Marie welcomes MHC’s Technical Director, Alec Brownscombe, who also owns and operates the website Mapleleafshotstove.com.

In this episode, Marie and Alec both discuss how MHC’s traffic drop assessments have evolved, reasons behind traffic drops, relevance, intent, machine learning, and more! This is an episode you don't want to miss.

Newsletter episode 242

www.mariehaynes.com/newsletter/episode-242/

Subscribe to the newsletter:

www.mariehaynes.com/seo-newsletter/

Links:

Mordy Oberstein discussing sites affected by the May Core update

https://www.wix.com/seo/learn/resource/content-lessons-google-may-2022-update

Cyrus Shepard - 3 Vital Click-Based Signals for SEO: First, Long, & Last

https://moz.com/blog/click-based-seo-engagement-signals

Tyler Hermanson - Why keywords are still so very important for SEO

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/why-keywords-important-seo/

Neeva discussing using quality raters and machine learning

https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/beyond-clicks-how-neeva-uses-human-evaluation-of-search-quality-to-take-on-google

https://www.seroundtable.com/how-google-search-uses-machine-learning-31386.html

Contact Marie and the MHC team:

www.mariehaynes.com/contact

twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

Alec Brownscombe's Twitter:

twitter.com/mapleleafshs

Submit a question for the next Q&A

Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

Has your Google traffic dropped? In this episode Marie goes into great detail describing how you can assess a decline in organic traffic. Your losses may be because of a Google update but there are many other reasons. Marie covers technical issues, core web vitals, competitor research and much more.

In the next episode, two weeks from now we will go into even further detail on how you can determine if your drops are due to a change in intent, relevancy or because of quality issues.

Newsletter episode 240

https://www.mariehaynes.com/newsletter/episode-240/

Links mentioned in this episode:

Using a knowledge of semantic search to improve E-A-T

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1537087939968221188?s=20&t=KOEJWeSmtERtphpydbriWw

SMX Advanced Talk/Agenda

https://marketinglandevents.com/smx/advanced/

Is Google Search Dying?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-search-algorithm-internet/661325/

MHC clients that did well with May core:

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1536722779889979392?s=20&t=KOEJWeSmtERtphpydbriWw

Google algorithm update list:

https://mariehaynes.com/algo

Screaming Frog article on redirects:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/how-to-use-the-seo-spider-in-a-site-migration/

Using Archive.org to get old urls to test redirects:

https://exposureninja.com/blog/extract-urls-archive-org/

Local SEO case study on improving page speed on Moz:

https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-speed-optimization-case-study

Mobile Moxy to monitor SERP changes for your brand:

https://mobilemoxie.com/

Newsletter:

https://mariehaynes.com/newsletter

Hire Marie and the MHC team to help improve your site or assess a traffic drop:

www.mariehaynes.com/contact

twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

Submit a question for the next Q&A

Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

In this episode, Marie Haynes and Lily Ray both discuss the early impact of the May 2022 core update, advice for recovery, a little about how Google handles title tags, and more!

Newsletter episode 238

https://www.mariehaynes.com/newsletter/episode-238/

Subscribe to the newsletter:

https://www.mariehaynes.com/seo-newsletter/

Links mentioned in this episode:

How Google generates titles for documents with language or script misalignment

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/06/title-script-misalignment

Lily’s recent article on E-A-T

https://friendsofsearch.com/nl/blog/interview/lily-ray-amsive-digital-any-seo-who-hasnt-jumped-onto-the-e-a-t-wave-is-not-playing-close-enough-attention/

Youtube’s use of knowledge graphs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-bTGefJj0A

Google’s announcement on the core update

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/05/may-2022-core-update

How people read on the web

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-people-read-online/

Barry Schwartz and John Mueller on whether machine learning is used to weight ranking factors

https://www.seroundtable.com/how-google-search-uses-machine-learning-31386.html

Register for SMX advanced

https://marketinglandevents.com/smx/advanced/

Contact Marie and the MHC team:

www.mariehaynes.com/contact

twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

Lily Ray's Twitter:

twitter.com/lilyraynyc

Submit a question for the next Q&A

Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

In this episode, Marie welcomes MHC’s director of products and services, Callum Scott. Callum has incredible knowledge of how Google’s algorithms work. In this episode, he and Marie discuss the following:

- May 16-18 - unnamed Google update affecting a large number of affiliate sites.

- How MHC’s site reviews developed over the years

- How we help sites improve their E-A-T

- Why knowing semantic search gets SEOs ahead of the game

- Google is likely a lexical search engine and a semantic search engine.

