Your B2B audience is full of avid TV watchers. In the days of linear television, it was nearly impossible (and very expensive) to target them accurately, which meant the TV screen was virtually off-limits for B2B marketers. Now, Connected TV has entered the scene, with digital roots and third-party data providers that allow for precision targeting of B2B audiences. You can now reach them whether they’re unwinding after work with reality television or streaming their favorite films on the weekend. Learn more by attending “Putting in the Work: Understanding B2B Audiences on Connected TV,” presented by MNTN. Click here to view more Search Engine Land webinars. The post Webinar: Your winning CTV advertising strategy in 2023 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/webinar-your-winning-ctv-advertising-strategy-in-2023-389871
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LinkedIn just announced three new features for brands to promote products, monitor trends, and do more with newsletters. Let’s jump in. Generate more newsletter subscribers. With LinkedIn Newsletters, you can publish recurring Articles and build a subscriber community via a one-time notification to your Page followers and ongoing notifications to your Newsletter subscribers. If a member searches for your profile they should be able to easily find and subscribe to your newsletter. LinkedIn also suggests incorporating SEO best practices by optimizing your article titles, descriptions, and tags. LinkedIn will also automatically send your new followers a notification to subscribe. Product pages. Your products can now be discovered via an in-platform search on LinkedIn. Buyers can search by product, company, or category to discover what they’re looking for. You can also use product highlights to showcase specific product content on your Page and point interested members to key details and conversations. You can also re-share content from your product community to your Page and add posts to your product highlights. Competitor analytics dashboard. There is a new upgrade to the LinkedIn Pages Competitor Analytics dashboard that is now available on desktop and mobile, which can help you understand what competitors are doing and set your brand apart. You can now:
Why we care. B2B brands and advertisers managing pages on LinkedIn should test and use these new tools to make the most out of their profiles. Since many brands may be rethinking their social strategies, companies should optimize the platform’s new features to gain first-party data with newsletter signups, as well as new ecommerce options and competitor metrics. The post LinkedIn just released 3 new features for pages appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/linkedin-just-released-3-new-features-for-pages-389867 Google has filed a lawsuit against a company that allegedly was charging business owners money for free Google Business Profiles, selling fake reviews and promising first-page rankings. Why we care. If anyone claims they are calling on behalf of Google and demands that you pay money for a free service, just don’t. Protect yourself. Do your research. Never pay such demands. It’s a scam. G Verifier promised first-page rankings on Google. G Verifier, which Google’s suit alleges was run by Kaushal Patel of Ohio, threatened business owners that if they failed to pay (typically $99), their Business listings would be deactivated or marked as “permanently closed” and their positive reviews would be hidden – resulting in lost visibility and revenue. Also according to the filing,
Google said “hundreds and hundreds” of Business Profile users contacted Google to report the scam since December 2021. G Verifier also sold fake reviews. Google’s lawsuit noted that in G Verifier’s FAQ section, one question was: “Why should I buy Google reviews from you?” Also, G Verifier discussed its usage of Virtual Private Networks to get “reviews from the country or place of your choice.” The website also allowed for the purchase of negative reviews, which could be used to harm competitors. What Google says. In its blog post announcing the lawsuit, Google said:
This is not the first company to impersonate Google, nor will it be the last. So always beware of anybody who claims they are from Google demanding any money for first-page rankings or for 100% free services. The post Google files lawsuit against company falsely promising Page 1 rankings appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/google-g-verifier-lawsuit-389853 Cyber Monday in the US this year brought in over an 8% increase in sales since FY21. Globally, sales hit $46.2 billion, a 2.4% increase YoY. Black Friday also saw an increase this year of about 12%. This brings total sales for the weekend to around $68 billion. The figures are not adjusted for inflation, which plays a big part in the cost of goods also increasing. Record numbers for Shopify. Shopify reported that 52 million consumers globally spent $7.5 billion on Shopify merchants, a 19 percent increase over last year. “Consumers voted with their wallets over Black Friday and Cyber Monday by shopping with independent businesses,” said Shopify President Harley Finkelstein. “The future of commerce is on any surface, whether that’s shopping online or in store.” Toys topped the most popular items shopped. The most popular toys shopped this year were:
Highest spending items. The average selling price during cyber week increased about 3%. Not surprisingly, the total amounts spent on the most popular items this year also increased, some as much as nearly 700%!
