For this month's webinar, Clint and Dori go through the following tests and make recommendations on how the results apply for you as a business owner or as a SEO agency.
Test 509: How Many Links Will It Take To Beat This Root TF 28?
Test 510: Can You Cloak A Page Using Http/1 Redirect For Googlebot?
Test 511: Do Non-Public Google Sheets With Links Have Ranking Value (Phase 2)?
Test 512: Do Non-Public Google Documents Still Have Ranking Value (Phase 2)?
Test 513: Do Non-Public Google Slides Still Have Ranking Value (Phase 2)?
Test 514: Do Non-Public Google Drawings Still Have Ranking Value (Phase 2)?
Test 515: Do Non-Public Google My Maps Still Have Ranking Value (Phase 2)?
Test 516: Does Staykeen.com Link Share Increase Rank?
Test 517: Will Duplicate Meta Descriptions Affect Rank?
July 2020 Dossier
Transcription Below:
DORI: Hey, everyone. Dori Friend here with Clint Butler. Welcome to the SIA's monthly webinar. We have, I believe, nine tests this month and Clint's schema course that he put in. I hope that you have seen it or are planning on it. Clint is the go-to guy for practically everything but especially schema so that is a must watch. In fact, Clint has put a couple courses in that are just amazing so I'm hoping that everybody takes advantage of those.
Test #509: How Many Links Will It Take To Beat This Root TF 28?
I'm starting off instead of Clint because it's the one I did. This test is 509: how many links will it take to beat this root TrustFlow of 28? Now, this is an extension of test 488 where we were putting up three TrustFlow 10 sites against – it was actually a TrustFlow 30 at the time and we wanted to see if it would outrank it and it did not. So, what we learned from that is that quality, of course, beats out quantity. If you're a link counter that might not be the best use of your time. We look for quality.
Now, we want to find out how many links it is going to take to overcome that TrustFlow 28 now and that's for the root domain. I'll get into root and URL in just a moment. The test was set up pretty straightforward. At the beginning they were all in the Recreation topic and I think most of them are now. We linked three of those TrustFlow one was a 10, 10 and a 12 to one page. Then, the one link of the 30 to the other page to see what happened. Well, the one link with the 30 beat those three links. Since then I've added three more links and the average TrustFlow – here's the root metrics: the top one with the red around it is the site with the link that is beating out all the links from this site. Now, that doesn't mean each one of those bottom ones are going to a separate page. All of these are going to the same page. So, this site is beating the page that all of these are linking to it.
I just want to show you that the links are all contextual, they're all at the top of the page. They all look like this. They are sticky posts so they've not gone down whatsoever. What's interesting though is that the URL metrics are a lot higher than the root metrics. If you can see it, the top site here the URL metrics is a TrustFlow 40. That's really extremely extremely high and it's beating out these 19, 20, 24, 13, 13 and 19. So, I found that to be really interesting especially – and I'll talk about that back in a moment but, the results are that a single link is still beating out all those other links. Here is that graphic for that.
In my analysis, it surprised me 1) that the TrustFlow metrics had gone up since the beginning of this test because these are all PBNs and these are all PBNs that are five years old. They were created in a linked network in 2015. That explains their diminished root metrics, like the MOZ and Ahrefs metrics as well. Although, I typically purchase for TrustFlow. I have liked TrustFlow way better than the other metrics and I never even paid attention to MOZ before but I bought a MOZ Pro account just so I could analyze this a little bit more and I could dive deeper. I spent the two days actually on this trying to figure out why these sites are not beating that one site. So, I have this chart here where I put everything in an Excel file. You may not see it but you can see this one site down here it beats the top site and most of the categories in all three analytical tools. So, this is interesting and maybe some people can dive into this and give me more of an explanation of what's going on here. We're going to still continue to link to that one page and see how many it takes to overcome this TrustFlow of 40, PA of 20, UR of 16. The root metrics aren't that great although it's a TrustFlow 28 DA of 10 and a DR of 3. The DR 3 still beat out the other sites. Like I said, these are old PBNs.
