In this March 2022 Monthly Webinar, Clint talks about the top SEO factors which has been derived from users of the Cora SEO software created by Ted Kubaitis. The users of the tool shared correlation data from hundreds of keywords on a daily basis and it was then compiled into a "Shared Data" reports that users get to see.
Also on this dossier, we measure up to 2100 possible SEO factors and used Spearman's and Pearson's correlation coefficients to help identify likely ranking factors that may be contributing to the sort order of the search results.
These tests and there results were also discussed in this month's webinar:
Test #656: Does The Use Of The Template HTML Tag Help Rankings?
Test #657: Do Unstructured Citations To A Map Help With Rankings?
Test #658: Do PBN Links To A GMB CID URL Help Map Rankings?
Test #659: Will Taking A Picture Of The Home Page With Google Lens Affect Rank?
Test #660: Will Hiding A Keyworded Paragraph With CSS Help Rankings? (CSS Position Variant)
Test #661: Does Blurring Text (or Keywords) Affect Rank?
Test #662: Would A Page That Links Back Into Itself With An Exact Match Anchor Text Make A Difference?
March 2022 Dossier
Transcription below:
Dori: Hey everyone, Dori Friend here. I believe Clint is on the line because I see he has control of the screen. Clint I didn't hear you and it sounded like you were starting, so are you here?
Clint: Getting things ready here.
Dori: Oh okay, there we go.
Clint: Make sure it's big enough. I should be able to see it better now. Cool. Alright, so those of you that were here an hour ago, GoToWebinar was actually in the wrong time zone and I apologize for that. I should have caught that earlier but Dori was here to cover down for me. So we're gonna do is knock out the webinar now.Technically, on time, but not because I wasn't paying attention. I apologize for that. I'll get that fixed and go to webinar. And if need be, we'll send you either a new link or you should get an update notification in your emails if you have everything in the calendar. Hopefully my sound is good. How are you doing today Dori?
Dori: I'm doing Excellent. I just had a phone call that popped me off my headphones. I'm putting my phone in airplane mode.
Clint: I'm sure the spammers will call me three or four times during those webinars.
Dori: I know. It's weird because my phone. Well, my headphones connect to both my Mac and phone and when somebody calls, people shouldn't call me they know I don't answer the phone. But they still do. And yeah, I get spammers too, but always knocks me off my computer.
Clint: Alright, everyone.
Dori: And I'm ready to see these field observations on the indexing.
Clint: Yeah, I think we're all set. I'm assuming everyone can hear me. Let's get going. As you see, we're going to do field observations, then we'll do the top SEO factors. And then we have the test results. So let's get to it. First is field observations on the Google indexing. Carolyn Holtzman, she's doing testing, she was doing testing for ING. I think she's moved on to her own thing now. She got her own course and stuff, which is awesome to see her progressing.Anyway, she did some testing on the Google indexing API. And she compared it to her search console submissions as well. The URL inspection tool specifically. If you remember, we did a test, was probably early on last year. I want to say where the Google indexing API used to work for everybody. Rankmath made a plugin for it. And everyone was happy and excited. And I had seen mixed results with it. And so we tested it. And we found that the API was actually looking for these specific schema that was required.
So in that case, it's video podcast event, or job posting. And so in that test, we found that Google was actually looking for those two schemas. If it wasn't there. It was essentially, accepting it, it was counting your submission against your credit points and Google Cloud. However you weren't getting indexed. And Carolyn was doing some testing and she had one specific domain, she does all her indexing testing on one domain and that domain started indexing with submissions daily to Google indexing API.
One thing she also noticed is her test pages, she was doing, like us the patent testing method and she was testing the brand new domains and brand new pages and she was submitting the Google URL inspection tool. And with that brand new domain and those brand new pages, nothing was getting indexed at all. And then she made a new page on a new domain and use the Google indexing API and she saw them getting indexed. Fast forward to today, rankmath, SEO press Pro and I think there's a couple other SEO plugins have now implemented the Google indexing API integration into their systems.I use for testing, I use SEO tools for Excel and it has a connector for allowing you to connect to the indexing API that way. It's kind of for me, it's like a 20% success rate. For every 12 pages that I was sending through it, I get to indexed just using the only the Google indexing API. Coupling that with the theories that the Google may or may not be using index now. All of those 12 pages, every time I send that set also get fired off to Bings index now system and I'm still seeing a 20% indexing rate.
So what does that mean? I'm not gonna say don't use the indexing API, I will say, because one is connected to your Google Cloud accounts, you only are allowed 200 submissions a day. I wouldn't put it past Google to look at accounts that are using in excess. Whatever they define excess to be, those API credits for free and then just kind of start ignoring your submissions. And I would not count on it working all the time. I would add it to your toolset.
In our case, for seointel.com for example, this is turned on. The Google indexing API is turned on, index now is turned on. And on top of that, we also have speed indexer to just kind of kick things going. For my clients, I'm using both API's and I'm using Omega co linker and Speed Indexer VIP. I do the same when I'm using Dori's Nitro Network for link building.
I submit all of those systems so that I can improve my rate to get as close to 100% as I can. And so keep that up, don't get frustrated with the indexing thing. It's just something that everyone's got to deal with. But if you're doing a whole bunch of things all at once, you'll have way better success rates then just go in and depending on one thing. So there's that. Any comments on that Dori?
Dori: I do not see any. No, and I don't. And I'm glad that we can least get some indexing happening so we can start doing more test again.
Clint: Yeah, for sure. Another thing on indexing is Google News. So this has been promoted by a lot of SEOs as this excellent tool to get your URLs indexed. You said, mitt, you get your site's approved and see Google News. And then ergo, you get a whole bunch of indexing. The theory is like it says, Here's a Google News of getting crawled more and that the URLs on the site are getting indexed. And so kind of in line with that theory, we tried it out.
