Newbie Question(s) so dumb, you're afraid to even ask!

[thisishatred]

Do you put a long-tail keyword /search query in your title exactly "as is"?

If a Google dropdown suggestion is displaying something, is it bad to make an article with that exact title (plus anything else after a colon if it fits)?

Wondering how good google is at deciphering different titles that are designed to answer that searches intent, or if I should lean on it being 1:1 more.

Thank you.

In my opinion, depends on the SERP and what my competition is doing.

However, there are some important notes that I think a lot of people miss when crafting titles (aside from shit like CRO).

Something you'll notice when Googling any phrase is that Google does not return the same "title" for anyone ranking (for terms that matter at least).

So if your competition is trying to rank for say:

splint vs cast for wrist fracture
-No titles are the same.

pets for an apartment
-No titles are the same; Definitely similar, but different.

how to make your cast smell better
-No titles are the same.

when do german shorthaired pointers stop growing
-No titles are the same; Definitely similar, but different. Two of the results - 1st and 7th - swap do and does and pointer and pointers.

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Now due to Rankbrain, which they came out with in like 2015, you no longer have to semantically dumb down your titles, anchor text, etc.

Google can discern the intent of the search - it's the same story for Local Niche site folks that seemingly want to rank for say "Carpet cleaners Yorba Linda" and they want link builders to exact match anchor with that phrasing.

Now that "anchor" isn't grammatically correct but "Carpet cleaners IN Yorba Linda" is; Google knows that the version with IN means the same thing.

I mean that's like 2nd grade English but I digress.

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The reason I said it depends on the competition is because I'll typically write my titles so that I don't match any person ranking top 1-10. A common set of modifiers you'll see LOTS of similarity with is something like:

"abc vs xyz: differences explained"

Actual example: "gsp vs weimaraner"

Even in this one, there appears to be one that's the same but that's because Google adjusted it. Going to those pages actually shows they're different.

To quote the link I just cited from Cyrus: "On the other hand, long titles with over 70 characters were rewritten a whopping 99.9% of the time. Any title over 60 characters had a greater than 76% chance of getting rewritten."

----

You noted:

"Wondering how good google is at deciphering different titles that are designed to answer that searches intent."

As an SEO with a website in a specific niche YOU should know the intent of their search far better than the person that's doing said Google search.

Like 3 years ago I wrote something that sort of answers your question inadvertently. I'd suggest reading that too.

----

Those are my thoughts though.
Test them for yourself

 

[Ryuzaki]

Do you put a long-tail keyword /search query in your title exactly "as is"?

If a Google dropdown suggestion is displaying something, is it bad to make an article with that exact title (plus anything else after a colon if it fits)?

Wondering how good google is at deciphering different titles that are designed to answer that searches intent, or if I should lean on it being 1:1 more.

Thank you.

If all other variables are held equal, the exact match is going to win over the phrase match. This means that going 1:1 is better than scrambling the wording around within the phrase. However, that doesn't mean going 1:1 is always better, since all the other variables are never held equal. Do what's right for the users, in the end. If you can manage that while going 1:1, then by all means, carry on!

 

[ashley]

does 301 redirect (of an aged domain) to a fresh domain shortcut the sandbox period?

 

[makoloko]

About 3 weeks ago, I had host problems (I switched to a new host since then). GSC even reported the problem in the crawl stats (GSC > Settings > Crawl stats). Right after, traffic dropped 10% for a few weeks. In the last few days, it popped back to where it was. It looks like this was a temporary penalty and now they've removed it after several weeks of no host issues. Or maybe this volatility is simply due to the ongoing Googlequake?

 

[Rooster]

What's the assumption how google measures topical authority.

Is it purely repeated use of a specific keyword?

Or does Google actually have the ability to organize all your keyword/content into some unique categories.

Like if I had 50 posts about jump rope, would I also have gained identical topical authority for skipping rope?

I heard topical authority is only measured during core algorithm updates. That leads me to believe it's due to it being resource heavy, so perhaps Google does spend effort figuring out what your sites about?

Thanks.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Or does Google actually have the ability to organize all your keyword/content into some unique categories.

They have the ability. Look at the list of categories they return from their Natural Language Processing API. This is possibly "the" list they use, if not one of them or a less granular one they offer the public.

I heard topical authority is only measured during core algorithm updates. That leads me to believe it's due to it being resource heavy, so perhaps Google does spend effort figuring out what your sites about?

