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SEO updates you need to know
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Search with Candour podcast
How social media impacts SEO
Season 3: Episode 36
Ashley Liddell, Creative Strategy Director & Co-Founder at Deviation, joins Jack Chambers-Ward on this week's Search With Candour to discuss how social media platforms are infiltrating the SERPs.
More users than ever are searching for content and products on social platforms and search engines like Google are reacting to this in different ways.
This means that aligning your social media and search strategies has never been more important.
Watch the episode on YouTube
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This week's solicited SEO tips:
Create multiple GSC properties for easier analysis
Many GSC accounts I get access to normally only have a domain property or a single URL property setup.
While domain properties cover "everything", it is always worth setting up individual URL properties for specific subdomains, subfolders, languages, or other parts of the site you may want to easily analyse in isolation.
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Buying links won't work well long-term
“Buying links is a part of SEO. People that don’t agree/recognise this are just pulling the wool over their own - and others - eyes”. In my opinion, this is complete rubbish. Let’s talk about link buying: ⬇
💰 Buying links does not scale well in the long-term vs investing in making things worth linking to. You’ll buy 1 link and get 1 link, whereas content worth linking to can attract multiple links for many, many years. For instance, the April Fool’s campaign I worked on with Expedia with Andrew Smith was still getting new links 10 YEARS later 😂
💰 Investing in building something worth linking to means you’re investing in the equity of your own website and business. This means that even when/if links were no longer used in ranking you are left with something of value for your visitors. This is not true with buying links. Investing in your customers is a smarter long-term play than investing in algorithms that change.
💰 Some people are great at buying links, others not so. For almost all paid links, it’s a matter of when the technology to identify and devalue them comes about, not if. You are sitting on train tracks and at some point, the value of those links will drop to zero.
💰 Honestly, it can be very hard to compete in some sectors without paying for links - a lot of your competitors will be at it. In those highly competitive sectors, you need the money, time, and backing if you want to do it properly in the long term. There’s no way around that.
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Find 1000s Exact Match Domains in a few seconds
Exact Match Domains (EMDs) can make ranking much easier. Wouldn't it be great if there was an easy way you could find 1000s of EMDs with good search volume? 😎
Here's how to find EMDs fast with Ahrefs and Google Colab:
1️⃣ Go to Ahrefs "Keywords Explorer" tool and enter the root keyword you want your EMD to be about
2️⃣ Go to the "Keyword Ideas" page to see the list of terms containing this keyword with MSV
3️⃣ Click "Export" and choose UTF-8 CSV format, along with how many rows you want to export
4️⃣ Go to the Google Colab script and select "Run All" (link in comments)
5️⃣ Select "Choose Files" at the bottom of the script and upload the CSV you got from Ahrefs
6️⃣ Wait and you will get 3 files:
🎉 available_domains.csv: Showing which domains are free + MSV
🛑 unavailable_domains.csv: Domains currently already registered + MSV
💀 errors.csv: If there were any errors
Good luck EMDing! I also made a video showing you how to do this.
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How long should redirect a page for?
Redirect rules generally need to be left in place as long as possible, which can mean big lists are generated, potentially generating latency. Here are 3 things you might be able to do to speed things up:
- If you're handling redirects at database level, move them to server level, or even better, to the Edge
- If redirects haven't been triggered in 12 months and don't have any incoming links, you may well be able to remove/prune them
- Rather than a "big list", it can sometimes be more efficient to use a single rule/regex to redirect multiple URLs
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What happens when a mid-redirect URL is blocked by robots.txt
Google Search Console won't report when a URL passes through a redirect that is blocked in robots.txt, but it will report that URL as blocked by robots.txt (even strictly when it isn't). 🤯
Here's a gotcha that Dave Smart helped me with:
- URL A is reported as "blocked by robots" in GSC. Checking the robots.txt rules, I could see it was not.
- Manually visiting the URL, you are redirected. Checking the robots.txt rules, that URL was not blocked either.
- As it happens, there were 2 redirect jumps and the one in the middle was blocked by robots which gives you confusing feedback from GSC.
Essentially, GSC is reporting the impact of the redirects is that the end result is blocked by robots, but it does not tell you the URL was redirected.
Another GSC nuance that can easily catch you out - keep an eye on those redirect chains!
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