think what is happening is Google isn’t taking the time to use Tidy or some other tool to make it correct for its ranking ranking factor. It is not taking the time to pay the money to process it so it is not counting that page as an h1.
Dori: In other words, h1s really count.
This is pretty cool cause we know before we looked at html errors and what we were doing before on those were just regular errors, not mis-formatted, just deprecated tags, things that ping in the w3c school as errors where you run those SEO tests and it comes back with 10,000 html errors, is that a ranking problem and we found that it wasn’t just general html issues aren’t it. This is where the problem is, in that nested html where it is mis-formatted so it is not crediting it as the tag that you think it should be.
That is where you want to look. That is where you can harm yourself or your clients can run into a problem. It is not necessarily just an html error; it is where Google isn’t going to spend the money to reformat your h1s so that it knows that it is an h1.
Do Exit Pops Affect Rank?
We looked at intro pops and what we found there is we felt pretty good that they aren’t harming you and that comes from Google’s recent ad blocking browser and they also had that interstitial penalty they said if your pop up takes up x percent of the screen, they are going to penalize you. We found out that wasn’t true. What we found was that it is possible that having an intro pop could help you with having content on it. It worked two times where the into pop that has the keyword on it moved to number one, one time it didn’t move.
Basically, we were looking at, there could be some other factors there, we were not sure if it is necessarily the intro pop but at the minimum, it is not harming. So then we wanted to look at the exit pop which is essentially the same concept but maybe Google is just honing in on intro pops maybe it pops in general but kind of just being thorough, we wanted to do both ways.
In this test, we are setting up an exit pop with just text and no keyword and then we are setting it up with just the target keyword in it. So we are setting it up both ways, one is just the pop itself be a positive or negative factor then can we maybe get a keyword in there and get a little boost. The results on this with the no keyword, to of the tests remain in the number three spot, they didn’t move. One test actually fell to the number four spot.
With that kind of results, we are not comfortable with saying that it is a negative factor. There is a lot going on there, I would call that a nothing. It is more likely that one dropped because of being ignored and there was an algoshift. When algoshift happens, test pages moved when they have no other factors in play or impacting them.
But then on the next one where we’ve got the keyword in the exit pop, all three of the tests moved to number one. So if you are scoring at home, essentially that is 6 pop tests with the keyword on it and 5 of the 6 moved it up to number 1 which means that pops are probably an opportunity to get a keyword in there.
If you are running a pop and there is an opportunity to put a keyword in there, it might be worth exploring. I do not think it is going to harm you but it actually has the possibility of impacting your rank. It is kind of crazy that it happened many times that it moved up. I do not think it is going to harm you and I do not think you should get rid of them because it hurts rank. It is actually an opportunity. I would experiment with it cause 5 out of 6 is a pretty decent number of something happening.
Dori: That is really good. I can see thing with partial exact match type of stuff. Different uses around that because they are counting it and reading it and giving some sort of credit to it.
The thing you want to be careful of course is that is probably going to your html so that is going to count as keywords or variations within your html. You do not want to go buck wild because that could throw off your page.
Expanding CRO: Applying Working Concepts to New Ads/Niches
This was done by Dennis Nisbet who is a professional friend of mine. We showed some work that I helped him with where he was working with some AdWords ctr and what we showed was that if you’ve got the near me concept and in this case, he worked med spas – Botox near me in the ads – he put the cross streets in the ad and 3% click through rate went up to 15% click through rate.
The concept being, everyone saying near me but you are telling people the near me is actually near them. You are giving local knowledge and if you are taking Stephen Grealy’s CRO course, he talks about giving local knowledge, as well. It is kind of proving that you are actually local. So in this test, we kind of validated that concepts where we are providing the cross streets where the business is located, the click through rate went from 3% to 15% which is out of control. This is expanding on that concept.
So we know that the cross streets are working, can we take it into a new account and then can we take it into different generic keywords beyond just that near me. This is another geographic region with the near me and you can see that the click through rate on that is 16.43% which is absolutely out of control for a click through rate. Most in here are doing CRO and they are doing PPC so we took it to Phoenix and moved it to another geographic region. We are showing that it is not just some weird Phoenix quirk and that it works in other regions.
Here is where I wanted to go into this. You have to consider your intent and this also goes into your meta description. You can put this concept directly to your metadescription. If you put the cross streets and the actual location into your meta description, I am confident that you will get a boost in your organic CTR. So, you can take this directly, this Botox near me concept, you’ve got the Botox near me page and then in the metadescription, you put this local knowledge, it is going to encourage and increase your CTRs, I am quite confident with that.
