OK, Q1 for #learnseo!
Have you had sites impacted by Google’s Penguin algorithm in the past? What happened?
A1 Trying to understand Penguin is what propelled my career in SEO. I did not have sites hit, but I helped a lot of sites recover.
Hard to believe Penguin was launched 10 years ago! #learnseo
A1 (cont) Penguin is now integrated into Google’s core ranking system and runs in real time. Google says it primarily ignores unnatural links. If a site has too many unnatural links and G can’t separate out the unnatural ones, it still can cause a Penguin suppression. #learnseo
Q5 While not mentioned in Callum’s article (will be in part 2), it’s worth discussing the product reviews update. The most recent release was March 23. Did you see sites affected? What have you seen?
A5 (cont) We also had some clients with losses. Most were the manufacturer or vendor of a product. They lost positions to content that reviewed multiple products for review queries.
A4 While not every site that is negatively impacted by a core update can recover, many can. In some cases improving EAT helps. Google has put a big emphasis on content as well.
Google’s advice: Focus on Content and E-A-T #learnseo
Q3 E-A-T is not an algorithm, but assessing your content in terms of what Google has described as E-A-T may help it rank better.
Have you had success in improving E-A-T? What did you do? #learnSEO
A3 We have had great success in helping sites improve by working on E-A-T: Adding expert authors if appropriate, cultivating good reviews, schema to improve entity understanding, mentions in authoritative places and more.
I'll post a question every 10 mins or so. You can find it by either clicking my profile pic and following my tweets, or following the #learnseo hashtag.
Here is another site that is doing well with this latest product reviews update. They are an affiliate site. They saw nice gains with Nov core and a slight increase again with the March PRU.
🧵1/6
Organic traffic is up 9%. But when you look at just pages with the word “best” in them, those ones are up 18%.
🧵2/6
These pages are lists…think, “The best shoes for running.” They do a lot of things well.
✅ Lists the factors they considered in testing products
✅ Links to multiple vendors
✅ Great detail to help searcher make a buying decision
✅ Extensive research and first hand testing
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