Recent Google Hangout Tidbits - July 2016

[Ryuzaki]

I'm taking this information from Search Engine Roundtable, who regularly monitor the Google Hangout conversations with John Mueller. I'm paraphrasing some quotes and adding my own notes as well:

There Is No Penalty For Not Linking Out Externally

Q: I heard that there is a penalty if I don’t link out from my domain to different domain from any of my pages. Is not linking out from any of my page harmful?

A: No that's not correct. There is no penalty for not linking out.

Obviously for users sometimes it makes sense to provide references and other websites that they can visit to to get more information on certain topics. So I think from a user experience point of view it's probably a good idea to have links on your pages.

But surely from a web spam point of view, from a Google indexing point of view you don't need to to put links on your pages.
​

It should be noted that Gary Illyes said "It's stupid not to link out and it makes me angry." John Mueller professed there being no SEO benefit from linking out nor a penalty, and for some odd reason there's a fear of linking out in the SEO community. Probably because of the crap they were doing in the past regarding "bad neighborhoods." Also there have been various case studies such as the one by Reboot Online that shows linking out does carry benefit, as I've mentioned before on BuSo concerning the Hilltop Algorithm and the query's intent and need for authority versus trust:

"an "expert" is a page that links to lots of other relevant documents; an "authority" is a page that has links pointing to it from the "expert" pages."
​

This is doublespeak to some degree. There's a bonus to linking out despite what he says. And while there's no "penalty" for not, there is an absence of the bonus. Yank out all the connotation and negations and other sneaky speak and the answer is that you should be linking out when it makes sense (and maybe even when it doesn't).

​

Disavow Links File Needs To Be On Canonical Version For Manual Actions

The summary of this is that regardless of which version of your site gets a manual penalty, whether that be:

http://www.
http://
https://www.
https://

When you begin to disavow links, the file needs to be updated to the canonical URL.

So even if the non-secure version with www gets the manual action notice in Webmaster Tools, which is strange because you're redirecting everything to the secure version without www... you need to upload the disavow file to the secure version without www. It's the one that's being indexed and canonicalized that matters.

Short Articles Won't Penalize Your Site; Think About Users

Q: My SEO agency told me that the longer the article I write, the more engaged the user should be or the Google will penalize me for this. I fear writing longer articles with lots of rich media inside because of this, is my SEO agency correct or not?​

A: I really wouldn't focus so much on the length of your article but rather making sure that you're actually providing something useful and compelling for the user. And sometimes that means a short article is fine, sometimes that means a long article with lots of information is fine.

From our point of view we don't have an algorithm that council words on your page and says, oh everything until a hundred words is bad and everything between 200 and 500 is fine and over 500 needs to have five pictures. We don't look at it like that.

We try to look at the pages overall and make sure that this is really a compelling and relevant search results to users. And if that's the case then that's perfectly fine.
​

A purposefully vague Cutts-esque statement. My translation is that Google uses User Metrics to measure this. Everything else is correlation. So time-on-page, bounce rate, pogo-sticking in the SERPs, CTR in SERPs, is what determines if your content is "thin." Thin doesn't necessarily mean "short" as many of us have discovered. It means not providing anything new, meaningful, and engaging for users. It also means, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, being an EMD affiliate site with an disproportionate number of affiliate links over other OBLs, especially those that aren't no-followed.

Why Did Google Dropped Authorship As A Ranking Signal?

For those that don't know, Google Authorship Markup and the whole G+ fiasco is toast. It's officially removed from use by Google and they've said you're safe to remove the markup from your sites.

Q: Previously, you said you didn't know really who wrote an article. Does it mean it's not a ranking factor who created content?

A: Probably we wouldn't know that. I mean maybe the article is great and it would rank essentially on its own or based on kind of the feedback that we see from users with regards to recommendations like links.
​

He continues to ramble about how some amazing author could write a completely irrelevant article on an unknown irrelevant blog, and that doesn't mean it's of better quality regarding the main industry of the author. It goes back to the fallacy of the argument of authority. It's like when Stephen Hawking says something stupid about the potential intentions of extraterrestrials. Just because he's a theoretical physicist doesn't mean he's an authority regarding exopolitics.