But then what we did was we moved it into general. So, just Botox. This ad does not have the near me concept but it still has those geographic identifiers and you could see that CTR is 3.4 which is a good CTR for an AdWords campaign but is not that spectacular. So, the concept here is while you could get CRO concepts that work and you could apply them to your AdWords and organically, you have to consider the buyer intent.
Here where it is just a general Botox, putting that local knowledge does not impact the CTR here. They do not care about that and that is not what they are looking for. The one thing that we often see in our industry are there are shiny objects - that is a great concept, it works, I will just apply it across the board - you really need to think about why you might do one thing or another but in this situation, putting those cross streets specifically to identify and get that local knowledge work with that near me concept because that is what people are looking for, it is not a blanket CRO win.
You cannot then put this in your homepage, meta description for Botox, because it is not going to do anything for people that are just searching generally for Botox. It is for those that are searching in the near me. That is what we see here in this test.
Does the Number of H4s on a Page Affect Rank?
Does the Number of Un-Optimized Anchor Text Zones on a Page Affect Rank?
Does the Number of Images on a Page Affect Rank?
The next three tests, tests 189, 190, 191 are all continuations of our new ranking factor that we have found. That ranking factor is unoptimized zones. What we found is that the number of unoptimized zones will actually affect rank. It is a ranking signal. What we found is that it works with H1s, H2s, H3s. Unoptimized zones are those with no keywords on it. We are actually just looking at the zone itself.
The number of h1 tags on the page that does not contain keywords. The number of h2s on a page that does not have keywords, the number of h3s that do not contain keywords. We have found that this is a ranking factor so it is very important when you are putting your pages together that you consider that. You consider not just how many times you put in a target keyword in my h2s but how many h2s I have on the page in total because once you get outside that range of what is expected for the keyword, you can harm your page.
The concept is you have 1 h1 on a page. We proved why that is. But once in a while, you will see a page that has 2 h1s or 3 h1s, is it harming itself? It actually comes down to what is expected for that keyword, what is expected for that niche. You might have a keyword that is expecting two h1s and you are fine but then the reason that 1 h1 is a problem because the vast majority of pages you are going up against only have one so as soon as you put 2 or 3, you are outside for what is expected for that zone and even if they are unoptimized, you are harming yourself. That is what we have found on those pages identifying for 2018. The ranking factor that nobody is talking about is unoptimized zones, as we discussed in the last two months.
We are expanding this out, we want to see how deep this goes and so for the next three tests, we are looking at h4s, anchor text on the page, and images. The reason I went for those is h4s is obviously after h3s and anchor text is a pretty strong signal right now and it has been for the last years and that is text that is on the page. The image alt is a very weak signal so we want to see if these concepts continue through this other signals – is this a universal type thing or is this just confined to the ones that we have identified – to the h1, h2, and h3.
Dori: Are we talking about keyword variations as well?
No, we are talking about nothing within these things.
Dori: Again, an unoptimized zone is just a zone without a keyword in it but a zone can be like your h1s, h2s, h3s.
Correct. So if you have 5 h2s on a page, we are going at 5 h2 zones and within those zones, you do not have a keyword at all. They are unoptimized. We are looking at the cumulative number of zones on a page.
I can sum up all three at once and you can go through all the data but what we have found is that it stopped. The h3 is where it ended. We could not get movement on the h4s, we could not get movement on the anchor text, and in the image alt. That is actually kind of a good thing and the reason that it is a good thing is because managing three zones, your h1s, h2s, h3s, are very possible. You can go through and you can count, get your averages for the top pages and you can find out how many h2s they are using and how many h3s they are using and you can modify your pages accordingly.
The idea is, this is kind of a two step process to your optimization. You want to find out how many times you need to get your keyword in there, variations, and perhaps your LSI into those sections, but then you also want to count the zones themselves. You might find that you need your exact keyword in your H2 but how many h2s in total do you need on the page? That is where we are talking about. You can make that calculation, you can go in and get those zones or the tag totals, if you will, you can figure those out.
When you are optimizing your page and you are making those decisions, count the h1s, h2s, h3s that you are using. H1 is probably one, that is probably going to be one all the time. But the 2s and the 3s are another story and you really want to look at how many time you need to use those and I would go for a competitive parity, I would go for the top ranking pages are doing. They clearly look like they are ranking as onpage as a factor and I will emulate them. I think Google is showing you the number of times you need based on the ones that are winning and then I would emulate that page.
