Webinar: Google Algorithm Updates Webinar with Harry Sanders

Google seems to change the rules just as you get comfortable, doesn’t it?

Join Harry Sanders and me, Peter Mead as we unpack the reality of Google’s algorithm updates and the impact on your SEO strategies.

They’ll explain how these updates have shifted over the years, and what’s coming next, drawing on real stories, not just textbooks.

If you own a website, this could be the knowledge that shapes your next big move online.

Full Transcript of the Google Algorithm Updates Webinar with Harry Sanders and Peter Mead

Peter Mead:
It’s Peter Mead and welcome to the Australian Search Marketing Academy, ASMA, made possible by SEMrush. We’re very excited today. Today is a huge topic. Today, Harry Sanders will be explaining all about Google algorithm updates.

Just before we get into that, before I welcome Harry, I just want to give a quick mention: we are on the SEMrush Channel, and of course, if you don’t know yet, big news, big announcement—the Australian Search Awards will be on again at the Opera House on the 12th of November. So, I would just encourage everybody out there to make a submission. Last year was a huge success, and yeah, I’m just getting right behind the community to encourage everyone to make a submission.

So, let me introduce Harry Sanders. Harry and I met a few years ago in Melbourne at the SEO meetup, and yeah, we always at the SMAW, we love the community, and it’s been so great having Harry in the community and seeing things come so far and so fast for Harry’s business, Studio Hawk. They won so many awards, including the Australian Search Awards last year. And the other thing I love about Harry is he calls me the SEO Godfather.

So, how are you, Harry? How are things?

Harry Sanders:
We’re doing well, doing well, thanks Peter. Just started up in the office, so here we are. I’m pretty pumped to do this, actually. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the algorithm updates, how they work, I’ve been hit, and kind of keen to nip it in the bud all in one.

Peter Mead:
Terrific. So, this is the other thing. I just want to quickly mention a couple of things, as there’s so many articles I’ve seen getting around, talking a bit about your history and your entrance into search marketing, and especially, you know, the director riches stories and this sort of thing. And I mean, did you—I mean, you know, you’re always very encouraging of people wanting to get into the industry. So, I just wanted to thank you for that and see if you want to say any more words about that as well.

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, look, SEO has given me everything I have, quite literally. I came from nothing and now I have this successful SEO agency here in Australia—14 SEO specialists, which is quite sizable in Australia. And I just want to say, anyone that is looking to get into it, it is probably one of the best industries you can be in at the moment, with big data becoming a thing and wizard becoming so easy to craft. But I love SEO; it’s the perfect mix of creativity and logic, and it’s never been a better time to get in. It’s going to go through a bit of a golden age over the next two years, and if you can find a company that’s gonna let you in—well, we’re hiring juniors if there’s any Australians out there—but anyone that you can kind of latch on to, people like Peter Mead, but if you’re not, what kind of role models, just get involved. No better time, you know.

Peter Mead:
Thanks for that, Harry. Yeah, we do love the community, and because it is based on that whole kind of sharing of ideas and sharing of information, and so, yeah, always terrific to see you at any of the meetups or any other conferences.

So, without—let’s just not hold off any longer. What’s going on, Google algorithm updates? So, what happened? I mean, you know, years ago, we’re happily cruising along, building links and doing all kinds of directory submissions, and then all of a sudden Penguin came along, and there’s other penalizing heaps of sites, big sites, everyone getting penalties. Then Panda came along. What’s going on? Harry, do you want to give us a rundown?

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, quick rundown. So, what is going on—my screen quickly—yeah, there have been a lot of updates, and one of the questions I get asked a lot as an SEO person is, how do you keep up with all these? There are so many, and they keep rolling out. Quite literally, there’s a new update, what feels like, what is actually now, every hour, every day. So, how do you know what’s going on, and how can you possibly keep up with this?

So, I’ll give a quick rundown of the history. So, start from here—it was obviously Penguin, right? So, you mentioned Penguin, and this is a bit of a brief look at the landscape, so I won’t dwell on this too much, but Penguin was essentially an algorithm update that Google named. Now, this is important because Google don’t name every algorithm update they do. Now they call them Fred—I’ll go into that in a little bit—but Penguin was an update to the way we perceived backlinks, right? So, instead of mass quantities, it became about quality and relevance and all those kind of things. And so, a lot of websites got hit from that, and there’s heaps of reading you can do up about it—really interesting topic. If you have any questions, send them through.

But that question, yeah, you know, why do they call it Penguin? Very animal in a very cold place. I like to think it’s called Penguin because it’s very slippery, a little slippery, dicey for a lot of people—yeah, tread very carefully like a penguin. And they still do, because while it was originally a core update, it is now a rolling update. And when I’m saying update, it happens every day now, right? So, Google updates their index—usually, it used to be yearly or biannually, whereas now it is, you know, a constant rolling update. Just as they check for onsite issues, they check for Penguin and backlink-related activities as well, which becomes interesting.

So, instead of getting slammed when an algorithm update comes out, it’s more kind of you see a gradual dip, or sometimes you do see yourself get slammed, but it is that more rolling kind of format, which is interesting, I think at least.

And then, of course, they rolled out into Panda, and Panda was about low-quality themed content. So, that’s—a lot of people were creating websites for the sake of having just really low-quality content. This is a lot of infographics—and not that there’s anything wrong with infographics—but people would just have an infographic and then get the link to them, and that fell apart, unfortunately, just because it wasn’t really the content Google was searching for. It was definitely a great linkable asset, but an infographic without any accompanying information or content unfortunately had a lot of issues, and a lot of websites even now still take a hit from Panda-related activities—definitely be aware of.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that was a big deal. I’ve seen heaps of sites get hit by Panda. But again, another cute animal, and you know, there was actually one office I worked in, and they went and got a huge big panda mask because it was such a big deal. Panda came out and just swiped out every site.

