Focus: Back Market SEO Strategy
Hi there, I hope your week is starting well. Here we go today for the 2nd edition of my Alternative Search News and today, we’re going to talk about:
- Google vs. Facebook Love and Hate Relationship Update
- Is there a new Google Update on the way?
- Beginner Black Hat SEO techniques done by mistake
- Google Patent on Search Queries
- Is EAT a Google Ranking Factor?
- How BackMarket.fr popped up on top of Google SERP
- Crawl without certain source code elements
- Indexing services are a scam
- New Youtube Ads feature
Before we dive into the news, let me share with you what’s going on with SEOconspiracy.
The Full SEO Conspiracy Podcast
I started SEOconspiracy a couple of months ago, in April 2020, with one content every Monday; with my friend Dixon Jones. We are doing a myth-busting about every myth & urban legend about SEO. One topic at a time, every Monday at 7:00 a.m. GMT.
We debunk all those nonsense that we’ve been with witnessing since we both started. 2004 in my case and Dixon started in the 90s, so it’s been a while.
A whole year is planned so do not hesitate to subscribe on Youtube to receive every new video with Dixon.
You can see all the previous episodes here: SEOConspiracy with Dixon Jones, or on Youtube.
I just started a weekly news review, every Tuesday, you are reading one right now, the second one. Hope you will like it.
Every Wednesday we’re going to do something different, with some very special guests. It’s called SEO Stories. I just can’t wait to start this because it’s time to record the history, our history, of this job we created. So we’re going to tell all the good and bad about the world of SEO.
On Thursday, I’m giving out for free my whole strategy. Next Thursday, I’m going to make a big announcement about it, so stay tuned.
Friday I will answer all the various questions I got every day.
The week-end, it’s freestyle; I will do some live audits, some live Q&A, whatever comes up, some live podcast.
I’m sharing my journey into building the perfect website
You read well. I’m going to document my journey into building the perfect website.
What I call the Topical Mesh, is a complete strategy going from high class, high level content marketing that deserves to be talked about; that deserves to get links organically, respecting the Google guidelines.
Being the best at what you can be as far as producing content.
I’ve been doing this for a while and I’m going to do it again. We are going to build be a very strong advanced SEO semantic SEO layer, the Topical Mesh. That’s the base of the strategy.
Then, we’re going to do everything around SEO as far as content marketing.
And, also, we are going the black hat way.
Private Links Network, that’s my game. That’s what I think is the best link building strategy on top of everything and even on top of the content marketing.
I’m telling you how to win the game.
I’m teaching you how to be the best SEO, the best digital marketer in the world.
So this newsletter is going to be my personal diary, my personal journal. I’m going to share every week my path into building this strategy.
I just started SEO Conspiracy a couple of months ago and I haven’t even built the SEO layer.
So I think this is the perfect time to document my journey, step by step, everything that I will do and I will share it, with you, on my newsletter only.
You will have access to this personal journal on real time and maybe I’m gonna fail. Maybe you will watch me fail, watch me quit or succeed. Who knows?
The first objective is one year. It’s starting this Thursday and in one year, I’ll meet you same hour, same place and we’re gonna go for round two, year two. Then year three. I have a five-year plan.
One year from today and four more years.
I think you want to embark on this journey my friend, it’s going to be huge and it’s totally free.
I invite you to spy on my shoulder. It’s going to be fun.
You can subscribe to receive my personal diary here: SEO Conspiracy Newsletter, or directly by filling out this form.
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Also, feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions, recommendations, questions or just to say Hi.
Ok, let’s get straight into the news!
Google vs. Facebook love and Hate Relationship Update
On Twitter, Tom Waddington shared this interesting screenshot.
So here in the address we see a little note that say “owner: Jay Cunningham. facebook.com. It means that Google got into Facebook to pull out that data.
And for those following the love/hate relationship between Facebook and Google, or rather hate/hate relationship, you know that it’s bothering Google that they can’t get into Facebook. And Facebook is doing everything possible to not let Google get into it.
So I think the fact that Google got into Facebook and pulled some data out; and displays it in the search engine result page, is pretty interesting.
Is there a new Google Update on the way?
All started on june 18th, on the Webmasterworld forum.
Everybody started complaining because their ranking dropped and everybody was calling out a new Core Update. Dude, do you really know what’s a Core Update?
So I look at the weather of Google and yes, I see a lot of agitation in the SERPs but it doesn’t look like Google is having a big “splash”.
Some tools are indeed showing a little spike but nothing like what happened on June 10th or nothing like what happened with
the May Core Update but it’s moving.
But please, I’m asking everyone of you, please stop. Every time Google is shaking up the serp, do not call for a core update.
The fact that the SERPs weather is moving up and down and the fact that the SERPs are changing is part of how machine learning and deep learning works. It’s doing things that are just agitating, trying to make Google a better spot to return relevant information.
We discussed this topic extensively with Dixon Jones, in our video about How To Reverse Engineer Google Algorithm.
Beginner Black Hat SEO techniques done by mistake
When I look at the answers, honestly, none of them nailed it.
They mostly talk about link building and one is even saying “all link building is black hat”.
Another one is talking about the five risky Black Hat SEO techniques as paid links, duplicate content, article spinning, keyword stuffing and invisible text.
In my opinion, the best case scenario of black hat SEO without your knowledge for beginner is spam indexing.
Spam indexing is very common and if I look back, it reverse from what we used to do back in the days when we needed to help website index better. We needed to help the websites to be optimized for a search engine.
Today it’s totally reverse. I mean, the websites are over built. Over build pages, over build content. And it’s not really duplicate content, it’s more what I would call spam indexing.
For example if you decide to index your tags, your internal search engine results might be never-ending.