Honorable mentions. Other products topping the list of popularity were:
Other factors weighing in. Aside from inflation and higher-priced items, this year we also saw an increase in trends surrounding discounts and chatbots.
Dig deeper. You can read the full articles from MediaPost here and here. Why we care. Sales aren’t over yet. If you’re an ecommerce brand or advertiser, you may want to keep your ad campaigns or discounts running until after the holidays to capitalize on the upward trends. The post Cyber Monday broke records this year, with almost $12 billion in US sales appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/cyber-monday-broke-records-this-year-with-almost-12-billion-in-us-sales-389850 There is a lot of fervor in the SEO industry for Python right now. It is a comparably easier programming language to learn and has become accessible to the SEO community through guides and blogs. But if you want to learn a new language for analyzing and visualizing your search data, consider looking into R. This article covers the basics of how you can produce time series forecasts in RStudio from your Google Search Console click data. But first, what is R?R is “a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics,” according to The R Project for Statistical Computing. R isn’t new and has been around since 1993. Still, learning some of the basics of R – including how to interact with Google’s various APIs – can be advantageous for SEOs. If you want to pick up R as a new language, good courses to learn from are:
But if you grasp the basics and want to learn data visualization fundamentals in R, I recommend Coursera’s guided project, Application of Data Analysis in Business with R Programming. And then you also need to install:
What follows are the steps for creating traffic forecasting models in RStudio using click data. Step 1: Prepare the dataThe first step is to export your Google Search Console data. You can either do this through the user interface and exporting data as a CSV: Or, if you want to pull your data via RStudio directly from the Google Search Console API, I recommend you follow this guide from JC Chouinard. If you do this via the interface, you’ll download a zip file with various CSVs, from which you want the workbook named “Dates”: Your date range can be from a quarter, six months, or 12 months – all that matters is that you have the values in chronological order, which this export easily produces. (You just need to sort Column A, so the oldest values are at the top.) Step 2: Plot the time series data in RStudioNow we need to import and plot our data. To do this, we must first install four packages and then load them. The first command to run is:
Followed by:
You then want to import your data. The only change you need to make to the below command is the file type name (maintaining the CSV extension) in red:
Then the last two commands in plotting your data are to make the time series the object, then to plot the graph itself:
Followed by:
And in your RStudio interface, you will have a time series plot appear: Step 3: Model and forecast your data in RStudioAt this stage, it’s important to acknowledge that forecasting is not an exact science and relies on several truths and assumptions. These being:
With this out of the way, we can begin to model and forecast our traffic data. For this article, I will visualize our data as a Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS) forecast, one of the packages we installed earlier. This graph is used by most forecasting methods. Most marketers will have seen or at least be familiar with the model as it is commonly used across many industries for forecasting purposes. The first command we need to run is to make our data fit the BSTS model:
And then plot the model components:
And now we can visualize one- and two-year forecasts. Going back to the previously mentioned general forecasting rules, the further into the future you forecast, the less accurate it becomes. Thus, I stick to two years when doing this. And as BSTS considers an upper and lower bound, it also becomes pretty pointless past a certain point. The below command will produce a one-year future BSTS forecast for your data:
And you’ll return a graph like this: To produce a two-year forecasting graph from your data, you want to run the below command:
And this will produce a graph like this: As you can see, the upper and lower bounds in the one-year forecast had a range of -50 to +150, whereas the 2-year forecast has -200 to +600. The further into the future you forecast, the greater this range becomes and, in my opinion, the less useful the forecast becomes. The post How to use RStudio to create traffic forecasting models appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/create-traffic-forecasting-models-rstudio-389823 In a recent survey led by Yelp and conducted by Material, 2,000 Americans were asked to reveal what they consider to be trustworthy reviews. The respondents said they read, on average, five reviews about a business to inform their spending decisions, and 77% say they’re reading more online reviews now than they ever have before. Key findings. In their survey, Yelp found the following:
Combating fake reviews. The survey also revealed that or respondents who think they’ve spotted a fake review, 49% will read other reviews to gather additional opinions about the business. 34% ignore the potentially fake review, 27% find another business, and 24% report the review to its respective platform. 85% of those surveyed trust reviews with written text over only a star rating. Extortion controversy. In the blog article, yelp goes on to mention a Google Reviews extortion scheme that affected numerous restaurants in major cities. These restaurants experienced an influx of one-star Google reviews without any review text, as scammers tried to extort the restaurants for $75 Google Play gift cards to remove their fake reviews. This did not occur on Yelp because of our mandatory review text policies. But similarly, Yelp also dealt with an extortion controversy of its own several years ago, as well as inconsistencies with its review solicitation rules. Dig deeper. You can read the full Yelp study on their blog. Why we care. Local businesses on Yelp should use ethical and legal tactics when asking for reviews. Alternatively, businesses can use paid ads to show higher in the search results, respond to any negative reviews, and keep their pages updated to optimize their business listings. The post 85% of Yelp survey respondents say they trust written reviews over stars only appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/85-of-yelp-survey-respondents-say-they-trust-written-reviews-over-stars-only-389821 Digital content creation and management seem to be more complex than ever. Workflows now need to accommodate remote workers and resources, worldwide offices, and security and privacy concerns, not to mention the growing pressure on content and creative teams to produce more content in less time and with fewer resources. So how are the most successful teams currently executing production and managing their workflows? To answer this question and find out the best practices for improving efficiency, Canto surveyed nearly 650 professionals in the United States and the United Kingdom involved in the production, management and/or strategy for content and creative assets at their organization. Tune into this webinar to learn the results of the survey and take an in-depth look at the content strategies, workflows and technologies that have made these organizations successful. You’ll take away valuable tips on how you can revamp your own content programs in 2023 and dive deep into the five areas to improve content workflow and strategy, including:
Planning and creating content is much harder than it used to be, with disconnected teams and a broken digital content supply chain. Watch this webinar so you can plan, create, manage and deliver your best content program in 2023. The post 5 ways to improve your content workflow and strategy in 2023 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/5-ways-to-improve-your-content-workflow-and-strategy-in-2023-389813 There are many questions about content length in SEO and what ranks the best. While Google says there’s no specific word count they recommend, some studies have shown that long-form content tends to rank higher than short-form. If you’re interested in writing long-form content, you probably want to make sure it’s going to rank, get read, and convert so you create an ROI for your effort. What is long-form content?Most consider long-form content to be over 1,000 words. It’s a content piece that goes in-depth, offers extra value for the reader and includes more research, insights, and information than a quick read. Long-form content should leave the reader feeling comfortable with the subject and as if their questions have been answered and they know what to do with the information or how it applies to them. What should you include in long-form content?You want to create content that helps your reader. Think about them and what they need or want to learn from this piece. What questions do they have? It’s your responsibility to anticipate their questions and answer them in your work. If you’re unsure what questions they have, then think about what you want to ensure they know. Use the following guide questions to identify which information is most important to help them get to the next stage:
Don’t write a bunch of unnecessary fluff to try to hit some word count. You must ensure you’re providing value and helping your ideal customer so they want to consume more of your content. If you get them to the site but find nothing of value, they’ll be less likely to stay or return another time. Write to tell a story and provide value rather than writing to an arbitrary word count. Your content will be better in the long run. Where do you start when creating long-form content to rank, get read and convert?To start, make sure there’s a conversion path for your reader. Your content pieces need to tie to your products or services to drive revenue and conversions. If you’re answering questions for your potential customer and providing helpful information, they’re more likely to convert if you offer a solution to their issues. Be helpful, and link to additional information that might help them move to the next step. If you have an opt-in that ties to this content piece and is the next step for them, offer it in your work. You’re helping them and building your email list at the same time. If you want your content to convert, you need to make sure there’s a conversion path. Everything you write needs to somehow tie to your core products and services. I teach my students to choose content pillars that link to their products and services and write about topics related to those subjects. Creating a long-form content piece and ranking at the top of Google is great, but if it drives irrelevant traffic, it won’t convert, and that’s a waste of your efforts. How do you make sure your long-form content ranks?We all know we have no control over the Google ranking algorithm, but we also know how it works and what’s most important from an optimization standpoint. First, verify there’s search demand for your topic idea, choose a keyword (or keywords) you can rank for, write for your audience, and finally, optimize your content piece. Make sure there’s interest in your topicStart by making sure there’s an audience for your content piece. It may seem like a great idea to you. However, if no one is searching for information on the subject, it’s unlikely that you’ll get much traffic due to low demand. That said, search volume is not the most critical factor in choosing a keyword, and we’ll talk more about that. Brainstorm the topics you think you want to cover, and then go to Google and see what’s there today.