If they say the average is 3 h2s and I have 20 h2s on my page, probably the reason why you are not performing well is probably because of that. You have overoptimized the zones even if you do not have the keyword in there. Reduce them down to what the average is or get them somewhere close to that average. But do not worry about it for your h4s, anchor text on the page, or images on your img alt file.
That is the three tests as we work on figuring out how far our hidden ranking factor goes.
Will a Page Index with Keywords Present Only in the Meta Description?
This came from two dossiers ago. We showed that Google will take metadescriptions longer than the 300-word character. Google got expanded metadescriptions now. It is like 300-ish characters will display and what we talked about is, can you write more than that. Could you write 600 characters? The idea is that you put a target keyword outside that 300-word character and Google will display it. This is the CRO ninja hack that will make you money.
Let’s say you have 2 important keywords on the page, normally you would write one metadescription, maybe it contains both keywords or something like that but those two keywords may have two different personas, two different people coming to the page and might search slightly differently and that is how they get there, you can write two meta descriptions, throw it all into that one tag and Google will display the right one based on the search.
The one type of person on the page may search one way and another person may search the other way, you can have two meta descriptions and what we showed is that Google will grab the right one for the search even though it is beyond the 300-character limit. This is one of the things within SEO where conventional people will say that Google will only display 300 characters so write a 300 character meta description.
Well, the first thing we should ask as scientists is why? Does that mean they cut it off and they do not consider beyond that? They won’t display anything beyond that 300? It turns out that is not true and they will. In discussing those results in the Skype group, what came up was, all that was throwing into one tag, what happens if you have multiple tags on the page? You’ve got not just one metadescriptions with multiple descriptions in it, what if you actually have multiple tags on the page?
That is where we are at. It occurred to me as we started this test that we actually haven’t looked at meta descriptions in years. It was a test that I ran prior to SIA. I think it was one the things I showed in a rockstars event back in the day or if not, I kind of discussed it then. This is one of the things that really got me into testing – is the metadescription a ranking factor? – and so I thought how I could test that and here is how I could do it and then I put my test together and found that it wasn’t.
What I realized is, we need to revisit that first because it has been three years probably since I have run that specific one. Other people might not be into it or aware of it but also because CRO is such a hot topic, people are talking about CRO, maybe part of the gains they are getting by doing CRO is actually putting part of the keyword in the metadescription. Maybe it has revived itself as a ranking factor. So, what I did for this particular one was just to look at that as a first step to the multiple description tag was just, is the metadescription a ranking factor? Has it revived itself?
We also know from Bill Hartzner and his theories on how the Google algorithm works that there are no original engineers, the guys that are in there now do not know what they are doing, they see code that looks superfluous, they remove it and it turns out that it was blocking the old school spam so maybe they have removed something and it has revived the metadescription. That is what we looked at here on this.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work. We couldn’t index the page by putting the keyword only in the meta description. Not only is it not a ranking factor but also it still won’t index which is what we found years ago. We kind of confirmed that data as part of this test. Getting a keyword that is just in the metadescription, you can’t get a page to index with that and because the page won’t index, it means that it also won’t be a ranking factor.
First step to rank is to actually index it based on that, it means Google is reading it, counting it, considering it, and then it is going to be part of the ranking algorithm. But when you can’t get a page to index with that zone, then it is not a ranking factor at all.
We proved one of my initial tests that got the ball rolling in testing. Unfortunately, metadescriptions have not returned as a ranking factor. You could not index a page with it, and then next month, we are moving forward to using the two tags. The concept there is, will Google actually use both metadescription tags or will it ignore them. That will be for next month.
Getting your Backlinks Out of Search Console
This took two weeks. There is this concept in SEO, this mythology that if you download your backlinks in Search Console, they will refresh and you will actually get more backlinks and you will see exactly what Google, or at least have a better picture of what Google is using when calculating your page rank, score, or maybe your strength. Which backlinks is it actually considering? Cause we know that Google is not showing all of your backlinks.
What you see within Search Console is a very limited view of what is actually coming into your site. The idea is that Google is actually using that which its showing and other things but if you constantly refresh and download out of search console, you actually get more backlinks and you can actually get insight to what Google is using to rank your pages. That is the concept. I wanted to take a look.
