For this month’s webinar, we discuss the results of the September dossier. Some recommendations were also provided on how you could best use the different results we have discovered in your own practice.
For this month, it was discussed if a page needs to be unique in order for a canonical link to pass juice or will a duplicate page work better? There were talks of content in the sidebar not being considered so this was tested and the results were discussed if indeed the keyword in the sidebar was read by Google.
We also have a couple of tests regarding internal links - internal linking with exact match anchor text, internal links using absolute or relative url, and if a silo will help a target page rank. The results show that you need to take focus on your internal links - more of this was discussed in the webinar.
It was also discussed if you should or should not take your time on user comments, if Google still reads hidden content know that we are in mobile first, if unique image alt tags boost rank, and if a page with the same meta title and h1 outrank one with different meta title and h1.
Lastly, we have worked on testing different tools and services and for this month, we test SEO Autopilot links. Lots of tests to look through. Enjoy the show! 🙂
Tests this month
Test 234: Do You Need a Unique Page for a Canonical to Pass Juice?
Test 235: Will a Keyword in a Sidebar Show Up in the SERPs?
Test 236: Internal Linking with Exact Match Anchors
Test 237: Are User Comments a Google Ranking Factor?
Test 238: Do SEO Autopilot Links Improve Rank?
Test 239: Now that We are in Mobile First, Does Google Read Content Hidden in Dropdown Accordions?
Test 240: Do Unique Image Alt Tags Boost Ranking?
Test 241: Which Passes More Internal Link Juice, an Absolute URL or a Relative URL?
Test 242: Will a Page with the Same Meta Title and H1 Outrank a Page with Different Meta Title and H1?
Test 243: Will a Silo Help a Target Page Rank?
September 2018 Dossier
Transcription Below:
Do You Need a Unique Page for a Canonical to Pass Juice?
This first test is very important to me. If you do some internal linking in your site, you’re looking at how you can pass juice, this is an important thing. Do you need a unique page for a canonical to pass juice? We are talking about a rel canonical, this is the kind of thing you put in the header of your site and you are telling Google which is the authoritative version of the page.
If you have ever done AdWords, you would create multiple landing pages that are duplicating content from another page on your site, there may be reasons to have those pages indexed. You would use rel canonical to tell Google to not worry about this version. I know that I am copying myself, the authoritative version is over there. But as SEOs, do those things pass juice?
Now we are looking at ok they probably pass link juice but how duplicated does the page need to be? So, the concept here is can you take just little portions of the page, put it into something, use rel canonical and pass some juice within your own site or do you need more than that. How unique does the page need to be?
I won’t keep you in too much suspense, Ryan Hough did an amazing job on this test, the bottom-line that we came to is that the page needs to be a duplicate, you need to use the whole page that you want to pass the juice on. The more duplicate the page is, the more juice it passes.
Dori: That seems very contrary to everything bad that we thought.
I think it goes down to what the rel canonical is supposed to do. The rel canonical is supposed to be where you have duplicated a page and you want to tell Google, please do not penalize me for this, I am not doing this to trick you, here is the page that I want you to index and rank. So Google, I think, would only really kick in that rel canonical when the pages are identical.
What you can do then is, if you were trying to build a page and you are – you know you’ve got this AdWords landing page and it would be great if we get an extra benefit from it by throwing in a rel canonical, if you want that situation where you might get that benefit, it needs to be basically completely duplicate of the page that you are sending the rel canonical to.
Will a Keyword in a Sidebar Show Up in the SERPs?
What we are testing here is, I had a member message me saying that there is no way that Google is considering content in the sidebar. If you do WordPress, you can see that quite easily but if you are in an html site, the idea is you’ve got the body, the header, the footer, and the sidebar. What he is saying is that Google is not considering that content he also said, which is interesting, is that it is a known fact in the SEO community which is weird because I did not know that.
Kind of the idea like we tested link strength and we found that there are different link strengths in different places in a particular page and I was like, they might be talking about content is devalued, I can see that as a possibility. But at a minimum, before we can get to that point, we need to see if Google is even reading sidebar content.