So we put seointel, you may or may not know that we are doing news daily. The team goes through and researches news and publishes it. I think what are we doing Dori, like an average of four articles a day, which is pretty decent for news based system. And it wasn't indexing, I won't say it's a brand new domain.
But it's pretty close to brand new, I think we're the first ones to do anything significant with it. And but Dori has had it for some time. So it's been sitting. But still, our indexing rate on the Google News stuff is just atrocious. Before I turned on the indexing API and Bings index now. So we got to monitor that and see how that's going. And if you don't have access to the indexing API for whatever reason, or you just want to follow along with another site and see how their indexing is going, just use the Google News section on SEOIntel and go check for indexing rates.
Like grab 10 URLs and see what the indexing rate is. Based off our our publishing cadence, which is roughly four articles a day. I also got access to Holly's News Network. She gave me access to that so we can do some stuff. And one of the first things that I looked at was indexing. And again, Google indexing are getting crawled more and so the theory was that they were getting indexing. In the case of her network, and she's got the last reporting number was in the 1000s of Google News sites.
They're not getting indexed. I think on average, if I publish 10 articles a day, I get, If I'm lucky, one of them will automatically get indexed. But I have to actually submit all these indexers in order to get them indexed. Which kinda, I mean for me, it just kind of devalues Holly's network. But if everyone is using Holly's network and actually going through and checking indexing and getting them indexed, and maybe even then some links and stuff, it'll boost up the power and authority of her network.
But right now, it's just kind of a Google News private blog network. A poor man's she probably wouldn't say it's poor, but a poor man's PBN system that just doesn't have all that much in the way of metrics right now. If you're using that, that whole thing. So there's that. Any insights Dori?
Dori: No, because I think Holly uses new sites. And that's why they don't have to be power that normal PBNs would, because if she bought expired domains that would. And then got them submitted to Google News, it would make the difference.
Clint: Yeah. Or just a little bit more quality control. I think she's just going for a different, different angle.
Dori: Yeah, who knows what Holly's doing? I mean, she's always up to something
Clint: Yeah. Any one of your attendees, you have any questions? Matthew? William? Majeed? Alright, so again, the ranking factors. Those of you probably been around long enough, know that I'm pretty much like a man crush on Ted Kubaitis. And I love his software, I've been using it like, ever since he made it and introduced it to the SEO world. And inside of that there is what's called a shared factors thing.
You can read more about it here inside of the write up, and this will be in here every month. And we're going to give you the top 200 shared factors. Short version, what does that mean? Every user of Cora that has the share factors function turned on, sends their data to Ted's server. And then that server compiles it all and puts it all together in essentially this report that you're looking at right here.
You can see this on a daily version, or you can see it in the monthly, you can wait for the month, it's here. You can just go check in there, if you want to go to top seofactors.com. That's where Ted has it.
Dori: Does he publish this to the public?
Clint: Yeah, it's a new site he created.
Dori: Oh, awesome.
Clint: In the page looks just like this. I just cleaned up some of his content. And then I added this top
Dori: A designer Ted is not. He's super smart.
Clint: Yeah. So what are the top factors? Kind of the gimme is right here, these the top 50 and the top 100 share factors. And then honestly, I think his inner pages kind of a gimme to. There's only so many home pages that are around, so isn't your page, just it's kind of there, right. It kind of sticks out is like a duh and then you get into the top 50 and top 100 Share factors that's actually a way more valuable.
And then there's the top 200 here in number 6. So this list is not really something that you should ignore. It's called the process of leveraging. This is actually called tuning for the zeros. So an example, let's say you're not using entities. Do anything with entities, you don't care about entities, blah, blah, blah. And you have no entities whatsoever. It's very rare that you'd actually have entities by the way, but let's just say you had no entities.
You would tune that, you would add entities if you have a zero because you want to change to zeros. And the more of these 200 factors that you're using, the less likely you are to actually get into trouble with the Google algorithm update or Google tattletale, Google manual review because you're not depending on one specific thing. You're not going, I just put my page up and now I'm building backlinks and in that case, you'll be building backlinks right, that's the only thing that you would do.
And by depending on 50 to 100 to 200 different factors, and in implementing the stuff that you get off of this sheet and implementing the tests that we give you in SIA, you're actually protecting yourself for Google updates. I'm not braging, but I haven't been hit by one since 2015. So I've been using Ted's tool, I think what? Early 2017 is when he started Dori if I'm not mistaken, it was almost when you guys started.
Dori: Yeah, cuz we both went to that conference up in Seattle. PubCon, was it that? Network? or one of those.Clint: Search engine, it was search engine, but it's not. But it was one of the white hat blah blah conferences.
Dori: Egg on our face.
Clint: We weren't corporate enough for them. See, we should have wore suits.
Dori: Yeah. But you know what, we had the coolest booth there. And everybody came by and said so. Took a U haul to get it there. But it was cool. We didn't sell a single thing. Not one.
Clint: Alright, so let's get into these. And I'll kind of just tell you the ones that I do by default. And then you guys have to really run through these and test these on your own and see which ones you want, which ones you don't. So number of entities used, I use by default, let me go. Yeah. Now it's gonna mess with me, there you go. See my little cool blue line Dori?
Dori: I love how you use that.
Clint: Alright, so number of entities use I use all the time. If you're writing your content, like I've taught you guys, and we've shown in the content optimization thing, you're going to almost always hit these. My content brand new, just running through the content thing typically hits like 100 of the factors. So you're going to do it by yourself, in your natural processes, you get used to building your pages out or putting them together in the right place, you're going to naturally optimize for the top 50, top 100 might be a stretch and some occasions.