- Semantic search and E-A-T

- Register for SMX Advanced to hear Marie speak on using a knowledge of semantic search to improve E-A-T. It’s free this year! https://attend.marketinglandevents.com/smx-advanced-2022?i=ttmi2mIwsKjtm9Yb56yxhjMCxG2PCGqx

- Marie speaking with John Mueller and Barry Schwartz on Duda’s webinar about Google updates: https://webinars.duda.co/google-updates

- Microsoft Azure article on semantic search: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/semantic-ranking

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/semantic-search-overview

- Our struggles in offering recurring SEO services

Contact Marie and the MHC team:

https://www.mariehaynes.com/contact

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

https://twitter.com/mrcallumscott

Submit a question for the next Q&A

Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

This episode will also be available on Youtube tomorrow where we have added some visuals as well.

In this episode, search professionals Olaf Kopp and Marie Haynes discuss the concept of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness in Google’s algorithms in great detail. You’ll learn what E-A-T is and how Google likely uses E-A-T in their algorithms including information on entities, the knowledge graph, the knowledge vault, and more.

At the end of the episode, Olaf gives very specific tips on how to improve E-A-T in ways that Google’s algorithms should reward.

Newsletter episode 234

https://www.mariehaynes.com/newsletter/episode-234-light-version/

Subscribe to the newsletter:

Mariehaynes.com/newsletter

Links mentioned in this talk:

Search quality rater guidelines:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

Glenn Gabe on Phantom updates:

https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/penguin-2-google-phantom-update-may-2013/

Google’s NLP tool

https://cloud.google.com/natural-language

Knowledge graph API

https://carlhendy.com/knowledge-graph-search/

Jason Barnard on entity hubs for authors

https://kalicube.com/learning-spaces/faq/knowledge-panels/the-3-step-process-to-getting-a-knowledge-panel-for-an-author/

Koray Gübür on creating topical authority

https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/importance-topical-authority-semantic-seo/

Diffbot NL tool to visualize entities as a graph

https://demo.nl.diffbot.com/

Tf-Idf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf

A few of Olaf’s articles:

https://searchengineland.com/google-mum-update-seo-future-383551

https://searchengineland.com/google-eat-possible-evaluation-signals-382799

https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/unwrapping-secrets-seo-semantic-google-search/

https://www.kopp-online-marketing.com/entities-from-unstructured-content

https://www.kopp-online-marketing.com/googles-semantic-search-engine

Contact Olaf:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/olafkopp/

https://twitter.com/Olaf_Kopp

Submit a question for the next Q&A

Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

Contact Marie and the MHC team:

https://www.mariehaynes.com/contact

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

https://twitter.com/mhc_inc

In this episode, Marie shares her thoughts on semantic search. Semantic search is search that’s based on understanding the meaning of words and the connections between them. In 2013, the Hummingbird algorithm made it possible for Google to expand their semantic search capabilities. With each new advancement in AI and NLP, they get a little closer. Semantic search could possibly explain how Google can algorithmically tackle the questions they give us in their article on what site owners should know about core updates. This episode discusses how SEOs can use a knowledge of semantic search to improve the quality of their websites in Google’s eyes.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor:

https://contentfly.com/searchnews

Newsletter episode 232

https://www.mariehaynes.com/newsletter/episode-232-light-version/

MHC’s algo update list:

https://mariehaynes.com/algo

Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land writing about Hummingbird:

https://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816

WSJ article with Amit Singhal describing Hummingbird calling it “semantic search”:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150503223300/http://www.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304459804577281842851136290-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNDExNDQyWj.html

What site owners should know about Google core updates:

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/08/core-updates

Stanford seminar by Xin Luna Dong on the knowledge vault and knowledge based trust:

https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxy93C30py9Kvj8Xd8pYYndOQghr6BKTis

MHC’s QRG book:

https://mariehaynes.com/book

How AI powers Google’s search results:

https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-great-search-results/

https://www.mariehaynes.com/google-ai-and-seo/

The Quality Update:

https://searchengineland.com/the-quality-update-google-confirms-changing-how-quality-is-assessed-resulting-in-rankings-shake-up-221118

Amit Singhal Panda questions:

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality

Is MUM Google’s next step in becoming a semantic search engine? By Olaf Kopp:

https://searchengineland.com/google-mum-update-seo-future-383551

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR on topical authority:

https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/importance-topical-authority-semantic-seo/

Some of Marie’s teachings on E-A-T:

https://www.mariehaynes.com/resources/eat/

3 part YT series on E-A-T:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDUhcogUl44

Contact Marie and the MHC team:

https://www.mariehaynes.com/contact

Subscribe to the newsletter

https://mariehaynes.com/newsletter

Submit a question for the next Q&A

https://Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

Twitter @Marie_Haynes

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

In this special episode of Search News You Can Use, we welcome Glenn Gabe to the show! Glenn has been assessing traffic drops in websites for many years. He and Marie discuss the types of issues that can cause a site to see traffic drops in conjunction with a Google core update. Glenn breaks these down into three areas:

Relevancy adjustments

Intent shifts

Overall site quality problems

Glenn and Marie share examples of the types of problems they have encountered when analyzing traffic drops and what lead to sites recovering after making changes.