So for this particular content, we’ve got our sidebar set up and what we do is we put a fake keyword in the sidebar. That is all it is to it. The idea is if the page indexed for that keyword then we know that Google is reading the whole page. If you have been around me for a while, you probably know that it is not a surprise. This page indexed for the fake keyword that is sitting in the sidebar. So, Google is clearly reading the entire page.
If you spent anytime with Cora, Ted Kubaitis has the most amazing tool of all time, you can see this as well. These are the kinds of things that correlate when you are looking at an entire page from a source code perspective. The whole source code is being considered and that makes sense from what we are seeing in these scientific tests, these single variable tests that we are doing. A lot of these really complement each other.
When you are thinking about, I am building this page and do I need to worry about what is in the sidebar? Yes, you do. Just because it is in the sidebar, doesn’t mean it is some weird free pass. I have seen a lot in the audits that I have done and the work I do with clients, is that some sidebar widgets throw a lot of htags. You need to be careful with that. That is actually the next test in this series that we are running – do htags count the same in the sidebar, because a lot of widgets simply use htags for styling and that could be throwing off a lot of your SEO.
Step one is yes, Google is totally reading the sidebar. Next, we are looking at, is there value there. Are htags considered the same as with the body. What they are and what they are not is very important but at a minimum, we know that text that is in there is totally being considered.
Internal Linking with Exact Match Anchors
This is from Jo Priest, he is one of our newer guys. He has been doing some tests for a few months and he is killing it. He is truly killing it, he is dropping tests left and right, he is working hard, he has an amazing scientific mind and he has been a great addition to the guys and gals that contribute to the tests that we do and this is one of his tests.
What he is looking at is, so you’re doing some internal linking and you’ve got a post, you want to point it to your target page, is Google really looking at the anchor text on an internal link, what if you just said “click here”, is that better or should it have the target keyword in it? Do you want that sort of a set-up? What is funny is you think this is a basic concept but Google that one really quick and how you should do your internal anchors and you are going to see 37 different answers.
This was a really excellent test because I was really excited to see it and work on it with them because this impacts everything that you do. As soon as you have an internal link, what should you do with that link and how should it be? Should it just be some random text, keyword? Now, this is basically everything that touches those, if you do any kind of SEO, this is just your day to day.
Here is the set up, we’ve got random link, random link, exact match going to the number three, then random links on the 4th and 5th. These are all internal links coming in to the specific pages and, these one here, number three, has the exact match anchor. The page receiving the internal link with the anchor jumped right to number one and did so quickly. When you are trying to take advantage of your own internal link strength, you should be conscious of the target keyword of the page you are linking to.
Often, if you have done your internal linking correctly, you are probably linking from a blog post to a page and the blog post contain your keyword in it, which would make sense, and then you can kind of do a long tail sort of link in to the target page. It is a pretty decent way to do your internal links but then getting the keyword into that anchor text is definitely what you should be doing rather than just a click here or link or read more.
Are User Comments a Google Ranking Factor?
Brand new guy on the group, Jonathan Gorham and what we are looking at here is if you’ve got content that is sitting in the comments section, I have heard may people, when doing on page evaluation, saying something along the lines of, my competitor has 6000 words on the page but I can see that 3000 of them are in the comments, do I need to worry about those? Should I try to build a page to that kind of word count? Is Google even looking at those comments, I mean they are just comments, would they account that? So that is what we are looking at here.
What Jonathan did in this test set up is he had 5 pages set up and then he moved part of the content into the comment section. The idea is that they had identical content and he is going to grab a portion of that content and simply move it into the comment section. So, everything is the same, all the word count is the same.
It totally worked. That page moved all the way up. One portion had the keyword in it, so text coming into the body, putting into that, and its got the keyword in it, some just regular text. The idea is that they all had a comment section but the test page had the comment section had the equal amount of content that also contained the target keyword. Cause what we were looking at is does Google care about this? Is it reading it? The idea is that it totally reads it and it totally cares.
What type of comment module was used on the page? Would you think there would be a difference between a comment module or widget?