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, well, then there’s Pigeon and Payday, but they’re probably outside the scope here, but still. And Hummingbird, of course, actually. So, whether it seems to be the birds and the fluffy animals—so, yep, what’s going on? They’re waiting for a platypus.

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, well, then there’s Pigeon and Payday, but they’re probably outside the scope here, but still. And Hummingbird, of course, actually. So, whether it seems to be the birds and the fluffy animals—so, yep, what’s going on? They’re waiting for a platypus.

So, that’s kind of something—those were the big ones to cover, a couple of small ones relatively there with the Mobilegeddon, which is about the mobile indexing, the mobile websites. This makes a lot more sense now that everything went mobile. Google is putting mobile-first indexing. I’ll explain a little bit more about each of these in a moment, how you can expect to see them evolve, which I suspect a lot of people are interested in more than just a history lesson. But it’s important to first cover them off.

So, Mobilegeddon obviously was the mobile indexing update and the mobile websites. Everyone saw massive change when Google rolled that out. Then there was the Fred update—lastly Fred, but what is it called Fred? So, the current trend of algorithm updates isn’t named other than your Penguins, which are rolling updates. Currently, updates aren’t named; there are just so many coming out. SEMrush sometimes as unofficial names will search into the land or journal, but Google officially calls them Fred. So, any update unless otherwise stated shall be called Fred. It was kind of unofficially said that now; he’s kind of helped works, so he’s just saying it was a Fred update, which can be really funny. That was a really interesting straight on Twitter, that one. What’s once the gallon was the latest update? It’s called Fred. Called Fred. Let’s go Fred.

Yeah, so that’s pretty much exactly what happened. Now people are really confusing, so we call a lot of them Fred, and they said, “What is this Fred? When did Fred happen?” Fred happened here, but it’s kind of like rolling update, so don’t get too caught up in it. But it is, you know, part of it because Fred is really, you know, it’s part of E-A-T, it’s part of all, although it’s good.

So, I’ll go back into some of these slides to talk about the future of algorithm updates and why you might have been affected, after covering off the basics. This is really the future of SEO, and look, it is the parts and the future. So, it is always in there, but what’s becoming more and more clear to SEO specialists or SEO people is that there are really three pillars that hold up search engines. And for the purpose of this, not including local—it’s a separate thing and, you know, a separate thing completely to try and rank in local rather than the national results—but, you know, that’s a separate conversation in there.

But these three pillars of kind of national organic search results at a very fundamental level are very simple, right? It’s very simple to bring you; you just got to do the three pillars. But it becomes quite difficult.

So, this first pillar is technical on-site, which is how crawlable, how issue-free, the user-friendly website structure. Peter, you would know all about the silo structure, fixing any technical issues, security certificates, all those kinds of things fall on the technical on-site, right? So, broken anything that you might find in a SEMrush site audit is covered off under that pillar, and that pillar is very important and definitely still nothing new. You should all be pinging because that’s one of the easier—not always, but one of the relatively easier ways you can sink your teeth into fixing your website, getting it to rank well. And there’s all sorts of documentation about that, and again, I’ll talk about that in a bit more detail, but that’s taking on-site. That’s the first pillar.

The second is off-site. So, I know backlinks are heavily debated and still, you know, a lot of fights are caused over it. If you look at branding and Bango and all these studies emerging, it is quite clear: it doesn’t matter how you look at it, backlinks still work. They still happen, they still work, they’re still going to continue to happen. The way that we’ve thought about them has certainly changed. You’re a very experienced person; it’s been industry a long time. You know, backlinks used to be something you quite in quantity, right? About how many backlinks you’re gonna get.

So, you might ask an SEO, “How many backlinks will you get me?” What has changed and why we’ve had to change our thinking is because it’s become more about quality and then relevant backlinks. So, make sure they’re coming from quality, credible domains which follow the E-A-T principle, which I’ll go into. Make sure they’re nice, your elements, you have to get, you know, plumbing websites or blogs or trade blogs, those kinds of things. You can’t be getting random weird blogs from, you know, some foreign gambling sites. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hairdresser or a plumber, you don’t want links from hairdressers. Sure? No, probably not. So, you want them to be neutral so that they make sense, and they’re consistent links as well. If you’re just doing one burst of links and you’re thinking, “Given done here,” you’re gonna find that that really doesn’t work, and you’re gonna find out in the coming months your SEO just kind of drops and drops, and it’s a flag, right? It is correct. Google sees that spot even if they are quality and relevant, not consistent. Google says, “Well, that’s funny. Maybe they just didn’t pay our torch, or maybe there was something else. Why aren’t they coming in consistently?” So, also something to consider.

But those are the three kind of things we really look at when we’re talking about off-site, probably known as relevancy. It’s so important.

And so, Claudia, well, I think, so what I mean, are we trying to avoid making a footprint, or do we just, well, just go out and naturally get good links and not worry about footprints? I try and just go out and naturally try to acquire them using techniques like skyscraper or the moving man or, you know, get supposed to work here and there, but you have to be very selective. You can’t just guest post where you’re just kind of going just for any kind of website that has a post. That isn’t going to work anymore. It needs to be much more piece relevant than that, which makes it a lot more difficult than a lot of people have imagined to do good off-site SEO. Hence why there’s a lot of backlash and pushback on doing it because, well, as you can imagine, it’s really hard with other networks or kind of relationships with people to acquire these links. But it is one of the reasons why you hire an SEO person, so I still think it’s very important and still one of those three pillars.