I actually get to 200. That's really rare, though. So I do address that number of factors use this is really important. Again, that's coming in line with should I go the top 200, the top 100 or top 50. So number of factors used is really, really important to look at. Keywords in these two tags right here. For the most part, if you're using WordPress, you're going to be focused on this right here. It's just kind of gonna naturally happen to you. But if you look how high this is, I mean, it's pretty clear that Google is still using keyword density, right.
So if there's 2000, I don't have the effort to get the exact number of keywords that this report is based on for this day. But if there's like 2000 of these and keyword density, which is essentially term frequency in this case, term frequency, the number of times that keyword is mentioned in the body tag, it's really important. And so you can kind of think about that, in regards to myth busting, getting rid of the idea that keyword density doesn't matter. And then these are my favorites.
These always show up and it says keywords and H tags, entities in H tags. This is broken down in h2s and h3s but for the most part you can guarantee that keywords are going to be part, has to be part of your headings. And in this case you can throw this in. So let's say you're doing a local thing, you can create a map and write about your business.
If it has a GMB and you say your business name, you've essentially added entities and cora has a tool and allow you to go in there and pull things out or entities lists and all that stuff. But I have a new training coming for SIA where I take Cora's data and we essentially make it way better. And the implementation of it, it will carry you over using the tools that you probably already got. So if you're a phrase user, surfer user or clear scope user inlinks.
When you combine that with tools like cora light or Cora and do the writing stuff. Again, this is gonna get so brain Buster easy that you're gonna love it. And you'll see some tests and stuff for some training that I purchased. We're gonna fire off the test on those too. And it leverages a lot of cora and leverages a lot of this data, leverages things like looking at this keyword density.
Again, look at it 16 and 17. This is all keyword density, right here. So you have #9, 16 and 17, you have those in there. Keyword density is looking like a pretty big deal. Here's another one, keywords and sentences. Here's another keyword density.
Dori: Now looking at this report, can you tell what the keyword density is?
Clint: Not in this because again, this is 1000s of keywords and the data pulled in for that 1000s of keywords. There is when you do a single cora report, there are blocks in there. It's raw keyword density. And I want to say unfiltered, but I know I'm using the word wrong. Keyword density, and it's just the way the software looks at it. So basically, whole site versus inside of the body tag or inside of an article or whatever, specific zones. He's got it set up to grade like that. And that'll let you see individual terms and stuff.
Dori: Okay.
Clint: What else? It's entities again, that content optimization stuff again. I'm going to reshoot that video for you guys. And it'll be part of the new course inside of your SIA membership that Dori and I are putting together with the entire SIA team. And we're going to essentially, take all the test results, take everything we're learning, put it on a course for you.
And then we're gonna keep adding, taking away so that if you're an SEO, and you want to know about a specific thing, you go to that thing, read the about thing, read about how we implement it, read all the test results for it, and then go and make a plan and take over the world. So all that stuff will be there. And one of the highlights is going to be the use of entities and getting everything going in your site. One thing I do want to point out is there's not very many backlink things in here.
And when I run the SIA, 100 keywords to check out ranking factors, which is essentially a small version of this, but we specifically look at niches, then that gets messed up. So those Ahrefs and sem rush stuff will get pushed up in here into the top because I'm running the API's and most people are not, those API's are kind of expensive, and most times I just forget to turn them off. And then I'm getting charged for a whole bunch of stuff.
But I mean, it's worth it just to see it every once in a while. So keep in mind that this thing could get messed up depending on who's running it and stuff. But there's always consistencies that you'll see if you look at this day to day. But internal links are good, dofollow backlinks still important. Referring domains, referring subnets is always a big deal. You can think about that when you're like, I want to take over this and how many backlinks and when I need the first thing you should be looking at it is referring pages. How many referring pages?
How many referring domains? How many referring C Class, IP classes? So this stuff here is probably more important, then I would argue be more important than the backlink count is getting unique referring domains in there. I would worry about that number first before worrying about backlink count specifically, and it'll just save you a whole lot of trouble. Especially if you're optimizing for the Top 50, Top 100 shared factors already.
You're probably more optimized than everyone else. And when you worry about that referring domains number, spending less on backlinks. To give way to do that is Dori's Nitro Network. So you can plug in, get 20 and do 20 or 10 or 20 at a time. And that system is designed to give you unique domains in that category. So if you're doing 20, you know, you're gonna get 20 unique domains, and then you just do 20, more and 20 more and to get to your number. Or you can use whatever tools you want to use. And let's see, anyway, just keep on rolling down. I won't go through all 200.
You guys can peruse this yourself. But if you turn this kind of into a checklist for yourself, every once in a while, go in there, update it for the new factors. I just recommend that you use the monthly because at the end of the day, unless something breaks seriously in Google, it's probably not going to change all that much. And you can just go down and check off the bot and make sure that none of this stuff is zero for you that you've addressed in so much as you've got at least one of those things and all of these.
As long as they're applicable to your page, then I think you will be set up for success pretty early on. So this is pretty cool. Any comments on that Dori?
Dori: I like it. I like it. I like it a lot. I really liked that he's given it away for free.
Clint: Again, it's topseofactors.com and you can see this on a daily. I have a direct link that leads to this. So I don't know, if the the latest is like right there already shows up. As matter of fact, when we just look at the top factors. You can set the date and everything. Let's go to the homepage and just want to see if it's.
Dori: He got a great domain for that. I mean, good grief. He must have been sitting on that for a while.
Clint: Probably. Well, I don't know. I think he bought it. That long actually. Click here to see the data, it's down here in the bottom. There you go. And then there's Ted, there's today's numbers.
Dori: How would you get like, the month number? Where would you go?
Clint: I don't think he's got month.
Dori: Okay, I thought you said you had it, he had it for like a whole month. Correlating a whole month instead of a day.
Clint: No, ours will be only once a month. So everyone will get this once a month.