I would say this is a safe assumption. There's a lot of data they seem to crunch "offline" and then roll it into the live algorithm during core updates.

does 301 redirect (of an aged domain) to a fresh domain shortcut the sandbox period?

My fairly firm opinion on this is "no". I've seen lots of attempts at it and they all failed. If it worked we'd hear about it and we'd all be doing it. By the way, it's less about the age of the domain and more about the "age of indexation". Indexation is everything with these kind of domains, in my opinion.

 

[bartman]

A question about cookie consent plugins - I've read some stuff posted a few years ago here in the forums but wonder what the thoughts are now. Do you think not showing this to EU users could be seen as lack of eeat or something and be marked down by Google? I get about 80% of traffic from the US and have never used one of the plugins. I am based in the UK - which until recently was in the EU - until Brexit! Now no one in the UK knows what the regulations actually are! Any thoughts of this effecting rankings or being seen as being trustworthy?

 

[Rooster]

I've noticed Google is rewriting my titles in the SERP. Should I adjust my titles to make the identical to how they appear?

 

[bernard]

A question about cookie consent plugins - I've read some stuff posted a few years ago here in the forums but wonder what the thoughts are now. Do you think not showing this to EU users could be seen as lack of eeat or something and be marked down by Google? I get about 80% of traffic from the US and have never used one of the plugins. I am based in the UK - which until recently was in the EU - until Brexit! Now no one in the UK knows what the regulations actually are! Any thoughts of this effecting rankings or being seen as being trustworthy?

I don't think it matters with Google at all or they would have told us. That's one of those like pagespeed, that you need to communicate.

There's a bunch of plugins for this though and everyone just click it away, so no real reason not to include it.

I've noticed Google is rewriting my titles in the SERP. Should I adjust my titles to make the identical to how they appear?

Why not write the titles like how you want them to appear?

If they're being rewritten, it might be because you're keyword stuffing. Google will almost always rewrite a title if you include the keyword more than once.

Go into Google Search Console, see what keywords are being found on those rewritten pages. Then if there are keywords you didn't know about, you can include them in the title.

The most important keyword up front and then the lesser keywords in the back.

Or does Google actually have the ability to organize all your keyword/content into some unique categories.

Do a google search from some topic, something with a known brand, and notice how Google themself group things. Like if you search for Metallica, you will get both some albums of their, but maybe also a suggested topic like Heavy Metal and if you click that, then more bands, but also maybe "Electrical Guitar" etc.

 

[ashley]

Indexation is everything with these kind of domains, in my opinion.

what about using the non dropped domains of the odys etc type that're indexed? it's hard to find much info about 301-ing vetted aged domains

 

[thisishatred]

what about using the non dropped domains of the odys etc type that're indexed? it's hard to find much info about 301-ing vetted aged domains

The reason for that is because it's a crapshoot.

Nobody has an answer because it's a risk and a calculated one at that.

They're just selling you a domain that they've analyzed to be spam free (from a backlink perspective), likely trademark free, with existing links in a specific niche; ODYS also goes after domains that are brandable to build on which further drives the price up.

Everything you do in SEO is a risk.

---

The reason it's a "calculated" risk:

If you started from a fresh reg ($10/yr for a .com), you'd have to build a link profile over time. Links (of the caliber of those existing domains) aren't cheap, at all; Some you can't even pay for.

Typically, the price per backlink has always been around $10-20 at auction. That price has only continued to go up over the past 5 years (more so in the past 3). These days you're lucky if you get a decent site in your vertical for $20-50 per link.

So let's do some basic math:

$20-50 per link for a site with 100 RDs. That's $2000 - $5000.

Instead, ODYS and other sellers are reselling domains that have an existing link profile - often the links they have are quite good, in some cases you can't even acquire them.

Editorials/outreach links of a decent caliber typically start at around $250+. So say you had a refresh reg and you wanted 100 links like that, that's $25,000 built over time.

Are we seeing why it's a calculated risk now?

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Nobody has an answer because nobody knows how a given site will work. They're buying it in anticipation that it will work; They're taking a risk.

Technically you could avoid said risk and do what @MrMedia did and buy a domain that's already ranking and making money in the vertical. Then you scale it with content and marketing efforts.

