SEO 101 Ep 441 Disappearing Google Reviews, Updates on Google Business Profile Features, and More.

by | Dec 13, 2022 | SEO, SEO Podcast

Ross & Scott started the show with news on WooCommerce WordPress plugin vulnerabilities. They then talked about review structured data, updates on Google Business Profile photos, the impact of local review keywords on local rankings, disappearing reviews caused by a GBP bug, and much more!

Bonus: Ross shares some of his learnings from a recent DMO Mastermind.

 

 

Noteworthy links from this episode:

 

Transcription of Episode 441

 

Ross: Hello, and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR. FM episode number 441. 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 my friend?

Scott:  It’s going great. Same question, same answer every week.

Ross:  You got a big red bullseye on you today.

Scott: Lindsay got me this random t-shirt, and it’s like a sunset whatever, but when it was in the package, you can only see the top part in it. It looks like a Japanese flag. I was like, “why did you get me a t- shirt with a Japanese flag? I’m not Japanese”.

Ross:  Maybe she was hiding the fact that you’re going to Japan or something, there was a big secret and surprise.

Scott:  Well, that’d be cool. Do you think I’m going? Did she ask you to give me time off that I don’t know about?

Ross:  Oh, no, you’re working.

Scott:  Oh damn. Okay. Well, she can go without me.

Ross:  I wanna apologize to everyone. I was away at Mastermind the last time we were supposed to be recording, so we’re behind. I gotta read a kind comment. I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode. I dream of the show sometimes, and I think I’ve said something and I don’t know if I have. One gentleman said that he wasn’t sure he could handle just having two episodes a month of SEO 101, he wants more again and I really appreciated that. That was a really nice comment. It made me consider it. We’ll see. We’re so busy with bits and pieces of growth and just trying to keep on top of everything. I want to make sure I’m not sacrificing any client satisfaction or anything like that. But we did do it before, so we might be able to pull it back out again. Maybe even do it three times a week…I mean a month.

Scott:   Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Alright.

Ross:  Now you got more than you can handle.

Scott:  Yeah, more than I can handle.

 

WooCommerce WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities

Ross:  Anyway, we’re back at it, and lots to share, which is always fun. Let’s start off with some non-SEO news you put down there.

Scott:  Just a quick little simple typical vulnerability WordPress issue. If you’re using WooCommerce, for your WordPress site, there are five WooCommerce plugins that have high to critical vulnerabilities that need to be updated. There’s a bunch of them, just make sure… I was gonna list them all off, but nobody cares. So just go into your WordPress installation. If you have any WooCommerce plugins, you know, backup your site first, as we always say, because you never know when an update is gonna break everything, and update all your WooCommerce stuff, and probably anything else that needs updating for that matter. But I guess this was related to some SQL injection, vulnerabilities, things like that. You know, not good, affects about 130,000 installations. It’s not everybody, but it’s a lot of people.

Ross:  It looks like it’s plugins for WooCommerce that are doing it.

Scott:  Correct. Yeah, they’re WooCommerce. They’re plugins created by WooCommerce for WooCommerce, if I understand it correctly, and there’s a bunch of them. Just go in, you know, it’s critical. So do it today, and you should be just fine.

Ross:  I was talking with someone the other day about WooCommerce. It’s a client we’re dealing with, we’re doing some web design for them. While we were trying to decide what functionality or what sort of system to use for the functionality they wanted, and I said, a lot of what you want can be done with WooCommerce, but they don’t want to actually sell anything. They just want it to be easy to use and manage the products and stuff like that, and I said we could do that, just keep in mind, and this is where this really ties in, WordPress alone takes a fair bit to keep maintained and safe. When you add WooCommerce to it, you’ve added a whole ‘nother dimension of upgrading and management. It isn’t light on maintenance, so just keep that in mind. It is phenomenal, though, in terms of the functionality you can get. It’s so fluid, so well designed. Everything seems to have a catch 22 to it.

 

Use Dots over Comma in Review Structured Data

Ross:  So now we’re right into the SEO news. Using dots over comma in review structured data. This is right up your alley. I don’t do a lot of review, or structured data. So tell us what’s up.

Scott:  I thought you were gonna say dots and commas are up my alley. Like I don’t know what that means… I love me some dots. 