Dori: Okay, got it.
Clint: These don't roll through. Again, these don't roll through a lot. They don't change significantly unless someone like me goes in and runs 100 reports all at one time. And then that'll shake this up a little bit. But then it ends up just sorting itself back out to pretty much almost the same as normal users and their data kicks in.
So once a month really is all you really need to look at it unless you just want to come over here and look at Ted's thing every day. I downloaded the HTML for this. That's how I made this table here. And I turned it on to my own page. And I'm going to be putting it on my own website like so I'll be using his stuff, put a affiliate link in there and drop it on my website and use some stuff promoted. I built the links for him.
And then it'll just essentially be one value added benefit to my website. It's kind of how I'm looking at this thing too. So I don't think he's gonna have this like export into the software. I was thinking about asking him but he's already giving it away for free here as a essentially, it's a lead magnet, there is no monetization on here other than these banners up here yourself. But it's a good demonstration of what you can do stuff that you're already creating. Right?
So if you're already writing, let's say you're doing articles and you pay for a writer and you have to optimize it and change it like 50%. When they got two articles, and then you can read one of them into audio. There's another thing and then you can read them, do a video and there's another thing so it's using in this case, he's just using data today, it's getting already, he's already have a system that present it.
That's this table right here. And he's just leveraging that as a lead magnet. So I think it's awesome. And a good example to go by if you're doing other stuff and you use it other software's and all that stuff, just go out and pop it in.
So let's get into the testing. The use of the template tag, HTML template tag to help ratings. This is, it's right here. It is a it's it's in the HTML five specifications. And the short version of this entire thing is, when you use that it does not display in the browser to the users, you actually have to write a JavaScript piece of piece of JavaScript code to actually get it to fire off. So let's say Dori was selling SEO Nitro, and she had it on Seointel.com.
But Seointel.com has a sales page for SIA. And then the user gets so far down, we're looking at her heatmaps and everything. We know use your behavior, when she gets this far down, you're not gonna buy as you just looking at it, blah, blah, blah. Well, we don't want you to just disappear. So we got to monetize you somehow. So you write a JavaScript code, and it calls up this template zone, where the content is in that template, and then it changes the content on the page. Essentially, that's how this whole template thing is supposed to be used.
Well, that's, since we know that it is hiding, we really wanted to know is if I hide it with that template code is Google going to look inside of that zone, and then credit me with the content that's in that page. And then there have been some claims that it actually does. So I wanted to test it out. And in the beginning of that test, the first thing I asked was, What else are you doing, and the person who brought this up said they were doing a lot of other things.
So they were crediting template, but they were doing a whole bunch of other things that could very well have just been what caused the improvement as well, right? So we isolated it or I isolated it. I put the tag in a container. And we did this on a live site. There you go, you don't get all the screenshots. I mean, I could have made screenshots, but I would have to blur everything out, which has been pretty pointless for you guys.
So what happened is that there are two pages that were ranking for this specific keyword on this live site. When I say live site was out there and wild, it was ranking for keywords, keywords that generate traffic and revenue. But they were in the pages, there was two of them on the site that were so closely related that are both ranking for the same term. And they were both on page two. And they were both ranked 15th and 16th, sometimes one over the other.
But for the most part, the homepage was out ranking the inner page. So I optimize the homepage for the primary term that I wanted it to rank. And I use the template tag. And I didn't change the content and on the actual page itself. And what happened was the other page disappeared. So I optimize using the content in the template page. I think I increase the keyword density of the homepage, and the homepage went from 15 to 11, which is the top of page two.
And ultimately, eventually it came back down to 15. But that inner page never came back. So what I can kind of think is one is does work as hidden content. And we know that hidden content using different codes is working great. I have a whole bunch of those tests coming. But in this particular case, I was able to do or the optimizations that I put inside of the template tag only were enough to just kind of fight off that inner page. I optimize the homepage better using the template stuff that's in the template and I fought off the inner page ergo now, only the homepage rank for that term.
So it's reading it, fine of applying it. Would I use it again consistently as a method for hiding text inside of my web pages? Probably not. I think there are better ways to do it there. And there are better ways that you can actually justify having it in there. I mean template it's so rare. There's not very many people that are using it. Let's you got caught with using template, you can totally say, hey, well, that was for an old JavaScript code that we wrote. And we're not using anymore. But we forgot to take template out, Oops, my bad. It's not our fault you're eating it.
But it seems to me that how that tag is required to run. If and when someone decides to abuse it excessively, Google can make an instant fix and just kind of shut it off. And there's other HTML tags that do the same thing. And there's other settings like display none, for example, that you can use that for the most part. I mean, you probably could code it out, but you'd be missing a whole lot of stuff.
And John Mueller himself, who says there's plenty of legit reasons to have hidden content on your web pages. So I don't know, I'm kind of in a toss up with this one. I do want to test it again, I went tested again, in the locksmith niche. If it works there, it probably works everywhere. And if we get away with it, there will probably get away with it everywhere. Because there's a lot of narc SEO in locksmiths and garage doors and all that stuff.
So I'm going to try to locksmith up in the Minnesota area and see what we get. But for right now, I think it's a good zone. It's good. Google's reading it. But you still got to apply the right stuff to it to get it to work. And I just think there's better tags to use in order to do that. So with least likely to get abused and turned off by Google in the first place. And you gotta go restart everything. Dori any comments?
Dori: Oh, yes. What does this look like? Is this like when you scroll down and new text comes up? Or is this something that is totally hidden to the user?
Clint: It's totally hidden. Think like old school cloaking. But in this case, the legit uses, you'd have a JavaScript code that references what's inside of that template to change the content of the page. So you can have a JavaScript code, just change one sentence if you wanted to. And it will pull that sentence out of the template. Or you can be really, you know, just put a whole another version of the page inside of the template thing and have the code, switch sections and pull those sections out of the template randomly to if you want to see that kind of stuff.
