The show started with a status check on Google’s Helpful Content Update. Ross & Scott then moved on to WordPress 6.02 security issues and Google’s advice on meta descriptions. They also gave valuable tips when they answered a few questions from the audience.
Noteworthy links from this episode:
- WordPress 6.02 Addresses Security Issues
- Google Helpful Update
- Google Provides Advice on Meta Descriptions
- Google’s guidelines on meta descriptions
Transcription of Episode 438
Ross: Hello, and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR. FM episode number 438. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Web Marketing and my co-host is my company’s senior SEO, Scott Van Achte. How’s it going bud?
Scott: It’s going fantastic. Kids are about to go to school so every parent loves that, right?
Ross: Yes. Going into a new school, boy, the drama.
Scott: It is nice to not have to scream at them, go outside for the next hour. We’re recording SEO 101, the world doesn’t want to hear you, instead I just do it. I just like to just start working. It’s perfect.
Ross: Yes. Well, it’s all new school stuff for my kids. They’re both… Well, Zander’s alright, but my little girl’s all dramatic about it. It changes.
Scott: School changes are interesting.
Ross: It’s a good segue, because there’s a lot of changes going on right now in SEO, we will jump into that in a sec. Well, I guess we could do it right away since we are doing the segue, Google Helpful update, how helpful is it? Pretty much nothing yet. There’s been very little disruption, hasn’t it?
Scott: It hasn’t helped, hasn’t hurt me either, though. Even if I look at my client list, it hasn’t really helped or hurt anybody, which, you know, ‘helps’ would be nice, but not hurting is also very nice.
Ross: Looking at your notes, only 20% of SEO is seeing any ranking changes. That was thanks to a twitter poll by Aleyda Solis. It was a big hype, even Danny Sullivan, again, will never make sense saying this, at Google said that “it is a big one”, “pay attention to this one”. As you and I were just discussing before the show, it hasn’t really finished so even Danny said that it’s not complete. I guess we’ll see how things shake out and they’re going to be continuing to tweak this. So, we’ll see what happens there.
Scott: Glenn Gabe, I can’t remember where he noted this, probably on Twitter, but I can’t recall, had said something along the lines of “he’s only seeing drops in sites that were clearly bad”. Sites that had content from scrape listings, some bad AI generated content, sites that were sort of in a gray area. We’re not really affected so it really seems to be only the worst offenders of having bad content that are getting hit by this. I personally have not seen anything like I was saying to you earlier. If I didn’t know there was a Helpful update happening right now, I wouldn’t assume there was anything going on. I think it was Danny, oh no it wasn’t Danny, on the article at SE Roundtable had said that. Oh, what did he say? I totally lost my train of thought… he said something.
Ross: Danny in Roundtable or do you mean, Barry at the SE Roundtable said something?
Scott: Yeah. What was I gonna say? I totally lost my train of thought. But anyway, it’s been a pretty minor update. Oh, the ranking tools, all those guys out there, like RankRanger, and all those tools, haven’t really noticed anything, either. Who knows, maybe tomorrow, you know what will hit the fan and the peak of the update will hit and we’ll have a fun work day tomorrow.
Ross: Danny Sullivan’s “With this helpful content update, as I said before, it’s part of a continuing effort. Directionally it’s what SEOs and creators should pay attention to, we’ll continue to tune it, refine it. It matters, which is why we’ve spent so much time talking about it”. I think the key thing to take out of this is, ‘it’s what SEOs and creators should pay attention to.’ It doesn’t mean it’s going to affect you right away, but pay attention to Google’s direction here. They’re trying to focus everyone into a next generation, a next level of quality content. You just know, all the AI generators out there are, or the guys who run these things are just chomping at the bit to get the perfect AI generated content or something that can get past these algorithmic updates. I mean, that’s what it’s come down to. It used to be SEOs that’s trying to do that, but now it’s going to be these AI systems.