It also probably means that there was too much noise for it to matter with more fake profiles than real going on.

 

[The Kloser]

Great summary. Is there any information available on how to maintain a disavow links file? I know that you do maintain one for your Surrender & Supremacy case study site.

 

[CCarter]

I link out ALL the time, especially when it will make user's lives' easier instead of them having to go re-Google something I'm talking about. All my outbound links are dofollow. If I don't think it's worth linking to and stating "yes I vote for this" then I wouldn't even talk about it.

SEO is so backwards, it no longer makes sense. You want your website to be a hub of your industry, so people visit it for new information, new data, and accurate content about your industry - it's impossible to achieve this level of being the "go-to" source if you don't link out and make it difficult for your visitors to navigate, wait for a it - GASP away from your site! I know it's crazy, but there is something called brand loyalty. If you become the premier hub for your industry and you link out to great sources, then more and more people will RE-VISIT your website, and link to your content.

You know the #1 content on my sites? All content pieces that link out to other resources for my industry. hmm... that can't be a coincidence.

The problem is SEOs don't think about their websites and thier visitors as users who need help. They just see "hits" to their website. What SEOs need to do is put themselves in their visitors shoes, when they've researched something and couldn't find a single link to the content the article is talking about and now you have to waste time Googling cause the author is retarded. A couple of those and you can forget about "visitor loyalty" cause people will not want to go to your website.

It's like Forbes.com, they like creating a bad experience for the end user with their pop up, and all this content blocking nonsense, and they THINK "hey it's working", reality is all the websites wasting time with blocking users who block Ads are on a steep decline (sauce: Sites that block adblockers seem to be suffering).

They aren't thinking about the experience a user is having on their website first - that's why all these viral sites are just shortterm operations, they have to keep adding more ADs ontop of more ADs to make a profit cause their visitors have no loyalty. Their visitors have no loyalty cause the user experience is horrible - why in the fuck would they put their email address to get updates from you when they had a slow and bad experience in the first place? Yet you can't figure out why your viral site isn't getting email conversions...

No one considers the bigger picture months or years from now and that's why in the long term they'll fail.

It's all about the user experience and what YOU would like from a website to provide you when doing research and visiting it. Link out people, think of your site like a train station, If it's simple a dead end station, Google's crawlers has no reason to really keep coming back, you aren't the source of new links they like discovering on their own. Become Grand Central Terminal and then the visitors will come from all angles, especially referring links as well as SEO.

There is a different between "No Penalty" versus "SEO benefits" - shit just even having happier users is better for word of mouth and recommendations.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I agree. These sites that entirely rely on display advertising are scared out of their panties. It's just like on some highways and interstates, there are limits to the # of billboards allowed before it hurts the beautification efforts or causes problems with driver's attention. Some of these big publishers are seeing the same backlash from users.

Everyone needs to be monetizing in ways that aren't a part of the reason people hate marketing and marketers. The possibilities are so much bigger than TV, radio, and print magazines. It's not all about ads, especially when those are the lowest denominator. These big publishers don't know how to survive the new digital reality.

Great summary. Is there any information available on how to maintain a disavow links file? I know that you do maintain one for your Surrender & Supremacy case study site.

Fixing a backlink profile with a hundred thousand backlinks is going to be far different than maintaining one from the start, which I recommend for any serious project. Watch your backlinks in Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic, and OpenSiteExplorer. Check them as they come in. If they are do-follow spam, disavow them.

# You can add comments in your file like this. 
# Notice that when you disavow an entire domain, you don't leave a space or use www or http
# To disavow a specific URL, paste the whole thing on a new line

# 7/11/16
# Scraper Sites & Do-Follow Wikipedia Copies
domain:badsite.com
http://www.crapsite.net/specific-url

That's it. Keep adding to it over time. The point is to show over the course of a long time that you're faithfully attempting to keep things clean and not cheat. If you get neg'd at some point, you'll have a lot of proof that you're not the one doing the spamming. It'll speed up the entire process too as you can isolate links in time chunks. "Well the spam started on so and so date and I've already cleaned up everything before that, so this should be easy."