Dori: Cool. Okay.
Clint: Any questions from the group?
Dori: Nope.
Clint: Do unstructured citations to the map help with rankings. I don't know about you. But I've heard this one like for ages. So unstructured citations, what is it? it's a name, address and phone number without a backlink to the landing page at the business. Adds an unstructured citation. I think even more to the point, it's just kind of like it if you think of a brand mentioned but you're also putting the address and phone number in there, that's what this is, but you're not linking to it.
And the idea was that those are still useful and you should do those and it will help you rank. So Matthew said hold my beer and got some links from Dori's network and fired off this test and knocked you out. You can see for the dates, he's been working on it for a minute. But it's a great test and I liked it. We're digging more into this map stuff.
And there are rumors and conjecture and everything else that's coming along with it. So he found some apps, he showed them to you because he just found some random little maps and this is surf pro. This is a franchise company so it's pretty safe math to go to go test and he created five PBN articles and he just optimized for the the keyword water damage, City State abbreviation again, we're moving away from the single variable, fake keyword stuff and kind of bringing this stuff into your face into the live world.
So in maps, that's a great place to do that. So we optimize that content. And then he put the map at the bottom of the articles with no link. So this name, the address and the phone number and no backlink and he sent citations and stuff in there. And you see where the average position lost 2, lost 2, lost 5 and then one of them got 4. So I think it's safe to say that unlinked citations doing absolutely nothing for you. You can assume that if your business becomes an entity like I think Servpro is probably entity by now, but Servpro of Highlands Ranch is not.
And there's the knowledge graph, entity and then the maps entities and they're not necessarily always tied together. And in this case, let me just mentioning Servpro of Highlands on a web page. They're actually nothing for that matter. So these unstructured citations and the concept behind them, not working. No matter how many you did. Five, there's five here and then 4-5 here and maybe five and get the plus four if you're on page two. And maybe that plus four is a difference for you but you really don't need to get with this whole thing is 14 27 45 47, that's just not, it's not doing it for you. So that's that's a test that's pretty interesting.
Dori: Well, I was hoping that was gonna work.
Clint: Yeah, that would have been awesome. I had another test from Lee Witcher, he wanted me to do this kind of the same thing but brand mentions using an SEO autopilot campaign which and one of the big ones which you know, that turns out to like 3000 or 4000 links when it's all said and done, but you'll see a net result on that too. That's you in a quick hit. I'm not you, ready to jump on that bandwagon and see if I want to even bother with it at this point.
Clint: Alright, so another match test from Mat is the PBNs to a GMB CID URL help with Map rankings and this is a common thing right? This went around for quite some time, build the GMB CID URL take that and then build backlinks to it or you can air quotes manipulate the URLs etc or add keywords to the CID or URL and then build backlinks to it. And this was going around for quite some time.
It's matter of fact it was going around so long and the people that were saying it kind of almost I had, I mean there's smoke, there's fire right? all these people saying that their building the CID is working, it's working great. There's some gurus that were teaching it, selling courses with this method in it. So I tested it but we never published the test results in SIA for it and this was probably my official involvement in SIA when I was just doing the chats.
And we spent $5,000 in PBN links and sent it to GMB CID URLs, because, hey, that works. And it's doing great, and we had a lot of maps to it. So let's test it out. So it's $5,000 and PBN links, and not one damn thing happened. Nothing went up, nothing went down. It didn't do anything to this. Hey, maybe we did it wrong. And Matthew was tossing around these ideas for these map tests. And this was a good one and I was like, go for it.
I didn't tell them my results. I didn't skew his stuff. And he went and he did the test. And you can read all the setup stuff in here, the serpro Highlands, the brand name and all this profile information and anchor text information. It's all in there, all this stuff that he did. And you can see that it's kinda I mean, there's a negative 6 here, but there's no negative 50s. And there's no plus 10s.
You know, there's no shut up into the three pack, any of that. So, the short version of this one is, don't send, don't bother wasting your money sending links to the GMB CID URL. There's no improvement, measurable or otherwise. How do you even just call this a tickle based off of how the Rank Tracker work that day or something like that. That's how minimal the results of that test are. So any insights in that Dori?
Dori: No
Clint: Taking a picture of the Home Page with Google Lens will affect the ranking? I forget where I heard this. And I put it into the test ideas and Matt, I mean, he's really getting after it. He tested this and I'm glad he did. So the the idea is that you take a picture, let's pretend, we'll use Ted's. Take a screenshot of this, and when we use that around etc with Google lens, will identify the top factors logo, identify some of the words in here, maybe identify Carolyn or Neil.
And in the SEO Fight Club logo, it might see that stuff in there. But it would definitely start seeing these in here. And then it'll eventually if you deck gets around enough, and you show that in the right places, you end up with a ranking improvement, not from a direct link, but because the AI in lens and was a Google vision. I think there's a couple other ones that they have. It might be just Lens and vision will kind of just tie you in.
Essentially, honestly more like a like a brand mentioned and not a backlink. But look, they're being shared and ergo, they're more relevant for X, Y, and Z. So you can see all the the write up stuff here, here's a starting position. Here's a copy of the homepage, set up everything into Google lens etc. And then some other stuff here. And it didn't work. So even the Google Lens, like they're highlighted, see I highlighted the URL, it didn't tied in effectively with the website.
Even if it had the URL, it didn't connect those things all together and it didn't help with rankings, one way or another. So in his test, it's negative. I would argue that you could probably take this test and turn it a little bit on your head with a little bit of creative Photoshop. So if you have an image of a delivery truck. And you super impose your clients logo onto the delivery truck.