That is a decent question, I do not know. I will ask Jonathan what he used and we will post it in the Skype group. I am pretty confident what was used is a standard WordPress set up but that is a good question and I will double check. I imagine it is really just having the comment section.
Is the comment additional content?
In this case, no it was not. It was not adding to any of the word count, in this situation. It was just taking content that was already existing on the page.
Let’s say you are in a situation where you need to add a thousand words on a page, and there is no way you are going to get this by the client, but if you could pitch the idea of a comments section, you could just have a Socratic straw man argument or play dough where he is having a dialog between two people, just create the dialog, give the answers, you are actually going to add value because you will be answering questions that people a lot of people probably have. It is kind of a better way of having an FAQ, just within the comments section.
Do SEO Autopilot Links Improve Rank?
This is one of my favorite series. There are all these link tools out there, right? They will build you links, that is great, but what do these things look like? What do they do? Do they even move pages in a test environment? We’ve done two of these. One just worked out fine, I cannot remember the name of the one and I do not want to disparage anybody’s tool but we found a tool a couple of months ago that totally didn’t work. It was absolutely complete garbage and in a test environment, it couldn’t move rank. That is a huge red flag.
This was done by Simon White, a good friend of SIA, and our regular rockstar Ryan Hough. Simon added SEO Autopilot and Ryan had the test page. They collaborated on this one. What I really loved about this, if this is anything that you are interested in doing, here is a look at it, this is how the interface looks like, this is how they set up their links so you can follow things, this is what the dashboard looks like within the tool, this is kind of the set up for the post that is going to create, so you can see how that looks, and then this is the best part, these are the links it actually creates.
You can go in and see in this particular test, and this is what we have done before testing anything, they actually show the actual links that you can get. So, depending on the link building you are doing and your comfort level in this sort of things, you can actually take a real hard look at what this actually will be.
For my personal comfort level, I would never ever point these anywhere near my site. I may point them perhaps to a few things removed from my site if I was so inclined but these would never go directly to my site. Here is the whole list of those.
Dori: What kind of sites are these? Is this a network or?
I think kind of a little mix of like sites that they have purchased, I guess, and they probably have a few thousands of those and you can see some Web 2.0s sprinkled in because there is a Tumblr over here, I think. So it is a mix.
This one worked great. There is our test page in the number three spot and that bad boy jumped up to number 1 pretty quick.
Dori: So you wouldn’t link those because they are spammy?
Yeah, they are pretty garbage but you know, if you see the movement here in a test environment, it means that if you were to do it to some of your tier 1s and that passes through your site, that is probably pretty clean, I think that would work pretty well. But think about, you are in a hail Mary situation, you’ve got a month and it is a rank or nothing, these things probably move the needle and in a very short term environment, if you do not have to worry about tomorrow, this is one of the better tools. A lot of people swear by it too.
Is it worth using spammy links to tier two sites? I would think it would trash your good links.
Dori: Tier 2, I would do tier 2s. I would use spammy links.
You have to remember tier 2 is three away from your site. It says two but it means three.
Dori: I guess it depends on how risk averse you are. I believe that there is never a bad link, it is either a good link or a nothing link but people will disagree with me. I don’t think I have ever seen any hard proof where a nothing link will push down your site. Google says it will, all the evidence that I have had, I should probably be doing more testing about that with the PBNs that we are doing now. It has never been about a neighborhood except when it was pulling down a whole network of PBNs.
By and large, I totally agree with you but clearly, link penalties still do exist. It is not just completely gone. I those situations, you should still have some caution but I agree with you. Most of the spammy links are just shrugged off.
Dori: What kind of link penalties have you been seeing? Because I haven’t seen any although I do no do client work but I haven’t heard anybody talking about getting link penalties and notices like what we did in the day.
I think what you see is kind of thinking about it as asynchronous penalty. If you ever had those sites like these half of the site simply won’t rank and this site is kind of okay. I think that is some sort of asynchronous penalty.
Dori: I have actually never experienced that even with my spammy AdSense sites.
I definitely still see that, where you see sites like this section of the site just won’t rank, this section kind of ranks. There is clearly a penalty going on and when you look at the content, the content is fine so you know that it is not a panda issue.