Scott: I think what’s going to help happen with this update is going to be just like the Page Experience update, you know, it’s not going to do much at the start but over the next few years, it’s going to ramp up and how important it is and the impact it has. Getting the signals now and knowing what they’re looking at, even if it’s not affecting much, but know what’s coming and it will grow. I think that’s the direction this is headed.
Ross: You mentioned the Product Review update here too, and we actually have a new client, we’re working, talking to him in a while, but glad to hear from again, who’s been hit badly by that. It’s quite common from what I’ve seen. I’m doing a little more research on it to see just how common, but those who have reviewed web-based websites are occasionally getting devastated, in this case our client did too. He’s only been a consult-type client with us, we’ve never done any actual long-term work with them, but when we’ve looked at his content, it hasn’t been bad. So, it’s gonna be really interesting, when you dig into that audit, and see what it is about the content that’s really dissatisfied Google. I worry that their criteria is going to be too strong. They’re gonna be looking at too many things and not enough of the most important things. You can’t compete against some websites who have gigantic editorial teams and videography, and all these things, to create reviews, but separate reviews are important. It’s important that there’s more than one out there. I don’t know, I’m skeptical that they’re going to pull that off well.
Scott: Another round of updates to the Product Review update that happens any day now, too. It’s one update after another. They just wrapped up at the beginning of August and now there’s one as soon as Helpful update’s done, this next Product Review update rolls in. It’s interesting how much effort Google is putting into Product Review websites, because in my mind, there weren’t that many of… obviously there are lots, but not so much that they have to have these updates specifically targeted towards these websites every couple of months now. There are a lot of them and I guess I’m not looking for the right stuff to find them.
Ross: Yeah, exactly. I don’t know what the heck they’re selling, but there’s everything under the sun. A lot of them are hamstring stretchers I’ve noticed lately. I bought one of these, the ones they have online, I bought it. You strap, attach it to your foot and you pull back, and you stretch your hamstring. Well, there’s different types, and now there’s different quality. Sure, review sites are popping up everywhere about that now, too. That’s just one example, the stuff I’m sure that is being built for that.
Scott: Did you start a website for it?
Ross: I have no interest in getting that detail, especially since I still haven’t healed my hamstring. Now, we skipped across: some non-SEO news you put down there. So why don’t you run with that?
WordPress 6.02 Addresses Security Issues
Scott: Oh, yeah, we can jump back to that. Another security update over at WordPress, so 6.02 has been launched. Probably a good idea to get your WordPress install updated right away, because there are a couple of security-related issues. First, there were 12 bug fixes to the WordPress Core, whatever those were, you can read up on them if you like. But there was a high severity SQL injection vulnerability, which sounds bad. Two “stored cross-site scripting” vulnerabilities, which I’m gonna be honest, I have absolutely no idea what that means, but you definitely want to get this update taken care of right away if you can, and of course, as always backup before you update, because you never know what’s gonna break on you.
Ross: Yeah, and don’t take for granted that your hosting company has backups that you can access when you need them, or within a timely manner if they do have them.
Scott: I’ve been in situations or I’ve seen it with clients where they get hacked and bad things happen. The host only has three days of backups. So, if you don’t catch that hack right away, your backup is the hacked version of your site, and it’s not a cheap fix.
Ross: Many times, people come to us because they’ve discovered that their hack is showing in Search. “Oh, my God!”, or they got a Google Search Console warning. Well, that can take weeks to appear, and goodbye, any backup you had. They’re all completely toxic now. That’s why when we’re doing our hosting for our clients, we use three months of backups. I love it.
Scott: If you don’t catch it within three months, you need to be changing your business model.
Ross: Using a good hosting company will also build in a certain amount of malware and virus scanning. We double that up with our own plugin as well, that also does that. If we’re going to be paid to fix it, we’d rather be something easy for us to repair. Back up and running doesn’t hurt the rankings as much. It’s a good thing all around. Let’s take a quick break and when we come back we’re going to jump into some questions we’ve had and a bit more on meta descriptions of all things.