I was really digging into this and the screenshots here, like in MOZ, I had different metrics from when I took them one at a time and when I did them one at a time that's what's in this chart, the Excel files screenshot, but when I would do the compare their metrics changed a lot. So, I found that to be really interesting. Like, the total links that it says coming into the site are in the thousands and none of the tools – even when I did MOZ, when I did it singularly, did not say it had these thousands of links coming into the site so I felt like that was really weird. Also, the internal followed links – and I'm not really sure if that means links coming into the internal pages from an external source or internal links that they're following in the site. Clint, maybe you know?
CLINT: Those are internal links in the site that are set to dofollow.
DORI: Okay. I know that these are old PBNs but they don't get posted to very often because these sites are not really in a network that's being used. So, I thought the thousands which is almost the total links, it's counting the internal follow links and the external links to get the total links. Is that what it's doing here?
CLINT: Yes.
DORI: That's interesting and I think it would also be confusing. It confused me because I'm not a MOZ user. It wasn't obvious to me so I thought that was a little bit strange.
That's the root domain. Then, I have a screenshot for the exact page which I, typically, want to rely on more because Google ranks pages. They don't rank URLs. The root domain, the DA and the DR really doesn't mean all that much. All that is an internal calculation to how they think these sites would rank in the search engine.
You can see over here that one site has a domain authority of 14 where the one that's winning is only a domain authority of 10. So, it should be beating that out. In any case, I'd like to look at the exact page. That's why I like to look at the URL metrics instead of the root domain metrics. I thought that was interesting and also the internal links followed on those URLs. I know that there's not hundreds of links on that homepage. There's a maximum of 10 articles with three links in them so that would be 30. So, there's that. I also thought maybe there's some internal linking playing here because I know that both MOZ and Ahrefs will use internal linking to score for the root domain and actually for the URL but they don't show that to us. In any case, here is a screenshot of that site with the TrustFlow of 40 and it only has one link coming into it and that link has a TrustFlow of 13. So, that's really like, "What? How can that be?" I know there's not these pages because it's a PBN that is linking to the homepage except in the navigation. Could the navigation play that important part? Have people been linking to these sites? I don't know. That was a big question mark for me and I started getting a little wary about Majestic here, too. Somebody could say, "Well, look at the historic. Maybe it's getting from that." But when you look at the historic view it's a TrustFlow of zero so that's not it.
This is the root again, and it shows like there's some great links coming into the root, into that homepage. Is that giving it the TrustFlow 40? I don't know. There's a 33 and a 23, a 6 and a 14. Then, there's some other lower ones and then it went to zero because this site doesn't have that many links going into it anymore.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out like where is that coming from and I haven't been able to really yet so I'm going to do some more investigation. The bottom line is this: we still don't have enough links to beat that one single site and I'm going to continue to add more. I started to lose faith in the tools all of them, because there was nothing that really showed me why this was happening and why that page is ranking #1. So, I will keep digging and more will be revealed.
We do know quality beats quantity but why is that site – it had that much quality? Clint, do you have any thoughts on that?
CLINT: I have always had the same issue with all of the tools just because they're so easily manipulated. UR rank is easily manipulated. PA and DA was always easily manipulated with just trackbacks and ping-backs. You can do that with that. Then, TrustFlow was the trusted metric that I was using filters through especially when we were looking at link targets but when you see that, and I've seen tons of instances of where that number just doesn't make sense. Like, if I had one link and that link had a TrustFlow of 90 then you rewarded my page with the TrustFlow of 40 I got it. But if I have three links and they're all like yours: 30s, 19s, 0s and 0s that makes zero sense of why my TrustFlow would be that. Is it taking into account the relevancy of the anchor text? Those are things that we don't know and I doubt MOZ or Majestic or Ahrefs would ever put out the true "This is how our database is manipulated in order to come up with these numbers”.