This is again, a pretty simple thing, Google has updated its review snippet structured data help documentation. That’s a mouthful. Essentially, if you are using a reviewRating.ratingValue or any of the rating value property sections, separate your numbers with dots instead of commas. So that’s really more of a geographic and language thing but Google wants you to use dots, use periods 4.2, instead of 4,2. While commas will still work, Google does not recommend them anymore. This doesn’t sound like a critical, super important thing, but I like to be somewhat thorough with little SEO jobs, everything and even the little things, you know, a hundred little things add up to a big thing. Whenever you see little stuff like this, if Google says do it, whether you want to or not, you should probably do it. This should be an easy fix for most people, if they have this issue, I would hope.

Ross:  It’s important. All of these schema is only helpful if it’s working. A small misedit can break it completely. So definitely do that and try to keep on top of what Google recommends. In these circumstances, it’s always a good bet to make them happy, it’s going to be a benefit.

 

DMO Mastermind 

Ross:  Now I was saying I was at a Mastermind, it was phenomenal. I can compress all the different conferences I’ve ever gone to, and I learned infinitely more than all of them combined, at least in terms of true benefits to my business. I think it’s because I was with colleagues who we could just share anything about running a business as well as learning SEO and stuff. A lot of it, I can’t share, it’s very private, or it’s really too complex. There were a few things that I thought were interesting. One is, a lot of us deal with site speed, and a lot of people with websites these days are being lured into adding chatbots to their website, or an invitation to chat, or it’s an AI chatbot, all these sorts of things. They’re really interesting to try and see what happens whether or not they’re going to be useful or not is entirely dependent upon your market and what kind of typical visitor you get to your website, that kind of thing. I’ve seen it work really well for some, but the one thing that they all consistently do is slow down your site, with the exception of one, which was mentioned by a very authoritative person in this group, who I wouldn’t question at all. And that is engage.com, they have an AI chatbot that they carefully tuned so that it would not have an impact on site speed, or very low, if at all. I thought that was really valuable, if you ever really are trying to get down to the absolute fastest load time, and I think this is really important for e-commerce sites, then do consider this investment. I have no idea what kind of cost it is. Maybe for all I know, it’s only really affordable for enterprise. I just happen to know that this was mentioned. I was going through my notes and I thought this is something I can share. So there you have it. That’s one.

Ross:  Next up Taboola was at this Mastermind. Taboola is… there’s a technical acronym for it, I can’t remember this, but essentially, it’s a content…let’s call it a Content Network. They have thousands of websites that are part of their network where you can advertise. I was really impressed. They had to present to us, they were one of the sponsors. Normally, I would never mention a sponsor because frankly, they usually aren’t worthy. But these guys really did a kick-ass job. They answered very tough questions from some of the top SEOs and marketers in the world that were in this Mastermind. I think it impressed most of us, at least that was my impression. I was impressed. I’m not saying they’re the end all and be all, but I do think they’d be worthwhile trying if you want to get in front of a specific market with display ads or video. Check them out to Taboola it’s spelt as T.A.B.O.O.L.A. Check them out. It seemed pretty good. I don’t know what the minimum spends are. I believe if you have a minimum spend of 5000 per month, you get your own client manager, or that’s not the right word for it. Anyway, a person will work directly with you, and you’ll get that extra level of care. Anything less than that I believe you have to do it yourself…much of the management and set up yourself but they still have some pretty awesome tools, including some keyword insight tools, which I thought were quite awesome.

Ross:  Finally, I have to be a bit vague on this one, unfortunately, because I know that some of the examples provided were private. I can say quite confidently that although Google says canonical tags are treated as suggestions — no, there are many cases where canonical tags are being used nefariously to hurt other websites, but also to benefit other websites. Essentially, Google is paying a great deal of attention to them, and not considering them just suggestions. Now, the reason I’m bringing that up is Google’s always said that canonical tag, which is essentially a tag you put on a page saying, “This page is owned by”… what do you say Scott? or “referenced by?”

Scott:  It’s always a tough one to explain and an easy one to understand. It’s really on pages that are duplicated content that you don’t necessarily want indexed. So then you would point it to a page that actually is a URL that should be indexed. Sometimes it might be with pagination, it’s really helpful. If you have product pages where you’ve got a red and a blue widget, but you want to point to the generic widget page instead, because you’re just changing things like that.