Now that We are in Mobile First, Does Google Read Content Hidden in Dropdown Accordions?
This was a test that I ran and it was kind of a reaction to some things that happened in the beginning of this month. We are looking at mobile first and this just popped this month. A lot of people came out and they are saying that if you have accordions on your site, you are getting hit by the mobile first roll out.
In the last few weeks, there has been a huge wave of mobile first roll outs. There was this kind of initial wave and maybe one to two percent of sites had it and there was a bigger wave and that was 20% and then in the last three weeks, there has been a massive roll out of sites moving to the mobile first index.
There has been some kind of the sky is falling situation that if you have content that is in an accordion dropdown or some sort of hidden content, in that drop down sort of scenario, Google isn’t reading it. Your sites are getting hit and you are losing rank because of that and Dejan SEO put out their little test, it is from Dan Petrovich.
I have heard Dan speak and I loved him. His work on data analysis is fantastic. This particular test that they ran is a bit flawed and you can check out that test on your own. Even still, just because the test is flawed, doesn’t mean it is wrong. It still could have hit on what is actually happening and so we want to go in.
Dori: What is flawed about it? It is just the way he tested it?
There were a couple of things wrong with it, the thing is he launched two separate sites and he called them with similar domain strengths so right there you run into problems because it is not exact and how do you know. We run into those things too but that is a tough one.
The other thing that they run into as well is that he only launched two at one time so he is launching two different, I believe they are identical pages at the same time, the situation you run into there is there’s part of Google’s algorithm is forced ranking and that is what we see in the duplicate pages that we launch in our test environments, there is something within Google’s algorithm that forces rank.
The algorithm doesn’t break because you have duplicate pages, it is going to rank them. Let us pretend for a second that the sites were entirely the same, there isn’t a thing that would cause one site to rank above the other, in terms of duplicate content. They are just going to be placed. So when he ran this test by only launching two pages, there is no way to say whether one is move valuable than the other.
They could just be going in that order simply because they are seen as the exact same thing, they are not seen as different, they are seen as the exact same content and they are just being pushed into rank. So there is no real way for him to say that the issue here was that one had a drop down with some content and one didn’t, was kind of the bigger issues.
So, anyway, that is to say, it still could be right.
What we got here is, we’ve got the test site and it is in the mobile first index. So you can see it there that it is in the mobile first index and it has been there since July. The idea then is we throw an accordion on the page – here is the mobile view of it and you can see the closed accordion hidden text and here is the open accordion, it has text in it and the target keyword. If our page indexes for this fake keyword, then we know Google is clearly reading this content.
Google isn’t just ignoring entire content because it is hidden in mobile. The thing about it too is Dan’s test is wildly complex. It was way more complex than it needed to be. You just had to do this just to see if Google is reading the content, here is a way to do it. We fetched the page and just for fun, we fetched it on the desktop mode rather than on the mobile mode to have fun with it and no surprise, the page totally indexes.
So this fake keyword only exists in that hidden content that you could see from that drop down and the page indexes. Google is clearly reading this content, do not freak out. It indexed in both desktop and mobile views.
Do Unique Image Alt Tags Boost Ranking?
This is from Jo Priest who was doing a really fantastic job with this test. Jo really has been big with the idea of unique content. Google said they want unique, we have seen a lot where that was simply not true but maybe there is something where it is. Maybe there is a point where the unique content actually does kick in. It’s not that Google is lying, they just give half truths where they let people assume what they mean but he’s going to go and find it where that unique content needs to be. So, how about your image alts? Should they be unique image alts, would that actually boost ranking?
I will cut right through the chase, it does not and here is his unique image alt, 1, 2, 4, and 5 were all the same and there is absolutely no movement. He is pushing the stone up the mountain. It is a wonderful test. We run into this all the time if you are doing client work, should we do it this way or that way and these are the kind of things that are, nope, it doesn’t matter. These things just do not matter. He is going to do a follow up test doing some variation work or LSI work and maybe that can be an impact.