I mean, if you think about it, off-site SEO, right, is that what Google was researching? The first search engine, there were many search engines, and that being said, Google’s one of the first, I believe, to implement the concept of off-site, and that was when did you know the story paper with Larry and said, “You’re in the library at Harvard,” yeah, the pager at Larry Page, and the whole idea of PageRank. It was the—so that was, I mean, even though they took away the toolbar PageRank, we believe that it still is PageRank operating behind the scenes, correct, in some form. But yes, so that’s basically the story. Larry and Sergey were in the library in Harvard, never thinking, “Well, okay, how do we know which is a good credible resource, paper, research papers?” And they together said, “Well, we know they’re credible because they have a lot of citations from other books and other works.” So, your really credible piece of research is going to have sources and citations from other research papers, say simply. If we was like that concept to the web rather than just focusing on technical SEO or technical on-site, which everyone else was doing, they said, “What if we do off-site SEO, the concept of other references making you the most credible?” And so that’s what they did, and obviously, they have evolved. That’s not just about quantity now; it’s about the quality. But that is how it was, and I don’t think that that’s going to go away any soon, as much as a lot of people would like to.

Yeah, so yeah, you’re saying it, this whole idea of the library and, you know, the sources and the citations phenomena.

Kyle, just on this, I mean, I hate to sort of get bogged down too much just in its we’re talking off-site and you’re really talking about algorithm here, but there has been a question here from Robyn Davis. He says, “Has backlink thinking been changed by Google going from DA to E-A-T, adding the trust and expertise?” That’s a really good question.

I’ll cover that up quickly. I’ll talk about it in a bit as well, but yes, so E-A-T for people that don’t know is expertise, authority, trust, which is a signal that Google’s looking at when determining where to place a website in the search results, right? It’s very, very important.

When Google does something like this, it is a big thing. So, quickly, expertise is: does it use an industry expert? Do they have a blog or other contributing information? Are they, you know, an expert in their field? Right? Like you might say StudioHawk is an SEO agency; they have a blog, they do a lot of stuff around this. You may need to deem them to fill the E in E-A-T because they have expertise. The A is authority; however, they know in the space you can have expertise with not a lot of authority. So, authority is, “Well, okay, StudioHawk, but what about the SEMrush awards and they want like the Innovation Awards, all these kinds of things?” Those are authority pieces, right? So, they back up our expertise and bring authority. So, that’s where that authority comes in.

The T stands for trust or trustworthiness, and that’s for how credible is this as a source of information. This is really relevant for new sites or even sites that are about diet or definitely finance as well. How trustworthy is this content? Is it real? Is it fake? Is it using clickbait? Those kinds of articles—you would notice if you follow BuzzFeed’s SEO—they took massive dips when it was officially kind of rolled out. They made too many because their titles were very clickbait-y, and a lot of BuzzFeed actually tried to go through and change their titles as a result of the T in E-A-T. So, I thought that was really interesting. You know, a company like that handles it, but that’s what we’re talking about now.

The question is, does Google look at where trust is? I think the firm yes, I think they look at the nice relevancy, the expertise, your thoroughness, and the trust of all these kinds of links. Why wouldn’t they? If they’ve got a metric for a site, they may as well use it as a backlink signal. And I think SEMrush, from when we spoke to them, Peter, in Portugal, they were doing a lot of work around this in there. And yes, for the, if credit their authority score, we had a good idea and a good understanding of this.

When an agency moved away from DA, obviously, you know, a lot of people still use it. DA is a lot of different metrics now, but it is difficult. But I do certainly think that they are using E-A-T when determining backlinks. So, that’s a—

Peter Mead:
Yeah, it does make a lot of sense. But I know that all of the most recent Google algorithm updates that I’ve seen come out, they do seem to be hitting, you know, the spammy links pretty hard, very most. That’s the common factor. The sites that have got spammy links are the ones they’re getting hit. So, spammy only getting hit.

Harry Sanders:
So, but you touched on when we were in Portugal with SEMrush, we were in the workshop with them, and you and I were talking about this whole thing. And they were asking us questions about how do we, how does this image tool find a quality score that is meaningful that actually helps us to really get a good metric for understanding what is good. Traditionally, obviously, people have been using DA, and people do still use DA because what else better is there at the moment? So, I’ll be interested to see where this all goes, especially with the E-A-T factor coming in in the future.

Yes, certainly, I think it will be a really good indication. I mean, we’re seeing, practically as an agency across 200 clients we’re doing, we see this all the time. This E-A-T signal becoming a big thing. We see a lot of our clients become winners because they’ve got strong backlinks. We’ve been working with them for a long time. And we’ve seen a lot of clients that have come from agencies taking a hit because of their backlink profile that needs to be built back up properly with strong credible backlinks. Because especially with the emergence of things like PBNs, definitely kind of networks where you can go to websites and kind of buy them, it’s just going to—people are really going to start feeling it if this is the only way that’s their only way of acquiring links.

So, hurry on the previous slide just—yeah, yeah, we’re going back. Are we? Yeah, they’re search intent.

Yes, I’m sorry, I’m going back. That’s the pretty side, the third pillar. So, I think we’ve come off well and truly is search intent. Now, this is where we talk about content, and we talk about making sure that the monitoring performance, making sure that we’re matching up the search intent with the content, right? Or with the website.

Now, you can have a good technical SEO as you want, and it’s a good balance as you would like, but if you’re a plumber, you’re never going to rank for financial services, right? Because you don’t have search intent, which is the third pillar.

Now, search intent is about making sure that, you know, you’ve got your three kinds of searches, which are educational, transactional, or navigational, but making sure that when someone searches for something, your website’s satisfying that search intent.