What I did was, I downloaded the content several times from three different live account and then compared all that data. The thing to understand is that there are actually three things to download. It is actually not just one area in Search Console. There is the overview all domains and this is what it looks like in that. This kind of lists all the domains Google claims in search console, these are your top domains.
I think Josh Bachynsky has the theory that some of these are the best ones and some of these are the worst ones. When you look at these, you think how are these the top domains, I have no idea. This is the screen of top domains and then you can see the download the table which has the “top domains”, the next section is the button that says “download more sample links”.
It is important to know that on that first one, this domain one, you can’t actually see the links. Download sample links then is the idea is, does it give you some of the links that are not showing perhaps. And then the thirds section is download latest links so the most recent links they claim to have seen. That is also not domain specific.
Probably in theory, when people say you download from Search Console, you get more, I do not know what they are talking about. There are three things to download so that means I have to download all of them and evaluate all of them.
Dori: Is each one different or does each one provide a little more?
That is what I wanted to find out – are these things the same thing, are they different, is this what they are talking about – if you download from the latest things, or sample links, are these the ones that refresh and would do it. That is what I was looking at. I also compared with Ahref and Majestic which I thought would be easy but I did a lot of work. As it turns out, it is really hard to compare two data sets.
Client one is a small brewery, they have a brand new site, it is under a year old, there are 15 pages on the site. They have their data in Ahref, Majestic, and this is what they have in Search Console. The thing to point out, on the subsequent downloads on the different days, I did days that are very close to each other and did one that is far away to see if there is an impact if I did two back to backs. What you’ll notice is that they actually came down.
The number of domains that they displayed dropped across the board. So 98, 97, 89 for the overview, the more sample links – 101, 192, 100, 193, out of the latest links. This is kind of standard as you go through these different clients. The amount of links that are displayed either rises or drops if the site is losing or gaining links. So two of these clients are losing links and they lose it across the board. The third client is gaining links and it is gaining across the board.
Then I went through and compared these ones and the sample links in the different domains and you can see that the domains are actually just three. It gave you three domains, it didn’t give you a whole new data set and these are the same from the 101 to 100. What I found was it doesn’t change them. You stay with the same number of domains, they do not really change. We are talking the difference between one or two on these downloads. All these data are in here and I won’t bore you with it but you can go through it at your leisure.
The end result here was, does Search Console give you more backlinks or linking domains if you refresh or you download, the answer is no. The domains and links you see trend with how you are trending – if you are gaining, they gain, if you are losing, they lose. You get one or two more. Client one, we find three extra in the sample links, client two got one, client three got four. That is not a huge amount of insight that you are getting some special insight in those domains, is just not there. You do not get any extra bonus or extra insight.
Then I compared with Ahref and Majestic with what they are showing. Client 1, Ahref says 40, Majestic says 37. Ahrefs missed 71, Majestic missed 74, Ahrefs had 9 extra ones that were not displayed in search console, Majestic had 4. Now, on these extra ones, Google might be using these, we do not know. We are hoping to find out. Is Google just ignoring them and that is why there are extra ones. Are they counting them and just really not displaying it?
What really impressed me on this is that 3rd party data is really just having blindfolds on and throwing darts at a barn and maybe they are hitting the side of the barn, the roof of the barn, maybe they are just hitting the dirt, who knows?
Dori: They are really missing a lot.
Maybe. With the extra domains, maybe they need that extra data that Google is also considering so maybe that is good. I do not know. Keep in mind, three clients are a smalls sample set, of course. But it is pretty impressive how across the board these are. I honestly do not have an alternative. You cannot not use Ahrefs, you cannot not use Majestic, or Moz or whatever you prefer. We have to have measuring sticks so we could try to track data but do not put all your heart and soul into things because God only knows if they are measuring the right ones, putting out the right ones, if Google are looking at those or not, don’t know at all.
Dori: Pretty interesting. I use Majestic as my barometer. It has been my barometer since its inception but it seems like they have changed, too. They are not following no follow links when I believe that they used to and this is what we have discussed today. All of a sudden, trust flow totally went down on everything for sites. Hey, what happened to my barometer here and I had a good sense by using that system and now I have to move over.
That is kind of my thought. It you think about the big 3 or 4, counting Moz and SEMRush as those big 4. The goal is to pick 2 of those and use them and roll with it. Understand that they might not show everything and that they might miss a lot.