If not, this might not be the best topic. Search the topic and see what shows up in Google Suggested Search. Is there something closely related to your topic that Google suggests, or are there questions related to it in the People Also Ask section? If you see your topic idea in either of those places, that’s good because it means there’s interest in your potential topic. Research keywordsOnce you know your topic is viable, use your favorite keyword research tool to identify the keyword or keywords you want to target for this new long-form content piece. Long-form pieces can rank for multiple keywords a bit easier than short-form pieces just due to the length of the content piece. Choose your keywords wisely. Look for a primary keyword with good search volume and the ability for your website to rank on Page 1. Choose your keywordsGo to Google and see who’s currently ranking on Page 1 for the keyword you’re considering using as your primary one.
If you see other websites similar to yours and content pieces that you feel aren’t as in-depth or are missing information on the topic you want to write about, then you’re probably making a good choice in your keyword selection. Choose the keyword with the highest search volume that your website has the best chance of ranking for and is the word your Ideal Customer uses when searching for information on this subject. How to make sure your content gets readNow it’s time to write. Go back to your brainstorming notes. What information do you need to include to answer your readers' questions? Be sure you have that information. Sort it in a way that it’s easy to follow and understand so your reader wants to continue. A long-form content piece is a time commitment for someone to read. Thus, you must provide value, insights, statistics, and things that are unique from something else they might have read on the subject before – or they won’t continue reading. Format your piece in a reader-friendly way. This is especially important with longer pieces. Consider:
It’s better to have many small paragraphs broken up with bullets and numbers than big blocks of text. People will shy away from reading a piece if the content isn’t formatted in a reader-friendly way. Your final step is to optimize your content pieceUse your keyword in all of your SEO elements. Make sure it’s in the first paragraph of the copy, which it should be since your keyword is closely tied to your content topic. In most instances, your keyword will be in the title of your piece. Add your keyword to your URL, image file name, and header tags, and use it throughout your copy. Focus on providing value, being helpful, and offering information your ideal customer needs rather than how often you use your keyword. You’ll use it naturally by concentrating on your reader. Done right, long-form content is worth the investmentLong-form content can be a significant time investment. It takes longer to write in-depth pieces than quick bites or short-form. However, the payoffs can be great. Long-form pieces often rank higher in the search results than short pieces. And if you’re creating content with an audience, you can rank for and tie to your business, bring relevant traffic to your website, and hopefully, get the conversion. It’s worth testing long-form content if you haven’t done it yet. Not every piece you write has to be long, but those most important to your business should be longer and more in-depth. The post How to create long-form content that ranks, gets read and converts appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/create-long-form-content-389834 As 2022 winds down, marketers are being asked to focus on efficiency and “do more with less.” The most successful have leveraged tools such as calculated metrics, artificial intelligence and real-time insights. In this webinar, learn how a financial institution with over 21 million active customers connects its customer data, segments audiences faster and delivers personalized experiences in real time. Join Salesforce in this free webinar and learn real use cases on finding success and business results by sending fewer communications that are more relevant and targeted. Register today for “Do More with Less: Connect Customer Data to Drive Marketing Efficiency,” presented by Salesforce. Click here to view more Search Engine Land webinars. The post Webinar: Do more with less to get ahead in 2023 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/webinar-do-more-with-less-to-get-ahead-in-2023-389840 I have an admission: I once created “doorway pages” on a large scale. In my defense, this was years before Google existed. And, it was not considered spam in those days. Doorway pages might seem like a nebulous concept for some marketers to grasp. Since Google announced that creating such pages was considered illicit practice, there has been some confusion. However, such mixups are just as wrong as cloaking in SEO. So read on, and I will explain what doorway pages are, how to watch for them, and what to do about them. What are doorway pages?Google defines doorways as:
They also cite the following examples as doorways:
The early days of doorway pagesDoorway pages seemed like a mystical, magical thing back in the earliest days of search engines. This is partly because, in the advent of the commercialized/public internet, everyone thought that website visitors would only enter your site via the homepage. Essentially, visitors would only arrive and enter through the “front door.” This idea led people to obsess over the design of homepages, while the rest of the website was often nearly an afterthought. Thus, as search engines absorbed and reflected webpages, it suddenly felt like reaching some high stage of Buddhist-monk-level enlightenment to realize that a website could now have many “front doors” through which visitors would enter. I did not know what doorway pages were when I thought I invented them circa 1996/1997. Search engines grew first out of curated directories of links, but once pages began being spidered, things changed fast. I had been tasked with increasing traffic to one of Verizon’s biggest websites at the time. I recognized that the site’s homepage could not be particularly optimized for ~8,000 business categories and ~19,000 cities. I realized that individual pages should be spawned, each optimized to rank for business categories, cities, or combos of both. I named my pages “portals” because the whole process seemed almost magical. I was following nearly mystical ritual-like designs in optimizing the pages and experimenting. I imagined I was virtually teleporting people who had a search need for “restaurants in springfield” or “doctors in bellevue” into our website where I would match them up with precisely what they wanted. Despite the lack of any guide or formula that talked about such doorways at scale, many others came up with similar solutions, seeking to expand content to match up with growing varieties of user queries in search engines. My “portal pages” skunkworks project was a clear success, although it would be some years further before leadership in the company recognized the value and allowed me to deploy the concept beyond my pilot research project. The rise of doorway pages in search resultsWhen doorway pages were first added to the list of spam practices, there was some degree of hubbub about them, with heavy emphasis expressed by Googlers reinforcing that the use of doorways was contravened. Not as much has been said about the topic in the years since. Google appeared to be increasingly circumspect about the imposition of penalties related to the practice and other quality rules. The lack of attention brought to doorway pages seemed to cause some marketers to believe that they are not a big deal. The typical rationalization is: “Amazon does it, and Google SERPs are full of Amazon, so…” Often, these folks employ doorway pages on their own websites. There has been a spike in lawsuits involving doorway pages in the last six years. I first wrote about this in 2017, “Initial Interest Confusion rears its ugly head once more in trademark infringement case,” where I mentioned an older lawsuit where watch company Multi Time Machine sued Amazon for hosting a search results page for “mtm special ops watches” (and other similar keyword searches that could be related to the watch company’s marks). Amazon hosted the “MTM special ops watches” page, but only showed search results for other competing products. Multi Time Machine contended that this could confuse consumers expecting MTM products, which was therefore an infringement. That suit was eventually dismissed as the court determined that no “reasonably prudent consumer” would be confused about the Amazon page that presented products that would be considerably underpriced for MTM watches. In yet another case (“Bodum USA, Inc. v. Williams-Sonoma, Inc.”), French press coffee maker manufacturer Bodum sued their former retail partner Williams-Sonoma under similar circumstances. Williams-Sonoma had sold Bodum products for a time but eventually discontinued selling them, opting instead to manufacture their own branded French press coffee makers. However, the Bodum search results page on the Williams-Sonoma.com website continued to be maintained, only it now presented Williams-Sonoma products and not Bodum’s. Thus, the circumstances, including accusations that the products themselves were confusingly similar, were arguably much more confusing than in the Multi Time Machine/Amazon case. The Bodum v. Williams-Sonoma case settled out of court, with Williams-Sonoma adding a disclaimer to their web results, “We do not sell Bodum branded products.” I subsequently spoke with the CEO of another company that formerly sold their products through Williams-Sonoma. In a similar sequence, the latter also dropped them, began featuring their own, competing products, and maintained a search results page that used (and ranked for) the dropped company’s brand name. In Google’s recent overhaul of its Webmaster Guidelines, including renaming them to Google Search Essentials, Google could have easily avoided this category if they were no longer a concern. Instead, the newly updated Spam Policies section page promotes Doorways to the second-listed contravened practice, right after Cloaking. Google also added another example of Doorways as well. Google’s take on doorway pages: A brief historyDoorway pages were against the rules very early in Google’s 20-plus-year history. I could find reference to doorway pages in Google’s rules as far back as June 2006 (although I think there may have been a rule in place a little before that): In a session at the first SMX Advanced conference in 2007, Google's former head of web spam Matt Cutts was asked for more descriptive guidelines. Just a few days later, Vanessa Fox announced on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog that they had expanded on the guidelines, providing more examples, among other things. The expanded text stated:
By 2013, Google’s Webmaster Tools content guidelines section had modified this description, stating:
In 2015, Google saw fit to post an article on the Google Search Central Blog, further highlighting what Google disliked about doorway pages and announcing a specific “ranking adjustment” (read: a core update that would penalize doorway pages).