So, for example, if you’re looking for a plumber, you’re coming back with a plumbing website to hire. But if you’re looking for how to fix a tap, you’re obviously looking for an informational source rather than necessarily a transactional search where you’re looking to buy something. It’s the same pretty much across the field. You want to make sure that you’re matching up good content that you’re producing with informational searches because they often lead to transactional searches, or making sure that even when people are searching for transactional searches, you’ve matched up your pages with what people want to see in order so that when they come to your website, they actually want to use it. Because if they bounce back, Google’s going to look at that and say, “Well, you haven’t fulfilled a search intent.”

Peter Mead:
Yeah.

Harry Sanders:
So, content, yeah, that’s it. So, that’s really with three pillars, right? SEO can really be boiled down quite straightforwardly to these three things. If you have an issue somewhere, it’s an issue with one of these three pillars, which helps, I think, a lot with newer people to the space or even experienced vets figuring out what’s gone wrong because there’s so many different sounds things it could be. It’s kind of like start with what category is it? Is it an off-site issue? Is it a search intent issue? Is it a technical problem? Where is it? And anything kind of drilled out further from there.

Peter Mead:
Right. Three pillars. I love this, Harry.

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, three pillars.

Peter Mead:
I have often spoken about in the past the, you know, many SEOs have talked about on-site SEO and off-site SEO. It’s the old kind of bread and butter. But I totally agree there’s a third pillar which absolutely people need to be thinking of just as importantly as the on-site and the off-site.

Can I ask a question here? I’ve got another question from John Naylor. Hey John, how are you?

John says, “Hey guys, great confirmation of what we are seeing. We have some sites at the top of their space with zero backlinks. Does that invalidate the backlinks question?”

Harry Sanders:
That’s a really, really good question, actually, because it kind of helps me cover off something that otherwise we’ve got to cover off.

You can rank for something by only doing one of these, right? You can do really good technical SEO and rank. You can do really good off-site SEO and rank. And you can do really good search intent and rank. However, you’re going to find that because you’re only doing one of the three or two of the three, it’s going to get more difficult.

In a less competitive space, you could get away doing technical on-site and search intent and rank strong if there’s little search volume or local competition. You can certainly do very well.

What you will find, however, is if you don’t have any quality backlinks, you can have the best technical on-site, you’re one of the best search intent, you want, but if you’re going for a really competitive keyword like gambling or really competitive ones like head injury or legal services, anything like that, you’re going to end up stuck without those off-site backlinks.

So, on one hand, you can do quite well with the two pillars just like you can do well with off-site and poor on-site. You can do really well technical on-site and search intent, but the more pillars you cover off, the higher you’re going to rank.

And while you may be that if someone comes along, fixes your on-site and the search intent, then also acquires some quality backlinks, I guarantee you you’ll be displaced behind that unless you can acquire those off-site links yourself as well.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, so that’s a great way of putting it.

What I would also say to John is have a think about how competitive is that niche that he is looking at. I was saying he’s seeing some sites at the top of the space with zero backlinks. Perhaps I’d be looking at, you know, using a tool like SEMrush and dropping those websites in just to see how competitive it is and who are the competitors in those spaces because that might help to solve part of the riddle of how competitive it is and why they are winning with sort of zero backlinks or can be with it. It can be a bit of a quandary at some times.

So, what else we got? What else we got?

Yes, what’s happening, Harry? Going to be?

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, let’s not talk about the future. So, I had to cover off kind of what’s going on, what are the standstill story, cover data before I can really talk the three pillars.

We covered off the off-site, covered off kind of E-A-T, what that means. E-A-T is really the direction that Google wants to attack. They’ve tried to—they haven’t been so subtle about it—they’ve said this is what we wanted, this is what we’re gonna do.

So, we know as SEO people need to figure out how we can demonstrate expertise for our clients, how we can demonstrate that authority, and how we can demonstrate that trust, right? That is really what they’re going to be looking at.

So, there’s a couple other things we’ve talked about backlinks, but when we talk about things like that expertise or trust, it also leaves out a couple things that you might otherwise be looking at it with URL consolidation.

And while this has taken years for the pillar of technical SEO, it does become—it’s becoming quite a big thing, and I’ve seen personally a ton of clients being hit by this lately. The amount of crawled URLs.

Now, what’s happened is Google having the background, and they put their mobile index, and that’s been going on for a few months now, and it’s very exciting for them to have a mobile desktop, which is really a first for Google. Previously, they had similar in the same index, just different prioritization. Now they’ve got, you know, once we’re gonna do a whole new one just for mobile, which is really exciting.

Now, what’s happened and what’s occurred as part of that is one of Google’s biggest expenses is their crawls, right? They have to crawl billions, probably trillions of URLs, right? And that is very taxing on their service.

Now, they used to have to do that twice. They used to have to do that from user agent Googlebot, but also one from a mystery shopper. Now they have to do that four times: one from Googlebot on a desktop, one from mystery shopper on a desktop, one from mobile Googlebot, one from mystery shopper mobile at Google.

Now, for business people out there, you’re gonna realize that’s double of their expenses. All right? That’s a very expensive exercise.

Now, if you look at the Google bug that happened recently, most of the people that were affected by that bug were people with big indexes, similar to kind of Panda. We’re basically content or not a lot of backlinks supporting or propping up those pages.

So, this URL consolidation is so interesting because perhaps they’re cutting back and being smarter with the use of canonicals or robots on the ones that are doing really well.

So, I’ve seen so many practical examples for this. This really only affects massively promise or big websites that it is something that we’re seeing emerge. It’s something that’s gonna happen in the future.