And your client is in a business model that has delivery trucks or service trucks or whenever. You can probably keep showing lens or vision that image in that truck. And eventually it will tie the brand and the service truck together. I don't know that it would necessarily tie your rankings together. But it may be a good way to actually teach Google about your brand.
And then eventually your brand gets turned into an entity because that entity is created as a person, place or thing in this case, a brand would be a thing. So if I have a whole bunch of images, we're super imposing my logo across those and Google lens can see it or the Google Vision API, you can run your images through Google vision to your desktop and make sure that it's always seeing your logo and always reporting your logo and it just keep doing that over and over and over and over and over and over again.
After a while you may get the API to learn your brand name. And then watch your brand rankings and see how that works out for you. My guess is you'd actually start getting a lot more image rankings, specifically for your brand name, because they're associating those images with your brand name and you can take over the image SEO part of your brand name at a minute. So that would help at least in a little bit. Let's see, Majid says a good way to strengthen your brand. Yep, exactly. Especially if you're selling entity optimization type of thing, you can you can keep doing that.
Keep pumping those images over and over again, making sure that the watermark for your logo is visible and getting reported in the tools. And just keep doing that over and over and over again, make that habit and you can eventually you have the potential to take over at least the image SEO side of things. If not, the front end for your brand terms. Also a good way to get ahead of negative views about you reputation management stuff, get all that stuff in place before you become a Twitter meme for some couch potato as Mama's basement.
Dori: Right.
Clint: Alright, let's see. Hidden stuff. All right, we talked about the hidden stuff was that my test with the template. And now we're looking at some stuff that Hunter had. Some ideas that he wanted to check out with CSS. I'm big CSS dummy, Hunter is that kind of Gertie guy for SIA on all things coding and web design and all that stuff. So when he comes up with these, I think it's awesome. One of these days you're gonna find the gem, it's gonna make me a whole bunch of money.
Dori: I mean, this one, isn't it?
Clint: No, this one isn't it? Cats out of the bag. Here's the test right up, here's the CSS that he use. Eessentially, I think this one, yeah, it just moves it off the page. So it makes the web page like this ungodly size inside of your browser. And then if you have a 43 inch monitor, think of this way, you have 43 inch monitor sitting on your desk, and you reach out and you touch the closet on the other side of the room.
That's where this text would be. But it's still on the page, right? And it's still in the code is just kind of messed with CSS. Looking at the results, you see how things move. One was in the middle or towards the top. One is at the bottom, good place to start. Then everything just started kind of moving its way to stuck. And it didn't really help at all, it was just kind of a wash. So in this case, thinking like a programmer, Dori, would it make sense to you if you were a programmer, and you are, to CSS seems a whole lot easier, because there's different like you can anticipate that no one in their right mind would put this on their webpage, right?
So setting some limits in the position, for example, could potentially result be a good way to filter out hidden content because you've programmatically anticipated these worst case scenarios that probably no one ever do. So ending you just back that up a little bit. Alright, this is the reasonable limit of where we want those top and left margins, for example. What do you think about that?
Dori: Yeah. Yes, I can see that.
Clint: I think when people are saying Google can find any content. I think CSS based off the testing, and he's got this one and he did this one too using CSS to blur out content. In both cases, it didn't do anything. Here's top one, it was the first position and almost towards the bottom. And it just sort of met in the middle here. And then this one kind of went back and this was the bottom. So it's the CSS in my opinion, I think Google, like the HTML tags. There's so few of them.
They're so pretty much used extensively that it's hard to say, but we're just going to ignore that one. Template, I mean, that could be an easy one to say ignore it. But with so few HTML tags anyway, especially an html5 specification, it seems like CSS would be the easier way from a technical perspective to teach an algorithm to ignore something.
In this case, we're blurring, keep blurred the text inside of the test page, blurred it out. And it still it didn't do anything. It wasn't helpful. It wasn't hidden to Google, so is there. It's like the CSS status of it was ignored. Or the CSS tag, specifically it was seen. And then because Google knew the code, or I was taught that code to blur in CSS, that it just ignored the text that was underneath it. Like the other test that was just out in la la land, it wasn't anywhere near the page.
I just ignored it because it was outside of the norm. That sounds to me, way more possible than saying Google is ignoring all hidden text blanketly. Maybe to Hunter found the systems that they're using, which in this case is the CSS. They're ignoring CSS applications that hide text versus the HTML that is doing it. What do you think?
Dori: I don't believe I have come across the test or heard anything about CSS being able to successfully hide or help hide to help rankings. Hide text to help rankings. I'm pretty sure all of our tests have come back negative with CSS. Now, there's other ways of hiding text. But CSS is just not one of them, which I would think, as a programmer, or somebody who knows a little bit about coding. It would, but it doesn't.
Clint: I wonder and I think this is probably the next iteration of this test is, can we do the same thing. You know, how you can code the styling inside of the head? You don't have to have CSS style sheets, right? So I wonder if that's how he coded his test pages, or he actually had a style sheet those not on the page. And if he coded it, the styling in that if he did it on a page and not in the head, if that would make a difference. For the other one.
Dori: On dev, I'm not sure of.
Clint: You know like, here's Ted's, like if we look at Ted's, here's what I'm talking about. All his styling is up here.
Dori: Right, so Google's gonna read that first.
Clint: Yeah. Versus having a style sheet which SEO Intel has, like that one.
Dori: Most sites have style sheets. All WordPress sites do.
Clint: Yeah. Show something everyone the stylesheet. There you go, Block library. This one includes the CSS. All the styling is on that sheet. I wonder if that makes a difference. Because if you build it like Ted build it, all the stylings here in the style.
Dori: I think those are WordPress pages and our test sites or WordPress. That would have been in a sheet.
Clint: It would have been in a sheet. We need to test it like this, like Ted's doing it.