DORI: Yes, I looked at all the anchor text in these sites and decided not to put them in the test because it would just make it long and they were pretty much benign. Just a lot of brand links, no exact matches, no heavily like that so there wasn't anything that stood out to me, in other words, when I was looking at that.
CLINT: Lauren had a good question too. Is the internal links part of that TrustFlow measurement? It very well could be and I think looking at the counts and knowing that they're probably all WordPress sites – you can correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm not sure if you have the date archives, the author archives, the category archives and the tag archives turned off. If those aren't turned off then that explains your high count of internal linking.
DORI: Then, that would be a way to manipulate it. I believe the archives may be on some of the sites. I don't know about these sites but I remember seeing them on some other sites. That is actually something I can go check. That would be really great. That's why I mentioned maybe the navigational links were giving that site-wide stuff back to the homepage but still... I do know that internal linking counts for a lot. That is something that Clint and I have talked about and it's not really talked all about all that much in the SEO industry, that how internal linking plays and how important it is. But when you think that it only has really two links coming into the site, where is that juice coming from? Except if all those pages are producing links that are going to give it juice. Now, we do know from earlier tests that two or three internal links are counted as an external link. So that, Lauren, you could be dead on there that that really could be what's happening. I'd like to test that more to really get a better understanding of why and how that site got such a high TrustFlow.
CLINT: All right. One thing I like about your test is it proved my theory that domain rank is trumped by URL rank for Ahrefs. I stopped following domain rank a long time ago and I only use UR when I'm doing my filters now and that has been working like gangbusters for me. Your numbers that you pulled manually the UR rank tracks with the ranking positions of the pages so that's pretty cool.
Go back to your screenshot there. If you look at UR, see it's 16, 1, 24, 14, 27 that's an outlier, in my opinion. That one right there, that 16, the highest UR is ranking.
DORI: Yes, it would make sense if all of these pages were shooting links to different pages and this was the one that won, the 16, and the 23 would be an outlier but all of these links are going to that single page and I checked it to make sure too that they were indeed active on top of the page and I did find one – there were supposed to be seven links going in, that did not have the link. It just didn't have the link so I pulled that out. That's not even part of the conversation right now. So, all of these sites are pointing to one page. That 16 is beating all of these. Same with that TrustFlow too, the highest TrustFlow. Maybe in a of couple days it could change. We'll see. I'm going to continue to add links to it and we'll see next month where it stands and I'll look at that internal linking and see if those archives and all that stuff's up on the site.
CLINT: Another factor is also how often those companies are updating their link database. I know MOZ is probably like six months, almost a year now, of them actually updating their database to make it work right because before it was really small. Now, it's like 6. Something million because people will call them out on it.
DORI: [Majestic] they are crawling pretty often. I mean, you see some of these pages were crawled July 28th. This one, may 13th was the last time it was crawled. This one was July 3rd, July 2nd.
CLINT: What I would do there, just for my own education, is just run that in Ahrefs and see when their last crawl dates were to see how that all washes out. So, who's updating faster et cetera because maybe you're missing stuff that is not being reported yet.
DORI: That's true. Although, that one site is still ranking and that Google updates pretty often.
CLINT: One more question would be on the pages that are being tested, are they all the exact same in regards to title tag, H1s, URL and keyword density in total?
DORI: Yes, they're mass-produced test pages by my team. We create all our test pages. They're lorem ipsum. They have the same exact amount of everything. The lorem ipsum isn't identical on the pages but the word count is and the keyword count is as well but that's something I can go back and make sure. I can check.
CLINT: The only reason I bring that up is because Ted and I have tanked tests because we had things in there. We were testing a really weak factor and it was getting out and I'm outdone by the stronger factors. URL, title tag and H1s are typically the stronger ones that we're messing up on.
DORI: That's a good point. I will go back and look at that. Thanks.