Peter Mead:
Okay, so what are you talking about? Duplicated URLs? Are you talking about messy URLs? Are you just talking about articles or maybe products that are disused, they’re still alive, and that kind of thing? I mean, what are we saying?

Harry Sanders:
Bit of all the above, but mostly the second part of that where products aren’t used, sample pages, and articles that have just no one listens or reads anymore.

And some of these massive websites have so many pages or so much content that it’s simply not used. All their search results are being indexed, everything’s being indexed.

You might look at a site, and so easy to do this—you can do a site query where you do something as simple as this: site:yourdomain.com, and it comes back with all the pages of the index as part of that.

It’s such a simple way to see how many URLs are being indexed. Did you mind go or StudioHawk’s got about, you know, twelve pages or so including blogs? Let’s call it forty-eight.

If I look at the search results for that query and I see hundreds, I’m gonna think, “Oh, well, something’s wrong with my URL.”

Yeah, it’s going to all this effort to throw my sitemap is such a blow to the amount of URLs, which is really earning.

So, I’m seeing it happen for some massive sites, some astronomically large sites that are losing a lot of traffic.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, on our enterprise level because it just got so many URLs that they’re not using again.

Okay, Harry, you’ve got a huge site, you’re a big company, and I mean, you’ve got, you know, tens of thousands of products.

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, maybe, maybe you’ve got millions of web pages, millions of URLs.

You know, it’s tough because you’re—I mean, how do you make a sensible decision about how to, you know, disallow, you know, stop Google from crawling or indexing, you know, hundreds of thousands of pages? And we guarantee which ones are you going to stop?

So, there’s a lot of work involved in that, right?

There is heaps of work, but there are handy tools. Yeah, SEMrush, we’ve got a tool to go through and look at the URLs and prioritize and by authority they kind of have a perceived value, which allows you to trim the ones at the very bottom because you’ll find that the 80/20 rule exists in SEO as well. So, 20% of your pages bring in 80% of your traffic, right? Which is a very weird thing to think about. It applies in most things in life but definitely in SEO.

So, just go, “Okay, what are those 20% pages that have really made it in my traffic? How can I optimize those pages the best? And how can I find which are part of that 80% that bring in the remaining 20% of traffic and which of those can I cull?” Because that’s gonna help strengthen your 20%, which is going to bring you more traffic.

So, it’s an interesting concept, but yeah, you go through Google Analytics and your SEMrush to trim those URLs that aren’t bringing you so much.

And I’m telling you now, put my head on the guillotine, you will see good results come from it.

Some other tools as well, I might throw in Google Search Console, so you know, but yeah.

Peter Mead:
There is, I mean, absolutely, on a day-to-day basis, you want to have an automatic setup for, you know, SEMrush to be crawling, or, you know, some other auditing tool on a regular basis to be just running regular crawls all the time.

Because you don’t want it to be stuff to come out of the blue and hit you without you knowing that it’s coming.

Harry Sanders:
So, yeah, I’ve got a couple questions. Maybe I’ll jump into those and fire them.

So, here we go. RB says, “Would you be able to dive into a little more about SEO versus local SEO and explain the shift towards local?”

I’m not sure. Should we maybe save that question until later because right now, we’re talking in the middle of—

Peter Mead:
Yeah, we’ll talk about scheming, yeah. We’ll save that pigeon one for a bit later.

And then Don’t Minc says, “How much authority do social links and Facebook pages/posts really convey for the algo scores these days? Is there any to you know, or is there some, or does it really make a difference?”

Harry Sanders:
This is a really good one. I think I’m probably very well equipped to answer this question right now.

Over the past two days, we’ve had a ridiculous amount of social media coverage as well as historically a lot of articles about us, and we saw very little to no uplift of the social coverage compared to what we saw in the article coverage.

That’s actually—we’re actually doing a full case study on this right now. You heard it first. We’re doing the full case study of a deep dive into a white paper as to the importance of those social links.

The TL;DR is while social links definitely help you out, they don’t seem to build up your PageRank or your actual website authority. However, articles like we got a link from Forbes and it was just a nofollow, as well as a few from big publications here for the smart company, and many massive ones to ours here, it went nuts with Frank even for, I think, at some point for a CEO in Australia just below that was a guy.

So, yeah, definitely.

Peter Mead:
Well, it comes back to the whole thing: if you can create the link yourself, then what’s the point? I mean, Google knows this. You can just jump on to this website and create your own link back to your own site.

Harry Sanders:
So, I mean, this is why I believe the whole thing within most recent algorithm updates, it’s really—I’ve seen PBNs getting hit. And because this is why I still believe that any link that you can just jump online and create yourself within your own network, it’s just gonna come to an end sooner or later.

Peter Mead:
Hmm.

Harry Sanders:
I firmly believe that, Peter, as well.

Peter Mead:
If you’re, you know, I still listen, I think we both know some really good blackhat dudes we’ve met and spoken to behind closed doors, and while they do have very interesting and technical techniques, even it feels like speaking to them that they’re at the point where they’re throwing the towel saying, “It’s just easier at this point.” I’m not saying that blackhat doesn’t work, but it’s easier at this point to acquire links reputably than it is to go to all the effort to acquire them directly against Google’s guidelines. You got to put the work in some way, right?

Harry Sanders:
So, around that, one more question before we go on to the next flight. Joanne B says, “What would be the best practice to treat those URLs that are considered rigid?” This is going back to your question about the URLs. What’s the best practice? So, do you just call them, do you index them, do you block them from the crawler? What do you do?

Peter Mead:
It is a good one.