Cause we have seen, as you know, variations in text and LSI in text are ranking factors and it would be kind of cool if we could find those factors in other signals as well and image alt might be one of them. But in terms of your image alt need to be definitely unique, that is not a ranking factor.
Which Passes More Internal Link Juice, an Absolute URL or
a Relative URL?
This is one of my favorite tests. For those that are unsure, an absolute url is you’ve got the whole thing, you’ve got https://www.domain.com/yourpage. A relative url is where you cut out all that first part and you just have /yourpage obviously, that can only work on your own site so what we are talking about is internal linking.
The idea is, on your own site, if you were to put in /yourpage or /pageone or something. Google understands and search engines understand and when somebody clicks on that, the browser understands that you age going to a page within that site. That is the relative url. The absolute url, which you can do, is the whole thing.
Here is the fun thing and this was great, test one, what we were doing was we were sending two links, these were all within the same environment. Absolute to number four, relative to number three. So, they both moved up but there was no flip-flop.
Our thought process is, if absolute is stronger, it would jump the number three. If there was no difference, they would stay the same but there was also the outcome possibility that the relative was stronger, in which case, it would all stay the same. But this was the first run.
First one, they both moved up, the relative stays above the absolute. So we want to run this the other way to see what happens so we are going the relative to number four, the absolute to number three. Here is where the fun thing happens, the absolute url didn’t move. It actually stayed in the number three spot but the relative jumped to number one. So, now, we are like, we can’t leave it at that. We have to replicate this thing.
So, we did it again. Exact same set up, different domains, and the relative didn’t go all the way to number one but it still jumped the absolute. This is a pretty cool thing. If you follow Josh Bachynsky, which I hope a lot of people do, he has been doing a lot of tests recently about internal links and he has been finding a lot of things where internal links aren’t passing juice and this could be part of what is going on here as maybe we were seeing a part of an algorithm shift, maybe Google is favoring these relative links so the idea is that if you are going to take the time to do a relative link, it is for the purpose of building within your site, it is a more trusted version of doing your internal links, there is less hanky-panky, if you will and it can be done.
We are still seeing internal links pass juice but keep this one in your back pocket. I wouldn’t go tomorrow and change all my links. But what I would do is if I’m in the process of building new pages for the purpose of internal linking or if I’ve got one that I have recently built that I don’t mind tinkering with, I would change them to relative urls and see what kind of results I would get.
Will a Page with the Same Meta Title and H1 Outrank a Page with Different Meta Title and H1?
Dori, do you remember 2015? It was my first time speaking at SEORockstars. This was one of the tests that I talked about – having your metatitles the same as your h1. Essentially, the page title that Google sees should not be the same as the page title that human sees or should they be different? I recently saw some chatter about it and you know that the test I presented in SEORockstars in 2015, I think I ran that test early 2015 or late 2014, it has been 3 or 4 years, let us run this test again because things do change.
Actually, a couple of people in Skype, I think, 3 months ago, people were talking in the Skype group and I was like, let’s do this, this is a good opportunity.
Normal set up, that is how they go, and the results are identical jumps to number one. Your metatitle and H1 identical, go up to the top. We ran it back the other way and this is where you’ve got a unique set up, unique drops to the bottom. While a lot of things change, a lot of things stay the same and I think real data analyst, people like Ted Kubaitis will tell you that as well.
The stuff on the fringe, that is what changes, things where people spam something or do something funky or weird or some technique, that is where Google is getting after, that kind of 10% on one side of the bell curve, the 10% on the other. So 20% of seo is what changes. The 80% on the middle is going to pretty much stay the same cause they really can’t change a lot of that. It has to be consistent or else, all their results would change constantly. They have to maintain some consistency and that is probably where that 80% is and I think this is one of the things that fall within that 80%.
Google likes to see the title that you give in Google is that title that you are giving your humans. It is the same title and I think Google feels a lot better about it. Because Google has a thing for hiding content. Why would you give a different title? Also think about the results, the meta title is what goes into the serps, more often than not. Somebody reads that metatitle and wants to read that page, they click on that and the page title is completely different. Everybody hates that and Google knows that so why would you do it?
Will a Silo Help a Target Page Rank?