Guess what though - those sites cost money

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If you're talking about 301ing in general though:

• Buy domain in your niche from someone like ODYS.
• Buy a fresh regged domain in your niche and make it brandable. Ensure it's never been registered before via archive.org.
• Host both on the same IP.
• Verify both in the same webmaster tools/search console account.
• Setup 301 with your hosting provider/server
• Use the "change of address" tool in search console and ensure you're moving from the aged site to your new site.
• Add content to new site, setup socials, build EEAT/trust signals, wait.

What else more is there to need to know?

 

[freshpeppermint]

Yo guys, I am having trouble. So my site that was hacked there's no pages anymore that is indexed which was a "hacked" page. But, on this site, my newer articles don't seem to be ranking. Some articles which are indexed, don't even show up in the top 100.
Do I have to do something else on top after all the hacked articles being deindexed? I think I have this same sort of issue with my other hacked site, The newer articles aren't ranking even though all the hacked things are cleaned and deindexed. Did my website get blacklisted and the website is completely useless now?

Am I suppose to fix the 2.4M "issues" it's all on the japanese links or the ?php links.

Not found (404)	Website	Not Started		54,122
Blocked due to access forbidden (403)	Website	Not Started		23,494
Server error (5xx)	Website	Not Started		22,315
Alternate page with proper canonical tag	Website	Not Started		13,223
Page with redirect	Website	Not Started		4,619
Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag	Website	Not Started		1,511

I changed the numbers in table by likee few decimal points, incase it didn't seem to addup exact amount.

 

[JoeyDonuts]

If you're cleaning things up, GSC should eventually catch up and refresh. When you make the changes, you request they re-assess and I'd suggest you keep doing that with all 'errors' or 'warnings' until Google responds to say 'issue resolved'.
In my experience it's unlikely the site is FUBAR or permanently screwed. It's an algorithm you're up against, not a human. Tick the right boxes, request re-assessment, appeal any manual penalties (carefully and doing everything they ask) and it should recover just fine.
Just my tuppence for what it's worth

 

[Ryuzaki]

Am I suppose to fix the 2.4M "issues" it's all on the japanese links or the ?php links.

No. They're not indexed. That's exactly what you want. There's nothing to fix as these are already fixed.

No, I doubt your site is blacklisted or useless now. I've had this hack on successful sites and I cleaned it up and never saw an issue. Your problem with not ranking is likely not related to this, even if it seems like it should be due to their closeness in time.

 

[freshpeppermint]

No. They're not indexed. That's exactly what you want. There's nothing to fix as these are already fixed.

No, I doubt your site is blacklisted or useless now. I've had this hack on successful sites and I cleaned it up and never saw an issue. Your problem with not ranking is likely not related to this, even if it seems like it should be due to their closeness in time.

I talked with other people, they tell me to 410 all the links. Did you do that? The hacked links. Which I have not done it automatically went down the millions of hacked pages. I swear I added so many articles and it's not ranking. Keyword research is good and so is the quality of content.

You may argue well, it's an indexing issue. No, some of them are indexed and yet not ranking when there's literally very little competition. BOTH of the sites which got hacked show this.

One of my only sites which didn't get hacked. My main one, ranks the articles just fine.

 

[tziahs]

Hey guys, I need your opinion on interlinking.

I have a pillar article, about 3,000 words long, published on my website about one month ago. Now, I want to publish a secondary article that explains a few statistics that are also present in the pillar article. I already placed a link to the pillar article.

My question is this: how do I place a link in my old article linking to the new one? Will I get penalized by Google for constantly editing my older articles and adding links to them?

I want to do this on other articles as well. How do you do it?

Thanks!

 

[ItsYoBuddy]

I got a dumb question. Does it have a negative impact if your external link is like this: website.com/blog-title/#:~:text=These%20are%20the%20best....

I assume these are called jump/anchor links?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Hey guys, I need your opinion on interlinking.

I have a pillar article, about 3,000 words long, published on my website about one month ago. Now, I want to publish a secondary article that explains a few statistics that are also present in the pillar article. I already placed a link to the pillar article.

My question is this: how do I place a link in my old article linking to the new one? Will I get penalized by Google for constantly editing my older articles and adding links to them?

I want to do this on other articles as well. How do you do it?

Thanks!

You can edit in links to old articles. I just did it across 850 articles over a few months and it was fine. Added over 1,000 OBLs. I edit in about 30 internal links a week too to point to new articles. Never had an issue.

I got a dumb question. Does it have a negative impact if your external link is like this: website.com/blog-title/#:~:text=These%20are%20the%20best....