Ross:  But generally, every page on a site has a self-referencing canonical. If you see this, this is the authority page for this content, essentially, the best way I can describe it. I’m sure there’s some phenomenal explanations online, but I can’t do it. Google has always said that, yes, use canonicals, and yes, it really will help but don’t expect us to follow every single one of them like they’re a religion. Now, we’re going to take them as a suggestion. I can tell you from the examples I got… Oh, my God! Be very careful that your canonicals are set properly on your site, because they can be a huge leak of authority. And they can be used nefariously. If you want to know more, hire us. There’s only so much stuff I can share, it’s part of what we’ve learned. I’m definitely applying it to our services in terms of audits and things that I always thought… well forgive me, I took Google a certain amount of face value on that one. We’re always checking them though, like Scott’s doing major audits right now, and he’s definitely making sure that canonicals are right. So don’t get me wrong there.

Scott:  Let me just write down that I should do that. Just kidding, I’m kidding.

Ross:  Anyway, that’s what I have to share about that. I’ve got a list here I was creating before a meeting to talk with Scott afterwards, but only found a few things I could share here. Anyway, I hope those are of some help to you.

 

Google Local Insights is Dropping Photo Views per Photo

Ross:  Next up, some local SEO.  I was looking this up for the show here, and noticed something. It was only 17 minutes ago that Joy Hawkins posted a response from Google. So what’s happened is it appears that Google Business Profiles have now dropped the view counts per photo that you have within your account. So if you look at your photos that you have shared, or that you’ve got in your system, you used to look at them and see how many times each of them are being viewed, it was a great indicator of which ones were a benefit. Well –gone. The official line from Google and the response, I think it was Joy that got this was… Just before I say this, I hate how bureaucratic… though their wordings just drives me crazy. Anyway, “While we are moving away from providing photo insights, Business Profile users will continue to have access to a number of profile insights like profile views, number of calls, messages, bookings, and others”.

Why does this matter? Well, you now can’t see which photos are popular. If you need to remove some, which we don’t recommend ever doing, really, unless it’s something that’s so outdated that it might misrepresent your brand, which I think you should remove anyway, even if it is popular, or it’s one you don’t like and you think you want to replace it with one with better quality, color, etc. Don’t do that. In that case, I think you would only want to remove them again, if it’s really a bad representation of your business. It’s also now harder to learn what types of photos are of greater interest to viewers, and that is really important. I mean, I find it fascinating to see what kind of content people like more than others. Sometimes it’s the weirdest photo, I have no idea why they’d pick it. Frankly, it’s just more data we don’t have, which is frustrating as a marketer, and as a business owner, I want more data. Maybe I don’t need it right now but at some point I might, and now Google’s decided, it’s gone because they hold the keys to our kingdom, it’s frustrating.

Scott:  It’s a weird change. Like, I don’t see any value, it must have something to do with the tech behind keeping a tally on those photos, like I don’t even know, it must be some technical requirement, because it’s not gonna be a privacy issue if they show you all the other stuff. And what does that number mean for privacy? Like, I don’t see their logic. Elon Musk didn’t buy Google, did he? Maybe that’s why.

Scott:  Even he can’t afford that. I’ll follow up with this part here and you can take the next one.

 

Google Business Profiles Adds Photo Cropping Tool

Ross:  Anyway, Google Business Profiles, when you add photos, now have a cropping tool, which is nice and handy. So if you upload a photo quickly that you just took, but you think you want to cut that person out of it, or that dog or something nasty, you can. Just crop it out and save. It’s all done within the same interface.

Scott:  Perfect. I’m looking up my Ross Dunn photos right now and start cropping. There’s a big, big black square where your face used to be.

 

Keywords In Local Reviews Does Not Impact Google Local Rankings; Study Says

Scott:  Yeah, so the next thing is, it’s not a huge thing. But it’s kind of an interesting thing. If you didn’t know this, or if you thought maybe that reviews on your local listing could have some keyword value for rankings, and they don’t. So there. I mean, I kind of knew this, but I thought there might be some of you guys out there that don’t know this. A very limited study was done at Sterling Sky that placed keywords into reviews for local business listings. It did not help with rankings for that local business. So their example was they used Christmas trees and what was the other term… like a Christmas tree farm or fresh cut Christmas trees was the other one. And they found it did not help with the rankings for the business and in some cases actually made some rankings worse. So if you were thinking about telling your customers and clients to try to include certain keywords in reviews of your business, don’t have them do that, it will just look weird,  unnatural, and frankly, will not help.