This is a very basic thing in SEO. The reason that I wanted to do this was, we found before that 2-3 internal links are equal to 1 external link. That is the ratio that we found but in those test, we really didn’t silo the pages. So now, what if we actually set up a silo structure with those 2-3 internal links, can we just beat that external link, is the idea. We really want to put in the effort into this and silo these bad boys.
To the number three here, we’ve got three silo posts going in and then to the number four, it is one link from a different domain, it is what we are playing with. If the one link from a different domain is better, then it should jump the number three spot. There is one thing, in addition to this, that is a huge find. Whether that is right or wrong, there is actually a more significant discovery. I want to show you these, these are the silo posts.
We want to make this the real thing, we’ve got your target page selling blue widgets so you will have three silo posts all about your widgets and some kind of long tail phrase on that perhaps. You’ve got your best blue widgets 2013, looking for blue widgets in your area, here’s why we like blue widgets, these are the three silo posts. There is a link on top of it and it uses the name of the post as the anchor text so it’s got anchor text going into it and the silo post link to each other.
The idea is that they link to each other and that is what makes them a silo and then they’ve got a link on the top of the page going up to the target page. This is what we call a virtual silo for those that aren’t familiar. A lot of people talk about a physical silo, that is where you’ve ever used WordPress or similar CMS, you can have a parent and a child page put on top of each other and that is a physical silo.
A virtual silo does not have that parent-child relationship. How it is created is through your linking between things. So you link from one post to the other and both of those posts link to a target page, that is a virtual silo which we are creating here. Pro-tip, if you really want to be advanced at SEO, create virtual silos.
This is the external links, it is coming from another domain pointing to the number four and it is using the exact anchor text as well. To show you what we are talking about, we are finding sites that has at least a little juice, not crazy juice because then you are really drawing a lot of variables. We at least wanted something there. The silo pages all have a page authority of 1 but that domain has a domain authority of 2.
Majestic didn’t have anything because there is not a lot going on with these things so majestic isn’t going to get much into the pages themselves. There was a little juice if you looked at the domain but the page level, you can see that there is nothing there. The external link, you can see the PA1 and DA2, we are at least reducing variables and there is nothing going on in majestic. This is how as close as we could get to having the internal link of the same value as the external links.
The page with the 3 links goes to number 2. The page getting the external link drops down to 7. In the middle, one silo page jumped it and another silo page jumped it. It is because they had the external links. But here is the huge find, are following along with the concept of sentiment? The idea of putting best into your meta titles, you are saying that this is the best, what has been chatted about in Josh’s group and also in SIA, and Ted is doing a lot of research on this, is putting best a ranking factor.
What is pretty cool is it hasn’t been seen yet in a testing environment but you’ll notice that these silo page with the word best in it actually jumps the target page. So, pretty crazy. You can also see, if anybody wondered, the site that was sending the link was indexed, yes it was crawled and it was actually in Google’s index. The bottom result is the page that was actually sending the link.
By the way, if you ever have any question on anchor text is a ranking factor, the answer is yes it is because there’s the result. The page sending the link indexes so we know that Google has crawled it and is considering it.
The big thing is, you control links on your site. You can interlink them with each other. You should be doing this. If you have some questions whether these things actually pass juice or not, what kind of juice, at a minimum, it is there. You should be doing them. What is really exciting though is the idea of this “best”. It has been talked about in the last two months and it as a very fresh concept in SEO.
Outside of our group, outside of SIA, outside of Josh’s group, I have never really seen anybody talking about this. This is something that is completely out there. I know that Josh and Ted have some ideas on when you may or may not want to use it, it has a warning. Don’t run and change all your things to best. I would hold off on that, it needs to be more scientific but this is a pretty cool indicator that it is a very strong signal right not in Google. It is also a pretty cool thing to interlink your pages and create virtual silos.
Any data on other sentiment words like awesome or great?
That is the next thing that we will test. These are hard things to test in a test environment but we are going to run some tests on best and if we see some movements, we are going to feel good about what we are doing there, then yeah that is the absolute next step, to look at the other sentiment words as possibilities.