Google Provides Advice on Meta Descriptions
Ross: Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR.fm. Hosted by myself Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Web Marketing, and my company senior SEO, Scott Van Achte. Alright. I don’t hear advice on meta descriptions very often from Google these days, but they’ve come up with something. What’s this?
Scott: Yeah, and I don’t talk about it much either. I almost skipped over it because it’s gonna be pretty 101, which I guess that’s the key of the show. We actually have a question later, from somebody who’s just getting into SEO, and I’m seeing a few.. I don’t really like the term noob, but I’m going to use it anyway. A few SEO noobs on our Facebook group that are joining have vocally said they’re learning from the ground up. So, stuff like this is gonna be helpful for them, right? It’s gonna be good stuff for them. Google has actually updated their Docs on snippets, and how to appear for snippets and all that kind of stuff on meta descriptions specifically, and they’ve listed 4 examples of bad meta descriptions, and 4 examples of good meta descriptions. You can search in Google and find the link. We’ll also have the link in our show notes, if you want to read these guidelines, and I’ll just give you, you know, just a really quick summary on what to do and what not to do. Some examples of bad meta descriptions, the first is just a list of keywords. I laugh at this because you shouldn’t have to say this, but I see it all the time when I do audits. I just did a new SEO job for one of our clients, and they have a list of keywords as a meta description. I haven’t seen that for a while. People are still doing it, people don’t know what the tag is for, and they do that. Don’t do that. Don’t just list off a bunch of keywords. Also, don’t use the same description across, I don’t know the example they give you, but have unique meta descriptions on all pages. Again, it’s a no brainer for SEO but if you don’t know, you don’t know, right? They also say don’t summarize the page, the example they give us, “eggs are a source of joy in everyone’s life”, are they?’ When I was a small child, I remember picking eggs from the hen house and bringing them to the kitchen.’ Those were the days, so that’s not a good example. And things that are too short, like mechanical pencils. I want to be the guy that writes these examples. It will be fun, especially the bad ones. Good examples are things that explain what you sell, and details, using snippets from a specific news article is okay, which is interesting, because I tend not to do that, but sometimes using a snippet from the article makes sense. Summarizing the whole page, wait, didn’t it just say not to summarize the whole page? Okay, so summarizing, the whole page is both on the do and don’t list, I think I need to read this a bit more closely. So, in this example, they say “learn how to cook eggs with this complete guide in one hour”, they really have a thing for eggs. Summarizing the gist of the article is okay, and having detailed specifics, self-sharpening mechanical pencils that auto corrects your penmanship, includes auto replenishing lead, and so on and so forth. Self-sharpening mechanical autocorrects your penmanship. That’s going to be a pain if you think of an autocorrect pen… Siri on my iPhone autocorrects badly enough as it is, but at least you can backspace that, if a pen was doing that… Anyway, so a bit of advice there. Take a look at Google’s guidelines, if you’re getting into writing meta descriptions. It’s kind of no-brainer stuff, if you’ve been doing this for a while, but if you haven’t, I could see people making these mistakes easily.
Ross: One of the things that everyone has to keep in mind, too, is that these do not have any impact on whether or not your site will rank. Google’s not considering this in terms of SEO. What they’re looking at is they want to ensure that you’re not putting garbage in there. Yes, obviously spam, which is essentially a description that’s just full of keywords is spam in my opinion. It’s ensuring that it incites the click, you want someone to want to click on your listing versus someone else’s, that other person may be ahead of you. If they’ve got all those keywords in their description instead of a really compelling statement, like “get everything you need to sew your next garment. Open Monday-Friday, 8am to 5pm located in the fashion district”. That was the example compared to the person who does just a list of keywords: ‘sewing supplies; yarn, colored pencils, sewing machines, threads, bobbins needles,’ you can get which one you’re going to click on. So that’s really the point here. Make sure it’s something that it gets people wanting to click on you versus someone else. You don’t have to put a ton of time into this. This is not advertising level eight or anything like that, you don’t have to go crazy. Maybe in the most competitive fields, you may want to spend a few more minutes on each one, but other than that, it’s good. Alright, back to my notes here. Mueller files. I didn’t see this; I saw how you wrote it down here so I’m just gonna let you take this one too.