Dori: Yeah
Clint: Essentially, all we'd have to do is create a tag. We just make a new tag, like he's got headline right here. We'd make one hidden text or something. Just obvious and then apply that tag to the div in the content down here. And that will take care of the hiding stuff, that's something tests. Other run by Hunter, see what he comes up with.
Clint: Alright, I think this is the last one. Yep, last test. SIA did a test way back early in the days, it was linking the home page to the home page. And if you link the home page to the home page with the exact match anchor, you get a boost in rankings for your exact match anchor. And that test will not repeated has been a consistent thing that I do for a lot of my client work across the board and I still apply it to this day.
I also was doing the same thing to my inner pages. I mean, if it works the home page, why does it work for the inner page? That seems kind of obvious, right? It should. But being who we are, we want to test it and make sure that we're passing out the right advice. If we tell you to link to a page to itself, then it's probably going to get a ranking thing. In this case, we have a starting point right here, the two URLs were pretty high up and it just kind of sat.
One got pushed down and the other one got pushed up. And then both pushed down. And that was the end of this test. And Hunter declared it a wash, right? The idea is if an internal link was pointing to these, and they're both the same, obviously they're both the same keywords and the the anchor text. Let me read that again, to make sure I'm saying the right thing, exact message link in the first paragraph linking back to itself.
How do internal links work? And I think what we did was, because Hunter was using two test pages against all the controls. Well, no, that's not even after not a wash because these are all in different domains now. What I was going to say is he's got to test pages on all the controls, but we created a keyword cannibalization kind of situation, but because he's got two different domains, and all the controls are on different domains, too. That can be the case.
Dori: That makes it a little bit tougher.
Clint: Yeah, tougher to explain this. I would argue at this point is probably just not even worth. I mean, of course, tells you got to add some anchor text links. That's an easy one to do. Just link the page to itself with this keyword, but just know it's not going to do anything other than to optimize for the zero thing. What do you think Dori?
Dori: I'd like to see the test redone, but not redone on different sites. Redone on one site and use the middle pages instead of top pages.
Clint: That brings us into the indexing issue that we're having. Getting one keyword on the same site on 10 pages. And it's sync. And this is tinfoil hat. But I think since Kyle Roof started pointing out the SEO Intelligence Agency patents that you two have together, it's Google's kind of figured out a way to get around this whole single variable testing using the same domains.
That's why we switched over to the multiple domains method. Because we're not trying to get one website to rank 10 pages for a keyword, now we're trying to get 10 websites with 10 pages, one page each website to rank for the same keyword and we're getting better indexed.
Dori: Which you would think would be okay. Except if you take into considerations that each site has a different authority, because we haven't been using for a while. Pre linking all kinds of stuff. They were 2 brand new sites, like for 10 brand new sites.
Clint: So what we're seeing is, let's say they're all the same domain. The ones that would get indexed would be these right here, these would stay in the search results, on average, and all of these would be taken out. So now, for using that same domain, we end up with two controls and one test page, I mean at that point, unless you want to kill it. If it kills it, then you know, don't do that. But I think that's kind of what we're running into and we use the single domain.
I still have this theory that Google got a dictionary. But when you see the tests and the stuff that the SIA team is able to get indexed for our tests. I mean, these are fake keywords, and they're still ranking, they're still getting in there. So it's throwing a monkey wrench into my Google's got a dictionary thing idea or theory on indexing. We'll see how it goes. Go ahead, you're going to say something?
Dori: Well, I was going to say, if we saw both of these pages move up or both of them move down, then it would have given me more "yes it is" or "no it's not". I would continue to point to your own page until proven not, because it's not gonna hurt you.
Clint: It's definitely in a hurry. Say helping and if you're using anchor text, you're getting that, you're throwing anchor inside of there. If you use the title option inside of your backlinks so you can put the name and title and your anchor text inside of that whole a string.
Dori: I don't think it has to be exact match. Maybe it does. Go back and look at that original test. Because it's just a link to that page. Because when we did test it was two to three link. Two to three inner links with no juice at all. Kind of created an external link. You're linking to yourself, that would create one link of maybe two or three interlinks.
Clint: In theory
Dori: Right, In theory, yeah
Clint: I would use and still do this, but I wouldn't even think of it as a backlink power essentially. I would think of it as an opportunity to hide more in the A tag. And what I'm talking about is we have this. You can actually do things like name, keyword, title, keyword.
Dori: Have we tested that?
Clint: Tags. Ted actually tested tags.
Dori: In the A?
Clint: He tested all of them. All the HTML tags.
Dori: Okay
Clint: Like this, the title, editing like I'm doing title in there, right? He tested all A's. And there's this whole list right here. He tested all of those together to see which ones are indexing zone and which ones are not.
Dori: Wow, does he have a printout?
Clint: That's an IMG product. It's stuck over in IMG land. And I was just going through there the other day, and they looked like all his tests were deleted. But I think well, that one is still in there.
Dori: The one that we want. They deleted all his tests, wow!
Clint: If anything, we just got to reach and duplicate this test again. And the way he did it was kind of extensive. He created a page. It was like one page and he's got a new name for it, too. But instead of doing this, he's got a testing system where he's got one page. Let's say, and this is the top URLs of that page. And then it has different sections that are using these tags. And each one of these tags has a different keyword in it.
Then he's using that to say if Google can find that keyword, let's pretend it's in. Let's pretend is right, like right here where it says value, right. We'll just say fake keyword. If Google finds that keyword inside of that tag, and then ranks that page for that keyword, ergo, that's a indexable zone. And I'm using air quotes again. And he tested all these. I don't know if he tested these and the html5 or just these, but I know he's tested these. The html5, I want to say it's smaller.
Dori: When you are in there and you saw these reports, were there any tags or any zones that you can remember that appeared more indexable than like the others?