But dang! I want to figure that TrustFlow out, the metrics, the tools to get a really clear view of the links that we're buying. Just everything.
CLINT: Well, I did something with Ahrefs and then Ahrefs threw monkey wrench because we were using DR 40. You get the DR 40 links and you can rank all day long. Then, they decided to change the way their algorithm works and that algorithm ~ initial change dropped the DR and the UR for pretty much every site on the web to like zeros and really low cap stuff and people got pissed at them and said something and so they updated it again to get everyone's numbers like a happy medium for everyone to stop complaining, is essentially what they did. Now, DR is pretty much useless.
DORI: Yes, because we use that as a barometer as an SEO. As long as we know what it is it's like that's our barometer. Like you said, I got a DR 40 and I was good all day long. Then, when they changed that barometer it's like, "Oh god, no. We gotta start over." So, I get that.
Test #510: Can You Cloak A Page Using Http/1 Redirect For Googlebot?
CLINT: This one's from Jo and it's kind of heady so I'm bound to mess up the presentation of this test a little bit. I would venture to say that 99% of you probably won't use cloaking in any shape or form and not because you don't want to, it's just because it's a pain in the butt to really set it up right.
What he's testing is, there's a new version of HTTP, the new standardized version and that's HTTP/2, then there's the original HTTP/1 and Google bot is actually written and programmed to pull using HTTP/1. The difference is, and if you've ever looked at a page speed test tool is connections. If your website is HTTP/1 Google bot has to make a new connection to pull each thing. A thing in the case of this PDF would be The logo is a thing, then the text is a thing. Then the background is a thing. Then CSS is a thing, etc. In HTTP/, which is considerably faster, allows Google to use that one connection to pull all those resources. At the same time, and most of this is really server based, then there's some finite things that you do in your HTML to change that up a little bit, but it's a server based thing that actually speeds up the web and most browsers are actually supporting It right now. I can't think of one that isn't even some of the obscured name browsers that are popping up out there right now. Especially if they're Chromium based they're all HTTP/2 compatible. As long as you turn your server on you're good to go, however, Google bots are not doing it.
The idea behind this test was – and it challenged Jo because he's like super nerdy to figure this stuff out is, if I have two versions, an HTTP/1 version and an HTTP/2 version, I give Google the HTTP/1 version and all my users will see the other version, the HTTP/2 can I still rank? If you have heard about mass pages, a lot of the systems are like that. Now, it's built into it. You build a page, You rank that page. Then you immediately or set up a Javascript where after the page has been published for a month, then it starts redirecting after it ranks. That's essentially the whole cloaking thing in a nutshell.
We're pretty much doing that here. We made this page, it sucks. It's just for ranking, then we want to actually show the users the page is going to convert. In the case of the test setup, Jo did it with htaccess and everybody got the HTTP/2 version, except for Google bot. Hopefully, you're all still with me.
DORI: Yes, this is pretty heady.
CLINT: Yes, the next step is, he obviously had to get all the pages indexed. He did like 100 of them and if you know Jo he's doing a lot of tests where he's literally scraping all of the pages in the top 100, then using those his test pages, which is really cool because it throws in some new ideas and concepts and he's actually doing pretty good with the indexing and stuff. He's got that all going up and you can see his impressions were like stupidly high. He was getting clicks, then, all of a sudden, the bottom fell out of it for him here as the pages dropped. It was ranking, Google was reading it and then it just dropped.
We'll scroll through the rest of this stuff. Here you can read it when you get it, but what he's surmising and as I'm looking through the data and I'm like right on there with him - is that, yes, you can cloak your pages using the htaccess and the HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 but if the content that you have that the user is interacting with is not any good then you're eventually going to fail the user metrics test with inside of the algorithm and thus lose your rankings. That's essentially what happened here. It was really good. Google tested it out and gave a lot of impressions. No one was clicking it. No one was reading it. No one was staying around so we're just going to kick you out of the index. You suck, you don't qualify for the top 100. That's pretty much what Jo's came up with and I agree with him. If you want to try that out I say go ahead and try it. Just keep that in mind, if you're going to do it on a site that you want to convert I.e if you're doing this for a launch tracking play or something like that make sure that the page that is actually being shown to the users get some interaction and stuff and Google see that via your Search Console et cetera and you probably have a lot better luck with this.
