Group items tagged

Using this implementation, it’s important not to noindex or block paginated URLs using robots.txt

If you’ve already implemented rel=prev and rel=next tags, there is no need to remove them. Bing and other search engines still use the tags, and they are used for web accessibility plus W3C compliance.

Pagination method 1: continue using multi-page pagination with self-referencing canonical tags to each page in the series. Keep rel=prev and rel=next if you’re already using it.

if you are going to keep them on your pages, make sure they are implemented correctly. You do have to take the time to learn how to follow the specs carefully and get it right. Putting aside the prev/next tags for a moment, let’s think about how you should implement pagination otherwise on your page. Our first preference is to implement that pagination in clean HTML tags that are visible in the source code for the pages on your site

The second choice would be to implement it in a way that isn’t clinging to the source code, but you can actually see it in the DOM or the Document Object Model. That means that your links are going to be anchor tags with a valid href attribute, not span or button elements with attached JavaScript click events.

Added note to clarify that ratings do not directly impact order of search results Emphasized 'The Role of Examples in these Guidelines' as an independent section in the introduction Added clarification that Special Content Result Blocks may have links to landing pages; added illustrative example Updated guidance on how to rate pages with malware warnings and when to assign the Did Not Load flag; added illustrative examples Changed the order of Rating Flags section and Relationship between Page Quality and Needs Met section for clarity Added 'Rating Dictionary and Encyclopedia Results for Different Queries': Emphasizes the importance of understanding the user intent and query for Needs Met rating; added illustrative examples

Small ranking changes consistently happen when your re-run ranking reports in competitive industries.

like many of the Google My Business features, we found that the services menu has no impact on ranking.  Wondering which fields do have an impact?  See our articles on categories, the business name, reviews, & the website field.

Fabrice Canal from Bing confirmed it is not coming to the new version and told SEOs instead to use meta data in HTML or HTTP header to communicate geo-related information to Bing.

what do you do instead? Fabrice linked to these instructions

Links are definitely not the most important SEO factor.

republishing any old post isn’t going to work. You need to find those that are underperforming because of content issues.

It’s sometimes because those that outrank you have more high-quality backlinks and ‘link authority.’To check if that’s the case, search for your keyword in Keywords Explorer, scroll to the SERP overview, then look at the Domain Ratings (DR) and URL Ratings (UR) of the sites and pages that outrank you.

If product, category, or landing pages are outranking you, then maybe searchers aren’t looking for blog posts.

The ranking is based on the physical location that Google thinks you are located in There is a major difference, as far as ranking goes, between what you think your address is (such as your mailing address) and what Google thinks your physical location is.

What you will see is that this business ranks amazing for explicit queries with “Lenexa” (their physical location) but ranks horribly for explicit searches with “Olathe” (mailing address and where they consider themselves to actually be located)

Implement a strategy to earn backlinks with anchors that mention the city name. Optimize your website, including your internal linking to make it clear to Google that you have a presence in that city. Move your business inside the border of the desired city (most impactful).

Consider offering a “Google only” entry-level service as one of your services

Then use the metrics that are available to prove its worth to your clients. Show them significant KPIs improvements as a rationale for upgrading to your higher-end services.

Consider selling reviews as a service beyond just asking for reviews.

Our financial client created COVID landing pages for both personal and business accounts. This client saw a 95% increase in organic goal completions from February to March. There was also a 97% increase in organic goal completions YoY. Google posts that focused on coronavirus-related services and products have also performed well.

Figure out the best method for earning reviews. Test email, texting, and in-person requests from your team, physical cards with a bit.ly link, etc. Test each one for a few months, then switch to a different method. Test until you find the method that works best for your customers.  The other thing that really needs to be considered is how to get customers to write about the specific services they used when working with your company. Little prompts or questions that they could answer when you reach out will help customers write better reviews.

Home Services

Keywords in GMB landing page title

Quality / authority of inbound links to GMB landing page URL

Topical (Product / Service) keyword relevance across entire website

Unfortunately, there is little you can do to directly change Google’s title links, but embracing a more holistic view of the issue can help you craft more informative titles and avoid bad rewrites from Google.

A redirect from one page to an entirely different page will result in no PageRank being passed and will be considered a soft 404.

the 301 redirect will pass 100% PageRank only if the redirect was a redirect to a new page that closely matched the topic of the old page.

Is there any link equity loss from redirect chains?

These entries are all optimized around a single keyword (usually a long tail). And they’re NOT written like normal blog posts. Instead, each entry is more like a Wikipedia article.

a recent SEO experiment discovered that “duplicate images” (like stock photos) can hurt your page’s rankings.

Content Features are things like: Calculators Comparison charts Feature breakdowns Pros and cons lists Summaries Quote boxes

Google made a change to how title tags are shown for sites sometime around August 17th/18th in 2021

Overall, there has been a decline in the length of title tags (according to Rank Ranger) within Google’s search results on both mobile and desktop. This however doesn’t appear to be a result of a pixel limit change.

In some instances, the new title has been taken from header tags, internal links, image alt text, or even made up completely by Google.

Mueller next reassured the publisher (as he has many other times) that the disavow tool doesn’t need to be used for random links that are discovered.

this particular case, where you’re saying you submitted a disavow file and then the ranking dropped or the visibility dropped, especially a few days later, I would assume that that is not related.

this is a process that happens incrementally over a period of time where I would expect it would have an effect over the course of… I don’t know… maybe three, four, five, six months …kind of step by step going in that direction.

Keyword clustering is powerful. The graph below shows one article’s journey in Google SERPs. It ranks for 50 clustered keywords and includes questions from PAA. This article quickly achieved a featured snippet, image rankings, 9.37k clicks, 68.9k impressions, 13.6% CTR and an average of six minutes spent on the page. Oh, and this was achieved before a single website back-linked directly to the article.