Glenn’s post on traffic drops: https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/google-broad-core-updates-difference-between-relevancy-adjustments-intent-shifts-overall-site-quality/

Contact Glenn: https://twitter.com/glenngabe

Newsletter episode 230

https://www.mariehaynes.com/newsletter/episode-230-light-version/

Past episodes

https://mariehaynes.com/seo-newsletter/seo-podcast

Contact MHC

https://mariehaynes.com/contact

Book on Unnatural Links and Manual Action Removal

https://mariehaynes.com/product/unnatural-links-book

Quality Raters Book

https://mariehaynes.com/product/quality-raters-guidelines

Subscribe to the newsletter

https://mariehaynes.com/newsletter

Submit a question for the next Q&A

https://Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

Twitter @Marie_Haynes

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

In this episode Marie shares information on how Google’s Hummingbird algorithm dramatically changed search to rely less on PageRank as their algorithms learned how to make use of entities. Understanding Google’s use of entities in their algorithms can help us improve E-A-T. More importantly, understanding how Google uses AI to extract entities from content can help us write and optimize content.

Marie also discusses the third release of the product reviews update, sharing which types of sites saw changes and how Google could be algorithmically evaluating product review sites.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Product reviews update

https://blog.google/products/search/more-helpful-product-reviews/

Interview with Jason Barnard re entity use and John Lennon’s confidence score in the knowledge graph  

https://fajela.com/seobox/orm/

https://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&p=1&S1=20050055341&OS=20050055341&RS=20050055341

FAQ:All About the New Hummingbird Algorithm: 

https://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816

Google’s Hummingbird Takes Flight: SEOs Give Insight On Google’s New Algorithm:

https://searchengineland.com/hummingbird-has-the-industry-flapping-its-wings-in-excitement-reactions-from-seo-experts-on-googles-new-algorithm-173030

This episode corresponds with newsletter episode 228:


https://mariehaynes.com/newsletter/episode-228-light-version/

Past episodes

https://Mariehaynes.com/seo-newsletter/seo-podcast

Contact MHC

https://Mariehaynes.com/contact

Book on Unnatural Links and Manual Action Removal

https://Mariehaynes.com/product/unnatural-links-book

Quality Raters Book

https://Mariehaynes.com/product/quality-raters-guidelines

Submit a question for the next Q&A

https://Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

Subscribe to the newsletter

https://Mariehaynes.com/newsletter

In this episode we talk about the latest news on Google’s MUM technology. The “Things to Know” SERP feature has been seen live. It is not yet MUM powered, but soon will be. Marie also does a website review for a small business website offering pressure washing. She shares how small business owners who want to work on SEO can do keyword research, use automated site audit tools, and work on things like building links and mentions and improving E-A-T to improve their Google presence.

Links mentioned in this episode

The Local Search Forum:

https://localsearchforum.com/

Past episodes

https://Mariehaynes.com/seo-newsletter/seo-podcast

Contact MHC

https://Mariehaynes.com/contact

Book on Unnatural Links and Manual Action Removal

https://Mariehaynes.com/product/unnatural-links-book

Quality Raters Book

https://Mariehaynes.com/product/quality-raters-guidelines

Submit a question for the next Q&A

https://Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

Subscribe to the newsletter:

https://Mariehaynes.com/newsletter

Twitter: @Marie_Haynes -

https://Twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

In this episode, Marie discusses the idea of “toxic links” and whether they have the ability to hurt your site’s organic traffic.

Discussed in this episode:

What are toxic links?

Semrush’s toxic links report: “Your risk of penalty is increasing”

Google’s documentation on link schemes

Unnatural links created by using automated tools to do spam comments, create forum profiles, etc.

Link auditing in the early days of the Penguin algorithm

Why I created a disavow blacklist

Why we closed down MHC’s disavow blacklist tool

Who needs to disavow in 2022?

Also discussed as SEO news this week:

Algorithmic turbulence Feb 24, but not likely a Google update

“Things to Know” powered by MUM, seen live in the search results

Links referenced in this episode:

https://www.mariehaynes.com/disavow-blacklist-tool/

https://searchengineland.com/googles-project-owl-attack-fake-news-273700

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/link-schemes

https://www.mariehaynes.com/disavow-advice-2021/

Past episodes

https://Mariehaynes.com/seo-newsletter/seo-podcast

Contact MHC

https://Mariehaynes.com/contact

Book on Unnatural Links and Manual Action Removal

https://Mariehaynes.com/product/unnatural-links-book

Quality Raters Book

https://Mariehaynes.com/product/quality-raters-guidelines

Submit a question for the next Q&A

https://Mariehaynes.com/qa-with-mhc

Subscribe to the newsletter:

https://Mariehaynes.com/newsletter