Jo is actually going to try this out on Bing. He's going to try and do it in some new domains. He's going to try it with the new content thing. Then, he's going to try some different methods of redirecting the traffic from, say, the target site or the cloaked site. Puts up a page, then that page is redirected somewhere else, for example. Like the mass page example I gave you and see how that works out. I think all of this is really interesting, probably above what most of you would be doing. But if you want to know and how to leverage the mass page concept and ideas a lot better than this one, this test will really help you out and show you that the concepts that they're teaching are generally in the right direction.
I don't see any questions on that one. Dori, you got anything in that.
DORI: No, it's just really interesting about what he's doing and Jo always brings that brain trust to the table. Thank you, Jo, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else he has, more results on this.
CLINT: It's nice just getting tests from Jo because he's a programmer so he thinks on the programming level.
Test #511: Do Non-Public Google Sheets With Links Have Ranking Value(Phase 2)?
CLINT: These next sets of tests are all phase twos from last month. If you remember last month, we tested the difference between Available to everyone versus Publish to the web and see if these are still passing juice. If you're new and haven't seen this before, basically the concept was you can go to Google Drive and you could create Google Sheets, you could create a Google doc, you can create drawings, Powerpoint and there's My Maps, which is part of Google Drive but also part of the Google maps atmosphere, and you can rank. We tested that in SIA back when Kyle was there and he primarily focused on Google docs, which was the number one target really for everybody because it was actually the one that provided the best link value. So, I wanted to do it again since Google changed the way that these work and I wanted to see, is that an indication or was that changes part of a reaction to all of the tools? Like, there's just people who made entire businesses about making tools that essentially, for the lack of a better term, spam Google Drive to quite an excess. You have 15 gigabytes, imagine how many of these Google Drive documents, etc. You can make and/or ranking pages. It's a business - there's software out there, there's gigs, there's trainings, etc. All designed around this one concept, which is the Google Drive stack, is what it's called.
When I change it to anyone with the link and Publish to the web versus what they used to have in here, which was anyone online allows to go into the search results. There's like four options, but one of them was that you can actually allow it to go into the search results and that's gone. To me that was an indication that there's something up. Google's probably caught on. They probably got tired of people using all their free resources to generate spam. Then all the people going to the John Mueller's and going, "Why is this ranking? I don't understand." For whatever reason because they got beat or they're just legitimately dumb.
So, I wanted to test if they still have some power. I set these all up for all the platforms and you can all see those before, and this is legitimately the original one where everything started. The first test was with no backlinks. Then this one was with backlinks, some premium backlinks – there's social bookmark backlinks. It's a set of backlinks that I've used consistently over and over and over again and continue to rank pages with, and I use SEO AutoPilot to generate them. In this case, we sent the backlinks to the thing and I just let them sit, and I wanted to see how long it would take, if any, would pop through in the search results. What happened was, and these are a little bit backwards, the page actually fell out of the top 10 and they dropped back in here. Even more so, unless I clicked the see the hidden pages, I couldn't see any of our test sites at all, except for one. If you remember the test before just turning it on and creating the backlink didn't provide any value. It's the same thing when I send links to it. There's no link juice passing through the Google Sheets at this time, which is really disheartening if you're into those sorts of things. If you build those out for yourselves and your clients, now at this time, you're wasting your time with Google Sheets.
Test #512: Do Non-Public Google Documents Still Have Ranking Value(Phase 2)?