At their best, doorway pages could be an effort to provide navigation between search engines’ results pages and the most granular content within a website. If one had a limited crawl budget, such pages could provide collecting pages for many granular-level, individual website pages. But, at their worst, doorway pages could inflate a site’s indexed pages by thousands and millions of pages, lending little value between the various ones and seeking to enable the site to appear for many more searches than the site merited. Jennifer Slegg’s analysis of the doorway pages ranking adjustment announcement at the time was that it was most likely focused on improving the quality of local search queries and mobile search results. Indeed, local business directory websites had tried to index their webpages for all category and location combinations. (This was what my early doorway pages were, before the anti-doorway rules got instituted, as I worked for Verizon’s Superpages – one of the largest of the early online yellow pages.) That said, there is cause to think that local directory sites somewhat get special treatment from Google (as I will describe shortly in the “Types of doorway pages” section below). Barry Schwartz outright called the “adjustment” a “doorway page penalty algorithm.” The automated penalty likely made many realize that doorway pages were considered a serious violation of Google’s guidelines. Websites had been penalized for this in the past, but many believed that if their sites were not currently penalized, then what they were doing was okay in Google’s eyes. This irrationally founded belief was proven untrue as the doorway page penalty rolled out. Seven years later, a whole younger, fresh set of organic search marketers have forgotten that doorway pages are a serious violation, just as some did in the past. This can happen as an oversight in some instances. Other times, SEO marketers can get progressively bolder and more ambitious about expanding indexable pages to the point where they have crossed a boundary. By then, Google detects doorway pages and dings them pretty sharply. While having even one doorway page is considered against Google’s rules, in truth, doorway page infractions are determined by scale. Having a few may not cause issues, but a large ratio of them versus meatier pages is far likelier to be detected, resulting in a negative outcome. Types of doorway pagesSpammy city/region pagesThis corresponds to Google's example of "[h]aving multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.” For instance, imagine a law firm in a small state like New Hampshire:
It would begin to look pretty spammy and repetitive if done for the roughly 234 towns in New Hampshire. But, also imagine this sort of thing done with over 19,000 incorporated cities and towns in the United States. There is cause to think that local businesses for large metro areas implementing this (i.e., targeting the roughly 88 cities of greater Los Angeles or the more than 200 cities of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex) could incur a penalty, particularly if the business did not have a physical address in each targeted city, which would qualify it for having such pages. Here is an example of a doorway page used by a current international business directory (name redacted). There are clearly some caveats to Google’s algorithmic rules around defining spammy city/region types of pages. One can perform a search right now and see local business listings pages from major directory websites like Yelp and Yellow Pages appearing in the top search results for a huge number of business category keywords combined with local city names (e.g., “accountants in poughkeepsie, ny”). Sites like neighborhoods.com and nextdoor.com are doing great. If the page shows high-quality, valuable information about each city a website targets, it likely won’t be considered a doorway page. This is a key criterion that many seem to miss when assessing whether doorway pages are policed by Google. Now, if you display a page like “Attorneys in New York City”, but the page merely has links to listings for all the boroughs, that would qualify as a doorway page. If a user seeks “attorneys in nyc” and clicks on a page that does not contain listings for “attorneys in nyc” but merely links to other pages, then that would be a very poor user experience. But, if they clicked on the page and got listings of attorneys, that would not fit in the model of being a doorway page per se. You can understand this by searching for “attorneys in nyc.” You will see on the first page of search results listings from Justia, FindLaw, Cornell University attorney listings, Yelp, the New York City Bar Association, Martindale-Hubbell, and Expertise.com. MicrositesGoogle does not refer to “microsites” in their guidelines, but this is what the tactic used to be called. Google’s current rule states, “Having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximize their reach for any specific query.” The concept of microsites was employed more when SEOs noticed that Google seemed to give ranking preference to websites incorporating the keyword in the domain name. Imagine if Target.com pursued this. They sell over 3,000 types of products based on their sitemaps file. Creating a “subwebsite” for each type of product with links back to their main website to conduct a purchase would have been massively irritating. It would also be largely unnecessary because Google can fully show their existing category pages in search results. This is an attractive idea for website operators who