Harry Sanders:
I make sure, but I’m looking at URLs, I do a few different things and make sure they firstly have a proper structure in place. The silo structure Peter talks a lot about this. But make sure that they make sense where they are, they’re layered, so not just from the homepage down. They have meaning to them, and that’s very important. Okay, this is their homepage, then is this category page, and this is this subcategory, and that’s where this sits, right? Rather than just, you know, if you’re looking at a massive e-commerce, just link to the product from original URL. And that’s very important.

So, that’s the first step: make sure that URLs are very human readable. Do they make sense? Do they contain numbers, numerical things that just don’t make any sense? Because that’s also a factor. Make sure they’re human readable.

Thirdly, in terms of culling them, any search results I generally try to count because they load your URLs so much. I try to make sure that search results are noindex as best as I can, and then there’s other ways to get the product rather than just searching for them because that’s a poorly structured website in that case.

As well as making sure that when I am culling these URLs and making sure to look at analytics, Screaming Frog, it’s a mirage to make sure that they aren’t sleeping the pages. Like, no, not like sleepwear. I mean those in the massive, I just didn’t realize. So, all those kinds of things, it’s kind of serious. You go through.

Peter Mead:
Okay, all right, Harry, let’s keep going.

Harry Sanders:
Let’s press on. Let’s find out what’s going on now with backlinks.

Peter Mead:
Let’s go.

Harry Sanders:
Okay, do you want to go presentation button just—

Peter Mead:
Yeah.

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, good idea. So, just quickly cover these off because I think so it is those things about E-A-T. Make sure that in each pillar, they have that authority and don’t be doing T-V ends and those kinds of things. Make sure you try to make them as natural as possible. You should have relationships or reach out to an SEO person that does have relationships or understands skyscraper or moving man techniques. Definitely prerequisites now for anyone that we bring on.

Going back to on-site issues, cover off some of the evolution of these and how they’ve changed, right? So, I still get questions about each and everything. Young, and I want to give a fight verdict on them.

Image contacts, yes, it’s destined. I would not recommend going through your twenty thousand web page website and adding image alt tags for every single image. If the image is very important for you, of course, make sure you have image alt tags, and if, for example, you’re looking at, you know, web product pages, that 20 percent of pages that are bringing in eighty percent of your traffic, maybe have to look at those. But, you know, an SEO person has recommended going through forty thousand images and adding alt tags, you will be wasting your time. I guarantee there are other things that you could be spending that time on and optimizing.

Yeah, so similar if the Meta Description—a lot of people are, you know, it used to be that you would always have a better description as fetched by what you’ve provided most of the time. If you look at your Meta Description now, Google fetches it automatically based on content on the page.

Your Meta Description should not be where you put in all your keywords. You’re doing it this way still need if these focus on keywords and driving that, but your Meta Description is largely what’s on the page. It’s just making sure that when the user finds your listing in the SERPs, they want to click through and it makes sense. But don’t worry about putting your keywords in. Not how it works.

See, with URL keywords, I still to this day get people going, “I’m gonna buy this URL because it’s got my keyword in it.” Yeah, works anymore. Don’t be doing that. You’re wanting to build up that E-A-T, and that’s these are kind of things in the element that I’ve always going to happen, right? This is just gonna evolve and change.

Same with keyword stuffing, we talked about that. We talked about topics now, or we don’t, but we should talk about topics now as related LSI’s, which is where Google is going. They’re not talking about specific keywords; it’ll be topics or clusters of keywords that form those topics. That’s where you should be focusing that time, and that latent semantic indexing that’s going into it is in that now, that topic optimization, relevant keyword optimization. So, that’s another direction.

So, yeah, absolutely. We’re seeing heaps of that where instead of keywords becoming more about topics like, yeah, if you took Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, it is about cryptocurrency and making sure you refer at those different things rather than just jamming in between. It needs to be naturally written in a way where it touches, where it describes all of the related words. I mean, you want to call them keywords, you can call them that, but yeah, what’s working with that.

Peter Mead:
So, um, so what are we doing in terms of, you know, images? Like, I heard you saying don’t worry about the, you know, not so much, I mean, with images, but I mean, what about—is it possible? Just saw Barry Schwartz yesterday making a post saying that if you’re using an image as a link, then Google may use the alt text as your anchor text or in a similar kind of a way.

Harry Sanders:
Yes, I mean, I would think you could probably maybe if you’ve got lots of images on your site you’re using as links, then why not have them make sure you get the alt—that could be one way of prioritizing you actually alt text working on those and any other kind of important images that are really you want those images that are important. But if you’ve got all kinds of images just as a part of your web design and that sort of thing, it’s kind of a waste of time worrying about those.

Yeah, if they’re just part of the website, if they’re linking externally or internally, I would 100% be thinking about that image alt tag, same as if they’re on a really important product or a really important page for you. If they’re just on a page that is not bringing in a lot of traffic or is not a priority for you, wouldn’t worry about that.

It is one of those things where it is very high more obvious.

Peter Mead:
All right, Harry, what are we got next?

Harry Sanders:
I think I’ve covered off a few different things. I’ve talked about the past, I’ve talked about the search pillars, that I’ve talked about some of the things and a couple of bits and pieces of the future, that really where search is going, what is Google trying to accomplish, and that’s the big question, million or billion dollar question: what is Google trying to accomplish?

Well, what is Google trying to accomplish? What it’s always been trying to accomplish. If we talk about a very high level, start with Google is trying to provide the best answer for a query. The way that’s happening is changing. We have voice becoming a new meaning that people are getting educational searches on, not yet so much transactional, but certainly educational people are looking for information around.

Then we have the knowledge graph becoming more and more present. We have the local graph changing its appearance. And going back to that question, you know, how is that local SEO? I think I know it is part of how Google perceives that local pack and the local results are always gonna be based on mostly your reviews, those kind of audits, the proximity office.