Inclusive Language
Scott: I wasn’t sure. I think there might be an SEO tie into this in the future so I thought I’d list it. This just happened a few hours ago, Brenda Malone on Twitter posted, “Please try to use more inclusive language instead of those inherently racist terms that are all too common”. So, she’s referring to things like, you know, the masters and master bedroom, instead of using primary, which people are using now. Black Hat, White Hat, that sort of thing. John replied, as well, you know, “If you write anything for SEO, internally or publicly, please watch out (he should say) for inclusive language, it doesn’t take much work, and you might not get it right all the time, but taking steps to get better matters too”. This made me think that, I wonder… there’s a lot of language you can’t really use on your website that can actually hurt your rankings, among many other problems, like your user experience, but if terms like white hat and black hat and white label are going to have negative SEO impacts at some point, because I know if you use hateful racist language, that can. There was a time when it was okay. For example, people use the term “neurodiverse” now, and you don’t say someone has autism, you say they’re neurodiverse. Before that there was the R word, and that was acceptable at one point in time. Clearly, if you have that word all over your website today, you might get in trouble for it. It was kind of interesting in the fact that John replied to her, and brought it forward, and then there was a big conversation about it on Twitter, some people were like, “Absolutely”, and some people were like, “When does it end?” I guess that’s also true to a degree, you know, with cancel culture and all that. Just something to be conscious of, and maybe this type of terminology will have a negative impact if you use it on your website someday, I wouldn’t go out and change everything now for that purpose. I mean, change it, of course, because you’re a better person, but don’t worry about it from an SEO perspective, at least.
Ross: If you’re in a sensitive business environment, which pretty much everyone is now, you have to pay attention to this stuff.
Alright, so let’s jump into some of the questions we have. This one is from Kassy Marsh. She says, “Although I’ve known what SEO is, for some time, I’m a novice. Would anyone have any advice for me about where I should start my learning journey?” Good question. Where would I start with SEO now?
Scott: It’s different than when it was… like I remember when I started. It was all about the forums, going into the forums and reading the Q and A’s in the forums, and I don’t do that a lot now. It’s probably more publications, if anything, like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable, all those. Really, it’s a lot of trial and error, but you can’t really necessarily start with trial and error because you don’t know what to try at the beginning. So, I’d say definitely listen to SEO 101, we’ll start with that.
Ross: Yeah, we’ve covered a lot of the basics. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do and just never get around to, is sort of curate a list of step one, step two, step three episodes from the past. Just put them in order for someone to listen to, but it hasn’t been done, so that’s not going to help you right now, Kassy. It also depends on how you like to learn. If you are a reader, then I can’t recommend enough reading The Art of SEO, an excellent book. It starts off with the basics, works all the way up into some of the more advanced stuff. I think that is a very compelling way to start. There’s also just really good sites. I don’t know if this is still the case, but I know that Moz had a lot of content that was great for introducing people into SEO.
Scott: Some of the older Whiteboard Friday stuff might be still pretty helpful too for a noob.
Ross: Yeah. And in Semrush.com, they also have a lot of training now. Logically, because this is just the way it would work, it’s built on learning their systems. It is a good system. It has some great tools, it’s really quite affordable, if you’re going to be applying it to a website, what you’re learning. The tools that Semrush has are quite costly if you were to get individual, top of the line products for each one of them. They do a very good job of covering a lot of the bases for an affordable price in retrograde when you compare it all. I think it’s free training, I’m not certain, but I believe a good chunk of it’s free. If you want to, you can go through a full course and that might be a modest amount of money, but you’re going to learn a lot that way. It’ll be more action-oriented; you’ll probably be working on your own website or your client website, with their tips and instructions. The more applicable way to learn, because you’re actually doing hands on work.