I assume these are called jump/anchor links?

I can’t recall what those are called. Fragmented Links or something. It’s Google’s thing to tell a browser to skip to and highlight that text in the page. I’m. Sure it’s ignored but I’m anal about all that so I remove it when I see it, as well as any URL parameters that don’t need to be there.

 

[ItsYoBuddy]

You can edit in links to old articles. I just did it across 850 articles over a few months and it was fine. Added over 1,000 OBLs. I edit in about 30 internal links a week too to point to new articles. Never had an issue.


I can’t recall what those are called. Fragmented Links or something. It’s Google’s thing to tell a browser to skip to and highlight that text in the page. I’m. Sure it’s ignored but I’m anal about all that so I remove it when I see it, as well as any URL parameters that don’t need to be there.

Appreciate the answer. I'm the same way and delete the rest of the link at the end. Sometimes the writers I use will add external links and I sometimes miss it. It looks like they get the links from People Also Ask. Thought maybe it made either a negative or positive impact.

 

[thisishatred]

Appreciate the answer. I'm the same way and delete the rest of the link at the end. Sometimes the writers I use will add external links and I sometimes miss it. It looks like they get the links from People Also Ask. Thought maybe it made either a negative or positive impact.

In a similar vein to those:

On my own sites with internal anchors, I'll use "jumps" from my TOC to get the user to the answer as fast as possible.

IE. I have a page where I mention "x" topic with "z" as a sub-heading on the page. I'll click the "Z" heading and get the #anchor link for that heading via the TOC plugin.

Say I have a new post where I mention the information cited under the Z sub-heading and anchor to that sub-heading; As apposed to anchoring to just the "x" topic page as a whole.

No idea if the above is beneficial - at all.

Anecdotally it seems to help the user from a navigational perspective (especially as a regular user of my own sites lol).

 

[freshpeppermint]

Hey so I recently watched some twitter guy saying to optimize affiliate post titles. So, this got me curious as to what the best one is to use?
The twitter guy said this: "Negative emotions weight higher in a reader's mind than positive - check Prospect Theory for more." This would mean the Don't Buy one would have the highest CTR or no?

What would you say would get the most CTR? (Assume the product is WP Rocket, whenever reading reviews I always like ones that are up to date so that's why I included 2023 in all. I know you can do something like OCT 2023 but, then you have less room for other things.)

- WP Rocket Review (2023) Don't Buy This
- WP Rocket Review (2023) Real User Opinion
- WP Rocket Review (2023) Honest & Unbiased
- WP Rocket Review (2023) Pros, Cons, Worth?
- WP Rocket Review (2023) Huge Discount
- WP Rocket Review (2023) Fastest Plugin Or No?
- WP Rocket Review (2023) See How It Compares With
- WP Rocket Review (2023) 97% Speed Increase (This one implies it does work but it could also be seen as biased so less or more Clicks?)
- WP Rocket Review (2023) Overhyped Or Not?

I also know that if you add certain keywords in the title/meta title, you'll rank for specific variations. Like if someone googles WP Rocket Pros, the guy who put Pros in the H1 will outrank others assuming all other factors are equal.

It's little things like these which really start to add up other than the guys who have more money to spend on better writers, editors, and link builders. (And of course, one with the best CTR won't be ranking first because other factors matter way more like links and actual content.)

 

[Nonbeardedman]

You can edit in links to old articles. I just did it across 850 articles over a few months and it was fine. Added over 1,000 OBLs. I edit in about 30 internal links a week too to point to new articles. Never had an issue.


I can’t recall what those are called. Fragmented Links or something. It’s Google’s thing to tell a browser to skip to and highlight that text in the page. I’m. Sure it’s ignored but I’m anal about all that so I remove it when I see it, as well as any URL parameters that don’t need to be there.

Google's John Mueller confirmed that they usually ignore the part after the hashtag and only consider the start of the address because it's "all the same page".

Here's the video talking about it:

 

[stymie]

What up all? Hope the summer has treated you well...

I am feeling pretty dumb about this situation, so this thread seemed like a good fit for this question.

Long story short, I picked up a client in the solar space a couple of months ago, and because his website is custom-coded, we had to wait a few weeks for the web dev company to build the page that we are targeting and also add some supporting blog articles that I had created. Being used to platforms like WP, Squarespace, etc., I was a bit frustrated by the archaic way of doing things, but otherwise didn't think too much about it.