I think Barry’s intern Perry—is it a good time for me now to reread that question because I didn’t before? But so Abby said, “Would you be able to dive into a little more about SEO versus local SEO and explain the shift towards local?” Question mark.

Yep.

Peter Mead:
Google is trying to answer users’ queries in the best way they think possible. A lot of the time, they think it has to be local. You’re looking for a plumber, a handyman, even an SEO specialist. They will bring up the local search results because people generally want someone nearby or someone convenient to them. So, that’s becoming a big thing, and how it’s working is changing as well. It used to be the reviews and quality ripple that the quantity of reviews was a massive single signal. So, what is really interesting is a lot of studies coming out that say it’s the quality of reviews, the text, the manner of a signal.

And what would one of our about a my GM Jacob did a study on this, I think that’s six months ago, and what he found was the actual words you use in the Google reviews use this part of the ranking factor, right? You say this was a great or fantastic service, it’s not the stars you’ve given, whether it’s four or five stars, it’s the words you used to describe it that have the ability to signal.

So, if you say it’s terrible or charges or all those kinds of descriptions, yeah, you’re actually going to—that’s what’s going to affect your ranking, both styles. And also, if they’re using keywords in the review, they actually mention your brand name or mentioning the name of your product or service, absolutely.

It’s almost like backlinks in which each reviewer is not created equal. That’s quality behind the reviewer. If someone’s created 140 reviews and is a local guide, the review is going to be worth much more than someone that certainly has a level one review. So, it is very interesting that it is evolving to be relevant just like that.

Peter Mead:
Okay, so that answers Abby’s question. So, what next, Harry? I mean, what are we going to do? Things are changing, you know, voice is coming, knowledge graph, you’ve got E-A-T, we’ve got all these things. They’re a big deal. What are we going to do here?

Harry Sanders:
Well, yes, sir, just changing. And how it merges video is also changing. Well, you have people like Newport Owl that talk about content. There are a lot of different factors in SEO, and each of them is evolving. Brian Dean might be sprouting out stuff about backlinks, and there’s no shortage of things about technical SEO, especially by people like Barry Schwartz.

What’s happening is those three pillars, you’ll notice, start to converge more and more. It’s said what we’ve got to focus on is SEO people is how are we satisfying each of those pillars and how are we applying principles like E-A-T to our websites now.

To give you an example, we’ve been doing a lot of SEO on our website recently, and historically it’s not something we’ve ever done, but we’ve done it because of some tests we’re doing around the E-A-T kind of methodology and systems.

And I have to tell you, Peter, it has been remarkable what I’ve seen. You know, in opinion SEO for eight years, and I’ve seen a lot of the changes to how I see things or how I would have previously thought things work.

After doing it for ourselves based on this new E-A-T methodology, of course, the pillars are still very important. You know, we covered off the on-site, off-site, and the search intent, but I am seeing—and you know the amount of stuff we’re putting out around expertise, the stuff, the awards we’re winning on the authority side and the trust side, we’re doing—our rankings have gone ridiculous, Peter. We’ve 20x down traffic in the six months we’ve been doing this.

And all that has been about is getting awards, making sure that on our website, making sure we’re getting the links back from those awards.

So, that’s a massive shout out for the SEMrush Awards. If you want to be seen as an SEO specialist or PPC or someone in the digital marketing space, you need to be winning awards. There’s no better one than the SEMrush Awards here in Australia.

Peter Mead:
Yes, it’s definitely something to get involved in.

Harry Sanders:
That expertise, how often are you putting out the comprehensive of those blog posts? Are they talking to, you want to share? And that trust, of course, is, do you have kind of validation, community validation as well? Like, you know, obviously involved in SEO meetups and a lot of other initiatives, and that helps build our trustworthiness.

And if you pull up our SEMrush profile in Australia, you go to—you pull up Australia as a country, you will see what effect that’s had. You know, you kind of follow it a moment, see what wound up.

Tell you what we’ve done: all we’ve done is put on-site good search intent with quite a few quality backlinks. We haven’t focused on all of the quantity, and we’ve matched the E-A-T, and we’re about the same process out to all that client is. That’s where I really see SEO going.

Peter Mead:
Okay, that’s a lot, Harry. You’re giving us all the secrets right here.

So, a couple of things I picked up which I’d like to drill into a bit more. I’ve fought along for a long time. I’ve often thought that less backlinks but high-quality backlinks are the way to go, right? So, maybe talk me through that a little bit because I heard you mention that as well.

Yeah, you’re saying, you know, you’ve cleaned up your site, you’ve done only your on-site SEO, and then you’re working on your E-A-T, but you’re getting just a few good quality links. Would you better talk me through that a little bit more, especially around the links? Because, I mean, did you buy them or did you have, you know, how did you get these really good quality links?

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, when we first started out, we tried to do, you know, some decent quality, low to medium kind of stuff. We got a few of those as kind of sponsored kind of postings of links and really see, you know, had an increase certainly, but not something that really moved the needle for us as a brand.

So, changing, we started to go, “Okay, well, how can we build that authority?” Right? So, we talked about E-A-T, all those things, but have a good actual business authority.

We started going out to a skyscraper, and we started out there press kind of work where we’d reach out to people that talked about, you know, we talked about smart and company about the story, the company, how we got started.

And once we started having those links, just a couple of those for my company, you have to wait, that’s right.

So, that’s where we really started saying that, okay, so you can’t fake those kind of links really.

Yeah, you can certainly build heavy-feeding publications and for certainly increase your traffic, but if you really want to see a boost to your authority, you’ve got to name those articles. They’re just like their numbers; it’s like shooting a cannon.