I went on and did Google Documents and I'll skip that since I don't have to say it all again because it's all the same. We've got the same result. Here's the test page and you can see the only page from the domain is still right there. Then, the rest of the backlinks all took over. I actually had to change the search result to even find one of the test pages and if you do it this way and you think about where these all started it didn't move at all, but who's going to search like that? So, essentially, the backlinks outrank the test pages and the test pages are gone. Again, there's no link juice passing through the Google Documents anymore. That blows.
DORI: I feel really bad for people who have businesses and software around that because I know what it's like to, all of a sudden, somethings not working anymore.
CLINT: Yes, it's all gone. It's time to pivot.
Test #513: Do Non-Public Google Slides Still Have Ranking Value(Phase 2)?
Google Slides, same thing. Anyone with the view test result, the test site gone completely. All of the backlinks came in there. Then, I did it the other way and you can see the test pages – one is gone and the other one's right there, essentially where it started. No link juice passes through that. So, Slides is pretty much dead.
Test #514: Do Non-Public Google Drawings Still Have Ranking Value(Phase 2)?
Then, Drawings was really cool. If you don't know how this worked, you could create a Google Drawing but underneath that you can actually put as many backlinks as you want, underneath that picture you put inside of your Google Drawings and then essentially hide the links for users but Google would see them. That was like a really cool link building method. Now it's toast.
This one actually stayed. The backlinks didn't outrank anything but you can see here there's no change in the ranking position so the backlinks are not going through here before. Here's the exact match, the pages are there but the test pages are gone. Then we brought the other versions just to make sure that the screenshots were all consistent. You can see it didn't do anything. This page, available with the web, and the ones that you see dropped are consistent with the other one where it was published with the web. So, if you intentionally click publish with the web so far every one of them has resulted in a drop of the page that the document was linking to.
Test #515: Do Non-Public Google My Maps Still Have Ranking Value(Phase 2)?
Then My Maps. My Maps, I always had my doubts about. I could get some ranks but I can definitely pass juice through them and in this case the benefit is, as you can see, gone. It killed it. Here the test pages were gone. What this is telling me is Google saying, "Hey, I've had enough of you, of you guys spamming the hell out of our thing. We've had enough with the "embarrassment" of Google Drive document outranking web pages so we are going to make these so that they don't pass any juice at all. Then, if you are the type of person that actually clicks Publish to the web, then I hope you don't have backlinks in there because we're going to give you a three to five position drop when you click that Publish to the web button to any page that's linking out to it, assuming that this doesn't have any links. So, that's where it's at. I would go ahead and you can wait for one more month. The next phase three of that test is I'm going to turn GSA SER and Xrumer loose on all of those properties and just blast the heck out of it and see what happens before we call it dead. But right now I would put a pause on building drive stacks.
Also keep in mind, I did not test the Google site. The site has actually got a new thing where you can publish it but not make it to the web too, but those are still indexing and they're still ranking just fine. The docs, the sheets and all that stuff they're not doing any of that anymore. The site might still - and this probably is still a good linking opportunity so I'll bust out another test on that this month and we'll test Google sites using the staxxio stack ceo software, which makes everything a lot nicer.
Vinay said, are Google stacks the same as drive stacks? Yes, they are the exact same. When you're doing the stack, the Google stack, it's the Google site and then all those drive stacks and they all point to the site and then boost sends to either your money sites or wherever you're sending the link to. Now, the entire Google Drive element, with the exception of Google sites, so far has been killed as an available link opportunity.
DORI: Matthew says those vendors will tell you it still works, but you know they don't.
CLINT: Yes, ~ and I could give these test results away for free to everyone and their brother and there'll still be people that, "Oh, no. I'm still ranking for mine." What they leave out is they built a whole bunch of other backlinks from other properties or whatever too.
Test #516: Does Staykeen.com Link Share Increase Rank?