Fast-forward to today. I have been trying like crazy to get the target page indexed, but for whatever reason it is stuck in Discovered - Currently Not Indexed mode. For the record, the content is optimized, onpage SEO is good, it has the recommended amount of images, etc.

I took a look at the source code today to see if anything came across as strange, and noticed that the site is javascript. I know that javascript typically isn't a death sentence when it comes to SEO, but I know that it isn't ideal either. Oddly, most of the blog posts are indexed, and they are obviously also javascript, and have internal links that go to the target page.

My general question is this: Am I screwed? If not, do you guys have any recommendations for making the page more SEO-friendly with regard to the javascript? I have always been lucky enough to work on sites that have easy-to-use backends, so this is a new one for me.

 

[ashley]

what is the current deal with outbound links from your site?

Link to authority domains or no? Authority in my niche would be the big-media-owned site which is my direct competitor and I'm not going to link to!

Maybe I could spend time researching to come up with some edu/gov sites to link out to, if that's helpful.
Would you link out to wikipedia?

Also - how important is topical authority really? I was listening to an interview with Backlinko's Brian Dean, where he talked about ranking for peleton keywords on Backlinko. He claims topical authority is overhyped. Of course I would be niching down on my site initially. And then I'd hope to branch out slightly, eg starting a site about indoor plants, and then going for plants in general.

But how important is it to have multiple articles on "how to care for pothos" "how to care for pothos indoors" "how to care for outdoor pothos" etc vs one big pothos article (where "how to care for indoor pothos" is a relatively low-comp kw) and then move on to other niche-relevant articles such as "how to water your plants correctly" etc. (gardening is not my niche).

I'm just doing the articles as I can, I believe backlinks are more important than 5 articles on the same topic (this is what Brian Dean said too) but I'm interested to hear how others are doing it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

what is the current deal with outbound links from your site?

Link to authority domains or no? Authority in my niche would be the big-media-owned site which is my direct competitor and I'm not going to link to!

Maybe I could spend time researching to come up with some edu/gov sites to link out to, if that's helpful.
Would you link out to wikipedia?

I just added somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 outbound links to my main site. I tried not to repeat domains until I had to. I tried to only link to big authority sites until I couldn't, then I tried to look at signal that made me feel like the smaller site would stay online and grow.

Is it THAT helpful? I doubt it, but I'm one of those that will dig into diminishing returns so whenever there's a tie breaker at play, I win. Yes, I linked to Wikipedia a couple times, and tons of gov's and edu's too.

If you need to link to a competitor, just don't link to one of their most important pages. Make it some rinky-dink blog page that'll never generate them money.

Also - how important is topical authority really? I was listening to an interview with Backlinko's Brian Dean, where he talked about ranking for peleton keywords on Backlinko. He claims topical authority is overhyped. Of course I would be niching down on my site initially. And then I'd hope to branch out slightly, eg starting a site about indoor plants, and then going for plants in general.

Topical Authority matters a good bit. Do you have to have it to rank? No. Is it much easier once you have it? Yes. Does one example disprove a pattern? No. I doubt Backlinko maintained any Peleton rankings. You can pick up weird rankings and lose them in updates. I ranked #2 for the word "rope" for a little while not long ago, but it was anomalous so I didn't make any over-arching statements about how it disproves anything.

But how important is it to have multiple articles on "how to care for pothos" "how to care for pothos indoors" "how to care for outdoor pothos" etc vs one big pothos article (where "how to care for indoor pothos" is a relatively low-comp kw) and then move on to other niche-relevant articles such as "how to water your plants correctly" etc. (gardening is not my niche).

Moving on is more important. You'll have a better chance to rank for the more detailed query, like adding the indoors or outdoors qualifier, but you gotta make sure you're not going to cannibalize yourself. The best thing to do is Google the queries and make sure Google thinks there's a difference in intent in them (meaning the top 10 are generally different articles ranking).

What you don't want to do is "how to care for red pothos" and "how to care for blue pothos" and "green pothos" and "pink pothos". Google put an update out a long time ago called the Farmer update that punished people doing that.

I'm just doing the articles as I can, I believe backlinks are more important than 5 articles on the same topic (this is what Brian Dean said too) but I'm interested to hear how others are doing it.

I would say this is good advice solely to combat all the people preaching that links don't matter, when Google's entire algorithm is built off measuring links.