Sub-Domains
An increasing “service” has been highlighted this month whereby webmasters that own high authoritive websites lease out sub-domains of the site. The idea is that you can rent a sub-domain and use to sell your product whilst ranking well due to the main domains authority.
I guess you could also just route the traffic directly to your own website too if you wanted.
You might think this is playing the system, benefiting from search engines rankings positions. But, to be honest, it’s no different than any other advertising, you rent advertising space to show your product, same with this idea.
The only difference is that Google is not making any money from it, so, as you can guess, they are looking into this.
No Joke
What do Hotels, Flights, Car Rental and now Jokes have in common?
Google now answers your queries from with in the search results without you having to click to someones website.
Joke websites are the latest vertical to be affected with the new’ish aggressive rollout of Google services.
How will it affect joke websites?
When someone searches for a joke Google will provide you with lots of jokes without you clicking to another website.
Google wants you to stay on their websites for as long as possible, so as they have done for hotel rooms they are trying to take the business.
This will not be the last industry, sadly. 🙁
Grouped Snippets
Have you seen when you enter a search query into Google it sometimes groups up a few websites with very similar content so you can easily open several websites to help find what you need?
It has been used by Google for a number of years.
Until, now.
Google has decided not to group results up anymore but instead just show a single website per entry in the search results.
This rolled out at the start of July 2019.
How will this affect you?
If you were ranking within these groups and now not, you will lose traffic because of this change. Check your stats to see if any traffic volume drops around this date.
Algorithms
If you are a regular reader you will know that each month we list the major search engine algorithm updates so you can check your ranking positions with them to help identify if these changes have affected your website.
This month we have seen a few updates, but, one was very large!
12th July – small’ish
13th – Medium-sized update
16th and 18th have been called the Maverick update, this one was very large.
Sadly Google is not helping us by telling us what area these updates are working on, as soon as I know I will update the post.
Tip
When people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I am an SEO they almost always want a tip on how to help their websites perform better.
So, I thought I would add the tip I often give to this month’s blog post. It is easy to implement and understand so no excuse not to use!
Here it is:
Have a look at the top 5 ranking websites for your keyword.
Write down all the types of sections these pages have. So, for example: Do they have headings (H1,H2), images (how many and what are in their ALT and Title tags), tables, bullet points, lists. Some pages might just show a table and others might present their content in an ordered list.
Combine all this data into one document removing any duplicates. So, you should have a page of content using all the different types of sections previously mined from your competitor’s websites.
There you have it, the perfect content for your page.*
You see Google has ranked them well because either the content is good, the content is easy to read or more importantly easy for Google to display in a rich snipper or people like the content.
*Please don’t copy other websites work and don’t just add a load of words about the subject, make it interesting and informative.
Titles
I thought it would be interesting to research the best type of titles used for different types of posts, why not try including these in future blog posts and see how they perform.
Let’s start with a generic posts title which could be used on all platforms.
The successful keyword phrase used in titles is: “… will make you …”.
For example “5 SEO tips that will make you out perform your competition”.
If you are writing a social media post try “This is why…”.
For example: “This is why links help your website“.
Ok, what about for Quizes?
Try “Only x in ….”.
For example: “Only 1 in 10 can spot the mistakes“.
Finally for list posts how about “x things only…”.
For example: “10 things only SEO experts know“,
Try them out for youself, let me know how you get on. Here are my Twitter and Facebook accounts!