Clint: It was mainly zones like this. The ones that I should. Name and title, that kind of stuff. Seemed to work out pretty good. And what's happening is, if I say, this is my content keyword. If you look at it my keyword density is what? Let's pretend it's 100 words and I have one instance. So it's 1%, right. But here I got two more. So now I'm up to 3% and it's counting.
In this case, I'm using my mouse but I doubt you guys can see it, counting this one and this one, with this one and now it's 3% keyword density because it's seeing it in there. And a good example of Ted likes to show me all the time is for this turn. He looked at addicted games code, almost open to Google's can. We get there their code. And then you do find, there's 870 instances of the word games on this website or this page. That's why it's ranking number one for game.
Dori: Wow
Clint: Reverse engineer some of these things, you can see where they're stuffing that keyword in there. And all of those things, all of those places are being counted towards the overall keyword density of the website. There's a better illustration. URLs, age, URLs should be some tags down here I think. The most of the stuff is the JavaScript, here's a tag in a class tag, some more URLs, some more class stuff.
So they did it really, really smart. It sounds complicated, like, oh, I don't want to do that. I don't know what I'm talking about, you're talking about with tags. But this stuff is really easy. And some of the builders to mess around with these tags to do this and to do it. Keyboarding in to do in here. So like the title for ezample. This is really easy to do and builders like oxygen. I don't know about Elementor.
We've only got one site that's in Elementor or live canvas. And there's a bunch of other ones but it's really easy to add these other attributes and booth build up your keyword density and staying it being moderator thing. Air quotes again, white hat.
Dori: I like that.
Clint: I'll talk to Ted, we'll see. They have exclusive rights over there at IMG now with all the tests that people publish. So we might have to replicate that test and do it ourselves, but we'll see. Probably be a good opportunity to highlight the new testing method that Ted came up with and test the html5 specifications, which are Google HTML 5 specifications. Things via lists, there's a better site that hasn't been there. But he's listed these new A tags and stuff.
Dori: Oh, my god, wow.
Clint: There's a site that actually has a table for humans to read and not developers.
Dori: Did Ted ever finish on fixing his testing tool?
Clint: He did not. He gave me the swift code for it. And I'm learning Java trying to rebuild it. And really, the the tool works. The only two features that are not there that I'm trying to do is, one is to read the new HTML from the SERPs. And then the other is to get it to post to multiple domains versus 10 pages per domain.
Dori: And why don't we hire a JavaScript Programmer to just put those in there?
Clint: I tried and it was like pulling teeth. So I just moved on to bigger things. And learning myself. It's a good learning project, it's not complex. I mean, not knowing JavaScript, right is hard, but it's not like trying to reverse engineer corn.
Dori: But not as hard as hiring somebody to do it.
Clint: That as hard as it is a way for sure. I mean, you and I both know, someone that could probably pull it. We know someone in SIA that could pull it off worse for sure. But really, at the end of the day, even when Ted was maintaining it, I was the only one using it. There's whole bunch feel it downloaded it but I was the only one actively using it.
When he shut it down, nobody noticed until I mentioned that, hey, why is it shut down? It's not a thing that we probably want to throw money at. I'll learn Java and just learn my way around it and get the Tinker and stuff. If my free time allows, so we'll see how it goes. I have this book and learn Java in 21 days. I've had it for like six months. So I'm still in chapter one.
Dori: Learn Java in 21 days as long as you do what we tell you to do.
Clint: Exactly, but you actually got to actually try it as we learn. Alright everyone, thank you for joining us. Keep an eye out again the weekly AMA's on Monday at 10am Arizona time. The end of month webinars, 2pm Arizona time. Bill Hartzer's podcasts, Thursdays 12pm, Bill time. I forget what time is his time zone.
Dori: Arizona time, do we have to type in to Google what is Arizona time since I think it' in mountain.
Clint: Yeah, it's in mountain standard time it's not Mountain Daylight Time.
Dori: Mountain Standard Time. Yeah, it's 4:13. Your hour ahead of Pacific.
Clint: It's 3:13 here.
Dori: Okay, wait so you're not Mountain Standard Time?
Clint: Phoenix, Mountain Standard time. Mountain Daylight Time is what? Everything was in. Phoenix is Mountain Standard Time.
Dori: And it says 4:13, Google says. Okay, let me put in Phoenix.
Clint: 3:14. Your Google is lying to you.
Dori: Okay. When you say Arizona time, I will put in Phoenix.
Clint: We got to change the GoToWebinar thing. We'll get that done. So the notifications get corrected. And what else? What else we got?
Dori: You mentioned the new courses and the new stuff. That's gonna be in a new system, LearnDash. So we're gonna go away from the old system.
Clint: It's gonna be awesome. You guys gonna like that, you can search around and stuff. We are trying to figure out the search thing because we're moving the tests into there too. So it'll all be easier to read and all that and allow us to do some cool stuff like Link Building tests for example.
We can get Dori to do a video about what does this mean? And how would she employ it? and that kind of stuff or on page I do that too, or get some guests people, we get Elizabeth Samuels, she's going to be talking about SEO from a web designer developer perspective, which a lot of us SEOs kind of forget to listen to their perspective on things.
We're gonna have some stuff from her. And we got a couple other people that we have already asked or plan on asking to do some modules to that will support our testing and will actually support them by testing elements of their course and proving that it works. Which is awesome. So it'd be cool.
Dori: It'd be like a small courses instead of just a lot of material.
Clint: Scattered junk everywhere is how they put it. Dusting your hard drive.
Dori: Dust on the server. There's a lot of stuff in there. Okay, everyone, see you next month. We don't see you sooner. And like Clint said, Ask him anything on Monday. And those are not recorded. So be on them.
Clint: Yep. Bye, everybody. Bye.