Ross:  Now, with that said, I wouldn’t recommend following Google’s advice on this completely. It’s one thing that this was found, and so be it. You definitely don’t want anyone, like clogging the review with keywords. That’s just ridiculous. You want it to be natural. But let’s say you have different services, whatever and each of these reviews typically are based on different services, I think it is wise to ask if someone’s going to leave a review, “If you don’t mind mentioning the service that you had with us.” Don’t necessarily tell them the keyword. If you do, I still don’t think it’s a big deal. But you do want them to add that, because it adds context for your other marketing, as well as anyone looking at the review, because that’s the problem with reviews I find these days. If I go and look at a company, I look at the reviews, sometimes it’s just like, “Great, they did a great job. I’m so glad I’ve worked with them, blah, blah, blah.” But they may have a ton of services. I want to know which service made them happy and made that person happy and I think that’s really important. So don’t get too insane about this stuff.  

I’ve been working on Tiktok lately, if anyone wants to check me out @rossdunnseo, all in one word. And I’m posting things exactly like this. My thoughts on such things. So check it out. It’s kind of fun. I’ll be doing Tiktok Lives at some point too. It’s kind of fun. I just don’t know whether I’ll be on it forever. But at this point, I’m making a commitment.

Ross:  Alright, what’s this bug? Tell me more.

 

Google’s Suggested GBP Updates Nuke Reviews

Scott:  Yeah, so this is always fun. You gotta love it when Google messes with things. So Mike Blumenthal actually reported on this and it was also on Search Engine Land. If you want to go to nearmedia.co you can find the article from Mike and some of his findings and more information. But what’s been happening recently is Google has been pushing automatic listing updates to clients’ businesses, which is kind of bad in its own sense, and whatever other reasons as well. But what this is also doing is creating a new.. what’s called a CID, which is an identifier that Google uses to tie together business listings with their reviews and when they push these updates, such as website updates or name changes, things like that, it’s breaking that connection between the business and the reviews, resulting in reviews vanishing. A couple of examples that Mike listed… He said there was one business that had 175 star reviews and then the next day they were gone, like just completely gone. What had happened is Google had changed their business name and phone number, and the short name for their business, just on their own, they decided to do this. And all the reviews are gone. Another business lost 105 reviews, Google had changed their business name and their website link. Apparently, Google as of November 15, they tweeted that they were aware of the bug and actively addressing it, many reviews at that point had already been restored. Who knows how widespread this is because I know a lot of businesses that don’t check this stuff.

Ross:  Meanwhile, the businesses lost hundreds of millions of dollars, probably over a few days due to this.

Scott:  Well, Mike had noted, I don’t have this in front of me, but he had a couple phone calls. One person literally in tears because of the business they lost because everything had been wiped out, essentially, because Google changed some critical information. So that’s lots of fun. So this bug apparently is in the works to be fixed. Who knows, I imagine it will be. But one thing that Mike goes on to say is to… they recommend backing up all your Google reviews. I wasn’t really sure how to do this and he goes into quite a bit of detail on how to do it using either Gatherup’s review link generator chrome extension, or Plepers free Google CID converter. So there’ll be a link in his article nearmedia.co, we will have the full link in the show notes so you can get there and look at all the nitty gritty on how to do that. It’s a bit much to explain here, or you can just google how to backup Google reviews and I’m sure you’ll find something helpful there.

Scott:  If you’ve got hundreds, definitely you want to use something like that. In other cases,…Text of the BC Emergency Alert System.

Scott:  I just got that too. Lucky, my phone was muted.

Ross:  Anyway, our phones are ringing crazy. I actually, again in Tiktok, recommended to people that they back those up, as soon as you get reviews, every time you get one, maybe once a week. Go through and just get the newest ones and put them in your site into a list and in a spreadsheet. We actually have an active spreadsheet, which has different categories. We can tag each review with a different service category/ multiple services, if we know that particular review mentions different ones. Anyway, it’s our own little Excel database, essentially, of all the reviews and testimonials we have from Google from everywhere, because you can’t guarantee they’re going to be there forever. And these are gold, you need to keep them somewhere  safe. So make sure you do that. A good spreadsheet is a great idea. You can even have your assistant do that or someone else in-house, if you have that, that can be part of their weekly task. I wouldn’t leave it longer than weekly because this can go missing overnight.

Ross:  I just had a great conversation with one of our listeners, Tina. I swear we should have had some booze and crying into our drinks, talking about how crappy Google can be to small businesses with local Google business listings. They can destroy you overnight with a simple mistake. It is wrong and in her case, she has a service area business, which is even more difficult and you’re even more at Google’s whim because frankly, they’ve never done a good job of dealing with service area businesses, they’ve always treated them as second class citizens, second class businesses, I guess, in this case. It’s unfortunate, but we’re at their whim, we have to work with what they have. And then if they decide they don’t like something, they can just pretty much shut the whole business down because so much business comes from Google. It’s scary.