Here's another one. This one is the Google site. It's like Google's answer to Pinterest - Staykeen.com, and when I saw it I asked James to test it out and he did. We wanted to know, do we get just as much link juice out of Staykeen as we would get out of Pinterest because it's a Google property and Google loves Google, right? We wanted to see how that works and he set up the test. You can see all the setup stuff inside of here. In the interest of time I won't go over all that, but this is the page that got the link, then you go through all his results. Everything's dropping. A whole month later and it's down there at #9 and then at 23rd it's right back. It's kind of early to say Staykeen is going to be good because what we didn't test was the link on Staykeen building links to it. If you heard me say this before, 0 + 0 = 0 and if the Staykeen is not getting – people aren't sharing it or people aren't building links to that Staykeen link, does it have any link value anyway just because it's linking out to the image? In and of itself, what the test proved is that Staykeen has no ranking value by itself, not doing anything to it, which is pretty interesting.
How is Google going to compete with Pinterest in this model? I think if they want to take it seriously, and they know that to get a platform taken seriously they have to court the SEO market. It's how they built Google AdWords, that's how they built their search results. They're going to need to make this property a lot more important in regards to link building so that more people get on it and more people use it then get people hooked to it. Then they'll take it away just like they did with Google AdWords, they built it with affiliates. They promoted affiliates to use it. They got it widely accepted. Small businesses jumped on board. Large businesses jumped on board. Then they kicked all the affiliates off of the network. It's essentially what I would say would be the next step with Staykeen if they actually want people to take it seriously as a competitor to Pinterest. But it is another platform you should be using just to at least check the exifs, see if it's ripping the iptc data out of there. Then build some backlinks to it and just play with it and have it a brand presence and you can add that to your schema, in your sameAs.
Test #517: Will Duplicate Meta Descriptions Affect Rank?
The final one: duplicate meta descriptions affect rank. We've talked about this before. I think we've tested different variations of this test – duplicates, leaving them blank, do they even matter at all, etc. James wants to look at it one more time to see if duplicate meta descriptions affect rank because as you know every SEO audit tool, SEO crawler, etc, says we found duplicate descriptions you need to change it. Then, from the SEO benefit the duplicate meta descriptions, as always, did not affect the rankings of the pages. As a matter of fact, they stayed up at the top where they started. There's some outliers that dropped out there but for the most part all of them are still all there.
I think this would be – and dori can't correct me or add to this, but I think that if you have the duplicate meta descriptions or you're leaving them blank, it's a laziness on your part because you're missing out on the CTR capture. People are reading your title. They read this a little bit, maybe they see some bolds that are like visual trigger that this listing is more on target than all the other ones and filling in unique meta descriptions is the way to achieve that and I think the CTR signal is way higher than the meta description signal anyway so if you can use your title in your meta description to increase CTR you'll, thus, rank better. So, if you're a three and your title and stuff is better than that ranking will eventually jump up as the more traffic selects you over everyone else.
This is more of a, "Hey, you're not really hurting yourself but it's best practice to fix this stuff". Before you jump on it, well, I got an e-commerce store and I have a thousand sites. We had four VA's change and write unique meta descriptions for a 25,000-product website. If we're going to invest that much time and effort, especially at over the top SEO, to do that then it's something that you should be doing as well. Even if it's programmatically altering these a little bit so that they are all unique.
That's it! Let me talk about the schema course you have in there. I think it was three months ago right when the covid all came out, and I gave everybody the copy of the SEO Spring Training presentation that I did where I talked about schema and using hierarchy, and this is really the follow-on to that. You got it all as part of your membership to SIA. I am selling it on my own website for $297 until I get some feedback and stuff and then I'm jacking the price up to $497. Don't go to my website and buy the course. You have it for free here as part of your SIA membership. But you really should be watching that and leveraging that.
DORI: I want to encourage everybody to really take advantage of that since it's there and Clint is the expert on it.