Scott: I would say another good way to go about it is, create a website as a hobby, not as a serious website, something that you can experiment on and play around on, and if it tanks, it’s not a big deal, it doesn’t matter and build it around a personal hobby or interest or something. So, it wouldn’t be geared as a website that would make you a ton of money. Although who knows, if you get really good, maybe you’ll get there, but more of a playground, a sandbox of sorts to just try things and not have to worry about any repercussions from you know, your client freaking out because their rankings have dropped, or if it’s your own business, I’m not sure in this case, but just a place to play. I think that’s always a great place to sort of cut your teeth, so to speak.
Ross: In this case, they actually do have a website, because Question two is this. “Last week, we were on page one for our search term for Google with seven keywords ranking for the URL. Today, we’ve been dropped to four, and we’re nowhere to be seen on Search for the pages we want to rank. In fact, the first page that comes up that’s ours is our homepage on the fourth page of Google. Looks like we got hit hard by the new update. We’re a small business and I have no idea what to do. This keyword is our main income!” Yeah, not a pleasant place to be. I don’t know how recent that hit was. If we’re talking a couple of weeks, I would sit tight, and just see how things shake out before you get too active unless you know of issues that have to be fixed then dig in, but don’t be too reactionary. We say time and time again but I know a lot of people don’t listen. I get it, like you said, this is your main income. It’s pretty darn nerve wracking, and you can have some sleepless nights while this is happening. The other thing too, is to look at other websites that haven’t been hit hard and see what might be different. You know, what is it that they’ve done that seems to be better? A lot of the updates that are happening right now are content-related, as we’ve discussed. It’s about creating helpful content and content that is not regurgitated, that is not thin, that’s what we used to call it – thin content. Google is just ramping this up every couple of years with new jargon and new update names and whatever it may be. This is not new; they’ve been talking about it forever. It’s just more intense now. See what it is about their content that’s kept them afloat. Not all of them will be good examples. Some will kind of blow your mind like “Why are they even around?” So bad, but you will almost certainly find one that makes you go, “That’s pretty well done, we don’t really have that”. Take some good tips and don’t reinvent the wheel.
Scott: I would add to this another perspective, because I’ve seen it happen to one of our client’s sites, make sure that somehow, inadvertently, you haven’t blocked your site to Google or made some critical error where content is now.. you know, other robots.txt or robots meta is blocking your content or make sure you haven’t been hacked. Run a spider through your website. If you’ve been hacked, you might not see it on the front end, you may only see it on the back end. And that would hurt your rankings. We had a client a few years ago and their main ranking terms all dropped, suddenly, like “Oh god, what’s happening?” like it went from awesome for years to terrible. What had happened is their developer had accidentally put a robots noindex-nofollow on the category pages that were ranking. It was critically bad, and once that was fixed, the rankings came back up I think almost within hours, it was very quick. Make sure there’s nothing like that, it’s probably not the case, but you never know if you’ve got a lot of people that have their fingers on the website, it’s possible somebody accidentally clicked a button that they shouldn’t have or what have you. Use a tool like Screaming Frog or go into Semrush or Ahrefs, or whatever, find the tool that spiders your website and run it through and make sure there isn’t anything that’s really critical that pops up there.
Ross: I’m trying to think of what… we’re spoiled now, because we use all these paid tools. What’s a free one?
Scott: Screaming Frog is free for the first 500 pages. So, I think it’s 500.
Ross: You can’t save it but you can least run it.