Scott:  You know, at least there’s one small silver lining and that is when it’s a bug it can be fixed. The reason I say that is I’m pretty sure this was with StepForth, although maybe I’m getting really confused. I seem to remember a Yellow Pages listing and they published the wrong phone number years ago. The problem with that, obviously, is now you have to wait a year to see that fixed. And thankfully for us, you know, we’re a web business. I don’t even know, do we ever get business from the Yellow Pages ever? I don’t know, maybe. But for some people that would be like a game changer that was you know, you lose your Yellow Pages listing, well that’s just Google now. Google is your… Well, I guess there is still Yellow Pages but..

Ross:  My opinion…this will all be antiquated garbage. Ten times the money back, I bet, from spending it elsewhere, marketing. I’ve never, ever, ever, ever been impressed with the results from the Yellow Pages when I’ve audited clients. So, take that to heart anyone out there who’s still using them. They charge exorbitant prices. I’ve never liked what they’ve done. I’d be the first to say if they’re any good because I would want my clients to use them.

Ross:  So let’s take a quick break and we come back, we’re going to jump into some Mueller files, quite a few of them, in fact.

Ross:  Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR.FM. Hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Web Marketing and my company’s senior SEO, Scott Van Achte.

 

Links May be Less Important in the Future

Ross:  Oh, right links may be less important in the future, says John Mueller.

Scott:  Yeah, so that’s kind of fun. Let’s hope so. Anyway, he had noted that he can see a future where links are not as important in the overall algorithm as they are today. This first bit, I paraphrase, because I didn’t know how to read what he had written. It was… actually I think it was an excerpt from a video. But essentially, he said that over time, the weight of inbound links will drop off, or he suspects, a little bit. But as we figure out better how content fits within the context of a whole website, geez, I’ve misread that in a really bad way. Essentially, he’s saying that  when they learn how to better understand the context within a website, the value of the links will be less important in determining things like authority.

Ross:  And that’s what they want. Obviously, that’s their goal.

Scott:  Yeah, and it’s not a big surprise, but he had said that…this is a quote from John, “But my guess is, over time, it won’t be such a big factor as sometimes it is today. I think already, that’s something that’s been changing quite a bit.” So he’s kind of alluding that, you know, the value of inbound links has probably already changed. There’s not as much importance as there once was, I don’t know. But I do want to say, though, that if the value of inbound links plummets to nothing, which it won’t ever do that, I don’t think, but if it did, it would make our jobs a lot easier, because link building is probably arguably the most time consuming, difficult and most expensive part of SEO. In a lot of cases it is.

Ross:  We prefer to call it Authority Building. A little more accurate, but it’s true that Google wants this. No, I don’t think… if it’s changed at all, I’ll give it a 1% based on what I’ve seen, and what I’ve heard. It’s still a major, major factor, and don’t take anything there with too much confidence. I think it’s hopeful that it will be changing at some point because they still rely on it so much. They haven’t been able to replace it. You know, all of these changes they’ve been doing with the algorithms are hopefully going to improve the ability for them to not rely on them. But I don’t think they’re there yet at all. Yeah, interesting, though. I love hearing this. It’s always a  good little peek into what’s going on.

Scott:  Little future insight.

 

Google Search Console Verified Sites Do Not Get Crawled More

Ross:  Yeah. Google Search Console verified sites do not get crawled more. I love all these little denial snippets.

Scott:  Well, I actually wasn’t going to include this and I thought I can expand on this and drive me in a certain tangent. So UpGo, whoever UpGo is, sorry if you’re listening, Mister/ Missus company UpGo, whatever, I don’t know. They asked John, “If we never add a website to google search console. Does google still crawl the site at certain intervals? Is the crawl frequency slower than a site with a search console attached?” And John’s answer is, of course, “Crawling is independent of search console,” which is true, their crawl rate and how often they come back to your site, for the most part, is not connected to Search Console. But of course, there are some exceptions to that. If you have a URL that you want to have crawled immediately, you can use the URL inspection tool at a one at a time basis and put that in there. It’ll force Google to crawl that URL, which is great…

Ross:  Do we see quick turnarounds on that?