think this will be a shortcut to successes they failed to achieve by insufficiently optimizing their existing websites. I have argued with CEOs before about this very thing, telling them that “to successfully employ a microsite, you must market it equivalently to your main website – promote it, advertise it, use social media with it, etc – don’t do it, because nobody markets microsites sufficiently when they create dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of them!” You can create a special promotional website for a few things, but you better treat them pretty close to complete, standalone websites to achieve good rankings. A unique, keyworded URL is insufficient in itself. This is not a shortcut to across-the-board high rankings. Indexable internal search results pagesGoogle has stated for many years now that they do not want to index a website’s search results pages as this could be an infinite set of pages, considering all the many keywords that could be used to conduct a search on a website. Search-results-in-search-results is an irritating user experience. This is perhaps the most confusing aspect of Google’s guidelines because there are a few ways to define “search results” on websites. Category pages or item listings pages on some websites use website/database search functionality to display these types of pages. Google’s SEO Starter Guide states:
However, there are differences between allowing one’s category pages to be indexed (of a limited number and very specific) vs. having many variations indexed for category-type keywords that display substantially identical pages. This can happen with ecommerce websites when marketers create category pages including every variation of product options. Ecatalog software often supplies “faceted” navigation options that produce such pages. Here’s an example:
Now, some websites have such a breadth of content that they might be able to produce such pages without running afoul of a doorway page assessment. But many websites may display virtually identical content on such pages or display only a single product listing – which would have been served better by only having the product page itself indexed. In yet more egregious cases, some websites have set up things such that when consumers conduct searches on their websites, it will automatically produce indexable search results pages for each of those queries. This can result in loads of pages indexed with only the keyword name changing, while the contents of the pages are substantially or wholly similar to others on the website. This is the case for those Williams-Sonoma pages where an indexed search result for “bodum coffee makers” might be the same content as for a “French press coffee makers” category page. Even more concerning, blindly generating pages from users’ search results can create pages featuring keywords that are no longer relevant to the website. In other words, spam and, put in another way, potential trademark infringement. In one lawsuit I worked on, an online retailer allowed thousands and thousands of pages generated by users’ search queries on the site to be indexed, including for major brand names that the website did not carry, such as Nike, Versace, Burberry, Gucci, Yves St. Laurent, Chanel, Eddie Bauer, and more. An even greater number of pages were indexed from the website, focused on keyword phrases that would produce substantially similar to identical search results pages:
Imagine these sorts of keyword phrases multiplied hundreds and thousands of times over, and you get the picture. Huge scale, duplicate content, and spammy. Any website with substantial content and search functionality that uses the GET method can end up with indexed internal search results. I had a client circa 2007/2008 whose business model was creating a sort of curated search results pages that got de-indexed by Google overnight when this rule was promoted. Substantially duplicate content propagated via keyword variationsYou can already see how this could work in the example above where pages were indexed for an online retailer under multiple, highly-similar keywords, and the pages would have identical content. But, some websites have sought to programmatically create alternate versions of content pages using synonyms, keyword research APIs, AI, or some human editors. The page's content could be published on multiple pages, each titled and headlined with different keywords. Many thin content websites have done this very thing in the past, and it likely does not work well in Google these days. Unsure? How to avoid a doorway ‘ding’You may wonder if you are at risk of having your website “dinged” by Google for having doorway pages. If you *know* you have doorway pages, eliminate them in favor of focusing on pushing the quality and promoting your other content pages. If you are unsure if you have what Google would consider doorway pages or want ideas on how to fix them, read on for some recommendations. There has long been the suggestion that Amazon gets away with doorway pages because they have loads of PageRank. Therefore, Google displays many of Amazon’s doorway pages where other websites would not. With 135 million pages indexed and ranking for top product name queries across the board, Amazon is indeed in a unique position. Google can – and does – take the position that providing users with what they seek is the first and foremost priority. So if the site is desired/expected in the search results, Google might allow infractions to pass to maintain the page in the search results where consumers can find it. That does not mean that Google likes doorway pages, however. But, I do not think Amazon’s pages are particularly doorway pages. Generally, if you click on an Amazon listing in Google’s search results for a product, you will find what you are looking for. Those can be category listings pages or specific product pages. But, you see pictures, typically, of what you are looking for, and the results are pretty satisfactory. This is a key determinant. Doorway pages are typically:
The takeaway is not that “Amazon gets away with Doorway Pages”. The takeaway is that “Amazon provides a very satisfactory experience for searchers by delivering on the promise of the keyword targeting of their pages.” Here are some tips for reducing your risks of a doorway “ding”. Simply remove doorways from the indexGoogle suggests using robots.txt, but I have another take. A robust internal link hierarchy is valuable for SEO, as that can help ensure Google finds and indexes the site’s granular content. For this reason, perhaps the quickest fix is to add a robots meta tag to those pages with a “noindex” directive, along with the “follow” directive to keep the links on the page getting crawled. Keep internal search from generating pagesIt is true that you can mine your internal website search data to discover keywords that your users may be using to find your type of content. You should still use that as a guide for creating new content, modifying existing content, or introducing other pages related to the top-searched terms. But do not let your internal searches automatically transform into pages of search results that search engines can index. Doing so will put your site squarely on an increasing curve of cookie-cutter-templated pages that will generate levels of duplication, pages with low value, and open you up to possible spam-hacking exploits. You should human-curate the pages added to your site, so stop the uncontrolled flow of pages created each time users type word combos into your search forms. You should also consider tech modifications if your internal search URLs are indexable because it is natural for users to share page URLs with others. This can result in user-generated external links growing over time until you involuntarily have a large set of doorway pages. You may need to set all those robot meta tags with noindex directives or disallow them in robots.txt. Alternatively, you could switch the search functionality to only work with the POST method, revoking the ability for full URLs to be bookmarkable/indexable. Redesign your category pages to be richerCategory and subcategory pages do not have to be mere navigational lists of links to deeper pages. You can display top items from the categories on the page along with navigational links deeper. Informational text content could be included, as well as videos and preview snippets and links to related blog posts. Highlight the newest items, recently-updated content, top-sellers, or endorsement blurbs. In short, you want to transform what have been essentially linking pages for search engines into pages that are simultaneously highly usable and useful for end users. Make core content pages more relevant for alternate keywordsIf you are using doorway pages to try to have content that appears for many related keyword phrases, you are using only one SEO method. Instead of doorways, you can judiciously add one or two other keyword phrases onto the page itself if you add them in a natural way that reads well for users. Do not go overboard, or you will run afoul of Google for keyword stuffing. Another option is to create external links pointing to the main page for any given topic, using alternate keyword phrases for the link text. Again, avoid going overboard with too many and do not resort to external link building to accrue the links. You could write posts on your website’s blog or in articles to link the alternate keywords’ text back to the main page for the topic. Do away with doorway pagesDoorway pages have now been a contravened practice for about two decades. Google’s recent update to Search Essentials increased the prominence of doorway pages in the contravened spam policies section. They also added an example among those long present. This indicates that doorway pages continue to be considered a bad practice and every bit as severe as the other black hat SEO practices that are risky, wrong, and unethical. Otherwise, Google would have used the opportunity of updating the section to revoke the doorway guidelines. Despite some level of rationalization and confusion on the part of the search community, doorway pages will continue to remain a bad practice. It could penalize your website (or a portion of it) such that the pages are buried far down in the search results or even de-indexed entirely so that they cannot be found for any search. Alternative optimizations can provide perceived benefits associated with doorway pages and reduce or avoid the conditions that can cause them. Stick with contemporary SEO best practices and avoid involvement with doorway pages. You’ll see your organic search rankings program grow and benefit without the risks of getting on Google’s bad side. Managing doorway pages (by eliminating them) has further benefits as well. You’ll do away with potentially significant legal liability associated with the practice. The post Doorway pages: An SEO deep dive appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/doorway-pages-seo-deep-dive-389786 |
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April 2023
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