Scott: You can run it and then take a look at the.. I believe it’s response codes. It’s one of the tabs if you download Screaming Frog, you’ll see that and it’ll pop up 500 errors and 400 errors and redirects and that kind of stuff. It’ll tell you which pages are indexable, and which ones aren’t, and you can look at the list of pages at spiders. If you see that they’re all unindexable. You know, that’s bad. At least it’ll give you a bit of help, and it’s free. If your site is 1000s of pages, it’ll get you started anyway. If it’s a major issue that you’re having, you’ll probably find it within that trial allowance.
Ross: Great. I hope that helps you, Kassy. Great questions. Thank you. We just love getting them. It lets us jump in areas we don’t necessarily get into very often. It also pulls us really far back into the 101 stuff, which I really want to keep reinforcing with our listeners. Alright, the next question is from Terry Withers. Thank you, Scott, you have paraphrased this. It’s a very good question, Terry. Thank you for all the notes and information, but I do agree that paraphrasing helps. Essentially, you started running a website in 2020, you bought 12 to 20 additional domains, and then you link them to the main site. You’re asking if these links could be hurting you. Now, was there.. I don’t see anything here saying why you might be worried about that?
Scott: Yeah, in his question, I’m assuming, could be her, sorry. In their question, Terry, doesn’t specify if they’re experiencing any ranking declines or problems. I think it’s being more proactive and is this okay? That’s the gist I got. As I understood it, the additional domains…it doesn’t sound like they have much content on them, but they simply link to the main site. So perhaps there’s a link, they might be redirecting to the main domain, I’m not sure, and I can’t be positive, I kind of need more information to know for sure but that’s the gist I got.
Ross: I get this question a lot. Oftentimes, it’s in the beginning times of working with a client, and they’ll say, “Look, I got a ton of domains I’ve bought over the years, can I just point them to my site? Will they help?” No, they really won’t. You can but unless they have their pre-existing traffic, or some kind of pre-existing authority, so in other words, there are sites linking to them, and they’re good quality sites, and there’s no issues with… I won’t get into link specifics, but essentially, they have good quality links pointing to their website, and then to that domain, and that domain points to your site. Well, then there’s some benefit, potentially. But really, only benefit if there’s some correlation in terms of relevance. The long and the short is, don’t think of it that way. It really isn’t the way to go. Those domains are not going to help you. If they were ones that people naturally type in and go to just to see what’s there, maybe they will help you, but in most cases, they’re not. Most cases, they’re .infos, there .biz, .whatever. I mean, there’s so many different types. The concept is that, well, “I’ve got these places, people will go to them, and then they’ll find my site, this will help my rankings” Well those, that doesn’t work. I mean, there was a time when getting new domains and then building them up, and then having that relevance and authority pass to your site would help your main site improve. There are incidents now, where that can still work. It’s not what I would say, a very wise use of your resources and time though. Why not spend that time improving your main sites, you don’t need those and people logically and naturally linked to you? That way, you’re building links yourself that are the ones that you know Google will like, they’ll have no reason not to like that. Whereas if you have all these other sites that you’re building up and you own them all, they’re all under the same ownership, there’s a clear connection, that can look like spam, and you’re risking the farm. So, don’t bother, just invest that time in your own website. Unless those domains have bad reputations, they aren’t going to hurt you either if you’ve got them pointing to your site. Anything else you wanna add?
Scott: I pretty much agree with all of that. The only thing I might say is, you know, Terry does ask if they should build some of those websites up. Like you said, probably not, I would say, but there might be examples maybe for Terry or others in the situation where you might want to, let’s say you’ve got a… I’m terrible at coming up with examples of the top of my head, let’s say you have an automotive website, you sell cars, and you also sell tires separately, you might have a website that focuses on tires and everything about tires. It complements your car website, but doesn’t line up enough to be part of it. If you’ve got complementary content that doesn’t necessarily belong on your website, and should live on a separate website, there might be examples there where you’d want to do something like that. But not necessarily. I mean, I think it’s a lot of a, I hate saying it, but it depends on a case-by-case situation, but for the most part, I probably wouldn’t put resources into building those up.