Scott:  I have one client who uses Wix, and I’m not going to go on a Wix rant today. But their blog is really hard to get indexed and it’s kind of a nightmare. I find that when they publish a new blog post, I immediately go into Search Console, I go into the URL inspection tool, paste the URL in there and often it’s indexed within minutes. So that’s a good example of where you want Search Console. But the crawl rate and how often they come back to your site is largely dependent on other factors, not so much Search Console. So then, I saw this and I thought I just wanted to go through a few quick tips on how to get Google to crawl your website more frequently. And these might be obvious, but I feel like they fit in the 101 category quite well. So okay, you want Google to come more often:

  • Add quality content to your site more frequently and at regular intervals. So if you’re posting to your blog, make it weekly or even monthly, like make it consistent all the time. And Google will ultimately learn that and come back more frequently.
  • Ensure your website has a fast response time.
  • Ensure your site is hosted on a fast server. So if your website or server is slow, that’s going to cause bottlenecks and it’s going to potentially cause crawling issues.
  • Building quality inbound links from authoritative websites, Google will follow those from the other websites and get to your site more often.
  • Eliminating errors on your site, don’t have 404 errors or 500 errors or whatever. Just make sure your site is error free.
  • Reduce the number of URLs on your website where possible. So if you have weird pagination, if you have lots of thin content that Google just kind of gets trapped in or lots of duplication or weird stuff going on, you might want to clean that up. And we have one client who was kind of struggling with this, they had 10s of 1000s of URLs. He made a couple… like one simple thing in the pagination. Instead of showing 10 results per page, he increased it to 15, which eliminated a mountain of pages on their website and things improved a little bit. So you know, I’ve seen a lot of blogs, where they have the pagination set to like,… well, I’ve seen three, as low as three.

Ross:  Can you describe what pagination is for the listeners.

Scott:  Yeah. So if you’ve got 10, say about 20 items in either a shopping cart or blog posts, you’ve had 20 blog posts, and then you click through and you display, say, five blog posts, and then you click “Next,” and then it displays the next five blog posts, and then the next five blog posts. So on each of those pages, include more items. You don’t wanna include 100, or 200. But you know, instead of 10, maybe bump it to 15. Or if you’re low at three to five, which I do see sometimes, increase it to 10. You eliminate the need for Google to crawl that much deeper to reach content and move deep level content closer to the homepage in terms of the number of clicks it takes for Google and users to find it, which is good.

Ross:  I’d say that you have to also consider the devices your viewers are using. If they’re mobile, you’re gonna be careful how many you include per page. You can use something like Hot Jar, which is a  user monitoring tool. So you can see how people use the page. You know, if they don’t mind scrolling through all that fine, but I would doubt it. So just keep that in mind since Google is mobile-first. And you may be one of those people, which is the majority of the internet, which has primarily mobile traffic. But yeah, if you’re having a genuine significant issue with being crawled, you know, that content being found, then increasing it is a good way to fix that.

Scott:  A lot of it falls again into that ‘it depends’ bucket. And what are these snippets, like if you’ve got 10 snippets per page, are each of these snippets, like five or six words, or they each 100 words, you know, that’s going to determine how much you put on a page. Do you have a graphic or no graphic? Is it like a title and a link, and that’s it? Or is it a huge snippet? Who knows, right? So certainly, a lot of it depends on there for sure. Especially like you said, devices and all that.

 

Link Words In Your Content When It Is Relevant & In Context

Ross:  Alright. Google has…this is our last bit here. It was interesting when I saw this. Again, it’s another Mueller file, it says cross-link words in your content when it’s relevant and in context. It’s a quote from Barry’s article on Search Engine Roundtable. It says, “Google’s John Mueller said that while it does make sense to cross-link between your content on your website, you should do it only when it is relevant and within the context of the content. If your users get confused by your links, so may search engines, John added.” It is important. Like it’s just like anything in SEO. If you want to do it right, do it for the users, don’t do it for the search engines. Users-first search engines blast sometimes, depending on what you’re doing.

Scott:  Usually second.

Ross:  We hope, we can hope for second. He was referencing examples where links were sending him to completely irrelevant garbage and that’s not good. This should be obvious to people that you shouldn’t be doing that. Anyway, I think that’s a good one to end on.

We will be back to two episodes per month (almost said per week again there). Anyway, do mention, if you have any questions, put them on our SEO 101 group on Facebook, please. We’d love to receive questions. It’s been a while and it’s always nice to have something to end the show with.

So, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Web Marketing and my company’s senior SEO, Scott Van Achte, thanks for joining us today. If you have any questions you’d like to share with us, you know where to go. Have a great week and remember to tune in to future episodes, which air twice a month on WMR.FM

Scott:  Hey, thanks for listening, everyone.