I’m actually following a client and we have to change the domain The website has big issues about spam indexing around the tags, I can’t even finish to crawl the website. It’s never ending.
So in my opinion, the number one black hat SEO technique that you’re doing without your knowledge is definitely spam indexing.
Google Patent on Search Queries
Now an article on SEObythesea.com, by Bill Slawski.
Thank you again, Bill, for everything you’ve done because for the community. You can watch our podcast with Bill here: SEO Conspiracy with Bill Slawski.
So, Bill talks about a new patent, A Well-Formed Query Helps Search Engines Understand User Intent in the Query.
It may seems obvious since a well-formed query helps the search engine understand the user intent behind the query.
It sounds simple but remember that Google or any search engine are pretty dumb, they doesn’t understand things like we do. They haven’t a brain like we do and you got to make things pretty clear about what you are searching for if you want to improve the results.
Furthermore this patent has something interesting because this is one of the rare time where we see popping up the people search type of answers on the search engine result page so it’s very interesting; this move is consolidating my opinion and tell me that I’m going in the right direction. Please embark on the adventure (subscribe to the newsletter).
Is E.A.T a Google Ranking Factor?
On Moz Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard topic was: Is Google E-A-T Actually a Ranking Factor?
To complete this, you can watch our video with Dixon about it: EAT Concept Applied to SEO For Google.
No, EAT is definitely not a ranking factor for Google but it’s also the goal.
If you were Google, how would you evaluate Expertise, Authority and Trust? Google is a robot, it’s an algorithm, it’s not human. It can’t judge the things like we do and I think EAT is the new SEO triptych.
The usual SEO triptych is Technical, Content, and Popularity.
Now, we have Expertise instead of Content. You open up a blog and put out some content of Expertise. Are you an expert and can you prove your expertise in an interesting way?
Be informative, be humoristic, be whatever you want but be able to prove how much you know and that’s a different game.
Authority. Are people influent in your industry? Are they talking about you, including your competition? That’s a whole different level than popularity, where you build links. Now you have to be an authority in your domain.
Trust. Once again it’s another level from the Technical SEO audit because Trust is can I trust your website? Do you welcome the visitors with a speedy good UX? Or do you have a Trojan hidden somewhere on your server? Can we trust you?
That’s a whole different level than just do an SEO audit.
How BackMarket.fr popped up on top of Google SERP
On , by one of my students, Nicolas: Retour sur le SEO! Étude de cas : la licorne Back Market
These days in France, Backmarket.fr has been the talk in the SEO industry.
To give you some context, that website started to pop up in the search engine result page and Nicolas, one of my students, working for Sistrix.fr analyzed Backmarket from a technical and structural point of view.
The analysis shows that the structure is pretty neat. They built a whole lexical; semantic field around the smartphone in France.
But they have a lot of what I call weak content. When your content is pretty much the same than all the other ones.
That’s something I teach in the whole Topical Mesh concept: how to smell the SERP, the footprint, the perfume, whatever Google is telling you on the SERP.
And on those type of queries, all the websites are the same. They all show that product page or that category.
The goal is to build a pie of analytics in 3/3
1/3 come from popularity, 1/3 from keywords on the search engine and 1/3 from referrals domains.
I mean, people talking about you, not just to build a backlink for PageRank sake. People recommending you, spreading the word and sending new high-value qualified traffic. It’s the hardest part to work out notoriety.
The last part is Authority. Building a brand.
If you are able to have this pie in three third: Popularity, Authority, Notoriety, you won.
Crawl without certain source code elements
Walid shared a little script: Hack SEO pour un Crawl hyper Custom
And what’s very cool about this community is that another friend, Nick, took the script, the code and built a website: crawl.seo-jedi.com.
You can have your free custom crawl. You enter the site, the CSS attributes, for example the navigation, the footer or whatever you want to take out. You can even decide on your user-agent and you simulate the crawl that’s cool.
A tool like this deserves to exist and I think this path is interesting but it’s lacking some stuff.
Because if you remove the footer, you also remove the content, you don’t only remove the links; and whatever words that are on those spots are very important, they need to be taking into account, the words on top of the links are part of the content.
Indexing services are a scam
Do you remember, back then, you could ping Googlebot and it would come.
Now, what about if you got a very crappy website with a lot of pages and you suck at internal linking? You don’t know how to do the Topical Mesh, how does it work.
How can you make google index your tons of URLs? You could go one
by one in the search console but it could be a little bit tedious if you got tons or if you are borderline into spam indexing and you want to feed Google tons of URLs.
On BlackHatWorld, you can find some services to index your pages.
But, it seems that none of those services are working, except one. and this guy ghengis_khan try them all. The thread 99% of indexing services are a scam is old but there was an update lately and it seems that still the only service doing a good job is speed-links.net.
I don’t know those guys, I’ve never tried this service because I do the Topical Mesh even in the black hat SEO version: full automated websites including the content and the links. I don’t need to use the service to index the pages.
With internal linking you truly are sitting on a hidden treasure
New Youtube Ads feature
YouTube Announces New ‘Storefront’ Video Format With A Twist On DR
It means that it’s going to be easier to go from a YouTube Ad down to a shop. How are they going to do that? Well, that’s what they’re trying very hard to do for years.
YouTube ads is a difficult game and I believe that Google (YouTube is owned by Google of course) is really trying to do something as far as Ads on YouTube.
They’re trying for years and it’s just one move it’s interesting.
Search is Search, I don’t care if it’s paid or organic
It’s part of the game and you got to jump on those type of things first. Because once everybody else gets on it, it’s wasted.
You’ve got six months to a year to enjoy this type of features so go now, like today; and I’ll see you next week for the Weekly News and whenever you want over the social medias or email.
Thanks for your time, until next week.
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