Peter Mead:
Howard, sir. Well, you know, we’re gonna fire off the strategy.

So, it’s so, so hairy. I’ve got a couple more questions. Do you have more to say? Because I do have some more questions for you.

Harry Sanders:
I think that’s pretty much it. Terribly, we’ve seen a lot of more manual kind of process behind the Google updates historically, you know, Penguin, Pigeon, all those kind of things. Never see more rolling up. That’s what I think the future is of what we’re really seeing our clients get affected by is now we’re shrinking a new door.

And where SEO really is about the E-A-T principle, of course, we’ve got our pillars which will always then always be the most important. You can’t do anything without them.

But by following this methodology, and that’s what who’s really trying to get us to do, stop thinking about metrics so much as we are thinking about how do we perceive this business as an important credible business, and that’s where we look at those.

Peter Mead:
So, here’s a couple questions. You know, we know lots of people got hit by a June 3rd update. Also, I saw a lot of sites get hit as well from August 1st. And I mean, maybe, maybe not, hasn’t been so much noise about it as the June 3. But I mean, look, this is all recent. I mean, it’s so, so, so Google definitely, I believe, is getting tougher every time they’re doing an update, a Google algorithm update.

What do we do? How do we stay on top of this? Should we sign up for notifications? I mean, you’ve just explained everything to do to be prepared so you don’t get hit. But I mean, if somebody’s site does get hit, how do we recover? I mean, do we just have to—I mean, if you listen to Google’s advice, they say do nothing. You know, nothing’s wrong. You know, you’ve been hit, but nothing’s wrong, and you shouldn’t do anything, nothing to change. But we know that’s not good enough for businesses who need that business, they need that traffic. So, who do they listen to today? Go get advice from people or what?

Harry Sanders:
That’s a very loaded question, but yeah, look, drink a will—they will come through stages in their business, even if you are following everything to a tee. There might be some straggler or something that’s going to come around.

So, what do you do? What do you do when you get hit by such update?

First of all, I like to start off again going to those three pillars. I run through each and every one of them. Have I fulfilled the nature of each pillar? You know, have I got impact technical SEO? Have I got very quality, news, relevant backlinks? And do I have, am I meeting the search intent? You find searching for the things has associated changed? Is it no longer, you know, SEO is of educational search, but it’s now transactional search? Meeting that search intent, those kinds of things are very important.

More, you know, that’s a great place to stop.

But then, you know, well, I just got hit by an update, a traffic. Okay, first thing I would say is my backlinks, backlinks seem to be the flavor of the pasta everyone’s getting hit by things because historically, you know, we’ve done things a little bit differently, and half backlinks maybe not so clean as they are now. And so a lot of people are feeling that.

So, the first place to check is your backlinks. Pull up SEMrush’s backlink pro tool or even backlink tool and just go through and see, okay, how credible are my backlinks? Do I have real traffic coming through them, not just metrics? Do I have real traffic? If I pull up that domain in SEMrush and we know it’s real traffic from this domain, yes.

You’re going through your backlink list and you’re not seeing any real traffic? Oh, you got a problem.

How do you fix it? You get good proper backlinks which do have real traffic. It’s not about how quiet that backlink is, but you can look at the skyscraper technique and the moving man, those kinds of methods, and they help a lot. That you do have to put in work, unfortunately. Backlinks are not super easy to acquire, but then these whereas check and start and obviously flow on from there to the technical SEO.

Am I—do I have ridiculous URL issues? And my permalinks not working? Do I have some new issue that’s popped up on my website?

I refuse there’s something. I see a lot, a lot of people are implementing all this schema on their site and getting penalized much, okay, overusing.

So, in the interest of looking deeper and learning more, look deeper, dig deeper, find out where things are going wrong, have a look where you could be over-optimizing, all these kinds of things.

But also learn more, right? Keep learning. We don’t know what we don’t know, right?

I mean, if you don’t know that you’ve now over-optimized all of your schema on your site because you think that putting lots of schema on there is a great idea, so we need to keep learning.

Peter Mead:
Absolutely. Learning. If you’re an SEO and you’re thinking, “I don’t want to learn any more,” probably time to consider CEO, you know?

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, and part of that learning is getting involved with, you know, things like community meetups. There’s always one city or in Australia that’s really strong. Me to present this is way you people’s brains on issues and how are things changing and what are people doing.

And you have an agency, and as I gossiped, have you know 200 odd campaigns all doing different things, and it gives very practical advice, understanding to what’s going on so you can breathe as much as you want.

But now you’ve—it’s a very different story.

Peter Mead:
Harry, we are out of time, and I think you have given us so much today. I think we’ll be going away and digesting this for quite a while. I’ll be thinking about everything you said. Thank you so much.

How do people stay in contact with you? Is the best channel for people to follow?

Harry Sanders:
Yeah, sure. So, when purchased, you accommodate really active on that center, the email or something. Otherwise, get in touch over my Facebook, Harrison is SEO, all those kinds of things. We’re not so active on Twitter, to be honest.

Peter Mead:
Okay, thanks so much. Next month, everybody, we have Brody Clark. He’s gonna be joining us talking about auditing, in particular with WordPress now. So, Brody is very well experienced, another great local Australian SEO.

So, also please don’t forget the Australian Search Awards on the 12th of November. Submissions in. This is a great initiative for the community. It’s done wonders since the 12 months since last year when this happened. We’ve seen a community grow in all kinds of ways, and so definitely get them happening.

Thanks again, Harry, and thanks everybody for being involved. Thanks so much for allowing us to do the Australian webinar, and we’ll see everyone soon. Always a pleasure.