Ross: Yeah, okay. I was just trying to use an example of my own, but it didn’t work.
Scott: Do you want me to ramble a bit longer while you look for it?
Ross: Nah, it’s all good.
Scott: I’ve got a new back scratcher. It’s really…
Ross: Our next question, this is great, man. We got tons. Adam Marland. “This is about retargeting cloned posts”, he says. “Let’s say I have a Southeast Asia packing list ranking number one on Google for that term, but not ranking for Thailand, or Vietnam packing list. However, it’s nearly exactly the same guide. Could I or should I clone the post, change the URL, headers, images and relevant text to go from Southeast Asia to Thailand? I would also, of course, make any niche changes that may exist, but 90% of the words would be identical. Most people I’ve asked said I should paraphrase previous content, but haven’t seen anything on the SEO end that supports this as anything more than a myth, and it would save a lot of time over five plus posts, if I could just do a keyword swap.”
Scott: My initial answer is no, don’t just clone it. Forget about penalties, let’s assume you’re not going to get any kind of penalization, which you probably won’t, it probably just won’t rank right. I feel like if you put the effort in and write unique posts for each of these focus areas, you’re gonna get something out of it. If you just do a find and replace and a few little tweaks here and there, I think you’re probably wasting your time; I don’t think there’s going to be any value in that, it might rank… might, especially if you get a lot of inbound links and things like to some of these pages, but I think it’s worth the time and effort to write it very specifically tailored to Thailand and Vietnam, and whatever the other countries are on your list there.
Ross: I find that Google’s more tolerant and allows, pardon the word, but shifty techniques like this to work when the website has a lot of authority. If your site is doing exceptionally well, and this is just a little pivot you want some of this content to get different traffic, maybe try one, see what happens. It likely can’t hurt. I mean, you’re just doing a test, it’ll be a separate page anyway. But then do another one where you’re rewriting it. Then do another one, I suggest China’s, with one of the AI generators. All I would do with this, I’m not a big, huge proponent, but I’m pretty impressed with them, is you put in the points that you want to cover in the tool, and then it will actually take that and generate content that is nearly perfect. Yes, you’ll tweak a few things, but it saves you time. Give that a shot. So, you have three different pages, targeting those different areas and see how they perform. Have fun with a little bit of a test here. That’s what I would do.
Scott: Yeah, I agree with that.
Ross: Yeah, if that works out, and you see all three going well… Well, Oh darn! If only one does super well, start to wonder why and look at it. The other thing too is you’re going to want to make sure that your internal linking strategy is strong. If your particular page about Southeast Asia packing has a fairly authoritative link network within your own website, you’re referring to it a fair bit, other pages refer to it. Well, if you want those other ones to do well, you’re gonna have to think about how you want to link them. I wouldn’t link all them just like that to the same… I wouldn’t provide the same amount of links you are to the one that’s ranking number one, you might dilute the authority that’s receiving and you might lose that ranking or it might dip. But at the very least ensure that there are pages that have traffic that Google seems to appreciate that on those pages linked to those new pages you’ve created. So that’s my tip, anyway. Anything you’d like to add Scott?
Scott: No. I wasn’t thinking about testing three different variations, but let’s see where it goes, and then tell us how it went. Definitely. Please.
Ross: Totally, that’d be fun. In fact, we need to cover that in the show.
Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Web Marketing, and my company’s senior SEO, Scott Van Achte, thank you for joining us today. Remember, we have a show notes newsletter, you can sign up for it at SEO101radio.com where you don’t have to miss a single link and you can refresh your memory of a past show at any time.
I’ll give you a little heads up too. There is going to be a fairly significant discount coming up for anyone on any of our newsletters, due to our 25th anniversary, so make sure you’re on that list, and you will benefit. Hope we get to speak with you soon. Have a great week and remember to tune in to future episodes, which air twice a month on WMR.fm.
Scott: Great, thank you everybody.