CLINT: Yes, the number one ~ that we're getting is that, "Hey, I got all this great information from you guys but either I don't have time to implement or I don't know how to implement." These courses that Dori and I are going to be publishing is the how. It's legitimately the hows. The next one for me is going to be on on-page. You have access to the Cora SEO course, I'll be bringing in that. I'll be bringing in Surfer. I'll be bringing in Page Optimizer Pro. I'll be bringing in all the tools that I use and then leveraging the information in the SIA into how to turn that into something that you can do for your business or your clients or whatever it is. If you're in that line where "I don't have the time", Guess what? You have training now for your va's and they're inside of your membership so leverage that stuff. Put the people to work and put the stuff that we're teaching you to good use because as we continue to build this out and dori and I continue to work together and expand SIA you're going to get more courses, you're going to get more tests, you're going to get a lot of repeat tests to make sure everything is good, but at the end of the day, we're going to give you everything that you need to actually rank in a local, national or affiliate setup. So, it's time to get done, put up or shut up. That's all I got dori.
DORI: Terry says, great stuff in there. He's not finished it yet but he says it's great.
Okay, everybody. We'll see you next month on the monthly webinar but we'll see you on Skype and Slack. Use those communication tools as well because we're here for you.
CLINT: One more. There was someone in the Slack group that asked me a question. His question was, I have a homepage and links going out to internal pages of the site. He's got a hundred links. If I understand the question, you have a hundred page links on your homepage that are going out to each one of these individual pages. So, you've got keyword cannibalization. What I would do in that case is I would find the one that Google likes the most. You'll be able to know that by looking at Google Analytics and the rankings and also look at your backlinks, just in case. But I would find the one that Google is sending the most traffic to you right now. What I would do is then I would delete the rest and then 301 all of the rest of those to the one that Google likes, just in case. In case there's some backlinks, there is rankings, etc. Then people will find it. If I did a page on SEO, let's go with Phoenix SEO because that's my favorite topic right now, if I did a page in Phoenix SEO, then I made 50 other pages all about Phoenix SEO I would completely entirely confuse Google and it wouldn't rank any on my page. That's essentially what keyword cannibalization is about. It doesn't matter if it's all unique content or anything. What you've essentially done is saying: hey, Google. My website is about Phoenix SEO but I have all these pages and I'm not really sure what's going to rank. Then, Google is just going to go, "Well, let's go with this one or yes, they're all cool so we're not going to show any of them." So, what I would do is, I would kill all your extras. Find the one that Google likes the most. Find the one that's getting the most traffic and/or look at conversions and look at backlinks and pick the one that's the best then delete the rest of them and 301 it to the one that's the best. That's how I'd handle that and you'll actually probably improve your ranking for that keyword overall and your traffic might even go up once you clean out all of the noise. I would also look at the content that you have there on the other pages and see if there's supporting content. So, now you can make a silo out of the supporting content.
Do I delete the Search Console from the rest? No, you don't even have to tell them that you change it. You can just submit the 301s and let Google find it. This is going to take time for Google to get it out of the search results anyway so just do the 301 and then you can submit the URLs where the 301 is in there if you want to, just to force a crawl. Typically, I wouldn't even waste my time doing that. Then you'll be good.
Then the re-spider, the recrawl. I would use the indexer. Dori, you are still using SpeedLinks, right? I'm still using Omega. Since, in your case, you're not caring about testing, which is why I use Omega because it doesn't build backlinks to test pages. SpeedLinks does. I would just go drop them into SpeedLinks and get Google to see it all again. Again, those URLs are going to stay in the search results if they're already indexed. They're going to stay in search results for a while. That's just the way Google works so you're just going to have to live with it, but you'll see a ranking increase on your target keyword when you get rid of all that extra mess. That was a good question. I wanted everyone to get the benefit of that so that's why I asked him to bring it here.
DORI: Yes, that was a good explanation.
CLINT: There's no other questions. I wasn't holding any. That's all I have this month. Dori?
DORI: That's it. We'll see everybody next month and on Skype and Slack. Have a great rest of your day and a great weekend.