[Ep141] - Your Options If You Are penalized For Having Irrelevant And Low-Quality Links

#TWIMshow - This Week in Marketing

1. Will Links On YouTube Videos Help With SEO & Google Rankings? - There are SEO Experts who tells people to add links to YouTube videos (YouTube backlinking) because it will help with SEO & Google Rankings. John Mueller from Google clarified that links on YouTube video pages do not help get your content indexed faster or give you any extra benefit.

Does this mean you should not put links in YouTube? You should so that the person watching your video can access your site if they are interested in learning more. Do not put it in there thinking it will help with SEO.

2. Google: No SEO Benefits In Adding Page Numbers To Paginated Pages - What do you do with your page titles for your paginated pages especially when it comes to e-commerce sites with multi-page product listing? I suspect you may use page X - category name Y?

Alan Kent from Google in the latest Google SEO office hours, said that putting page numbers in your title tags for your paginated pages does not help much with SEO. He said, "including the page number in your information about a page will have little effect. I would include the page number if you think it's gonna help users understand the context of a page. I would not include it on the assumption it'll help with ranking or increasing the likelihood of the page being indexed."

3. Google: Cache-Control Headers Aren't Used For Crawling & Indexing - Cache-control is an HTTP header broken up into directives to specify browser caching policies in both client requests and server responses. Policies include how a resource is cached, where it’s cached and its maximum age before expiring (i.e., time to live).

Google’s John Muller reiterated that cache-control headers don't apply to Google's crawling & indexing, they're for browsers. At most, they might be used in rendering for embedded content.

Website administrators use cache-control headers as a way make a website load faster.

If you need help with your cache-control headers then reach out and ask me questions.

4. Google: Unique Text, Infographics & Video Does Not Make Content Good, Accurate & Helpful - Twitter user @arplift wrote “How is this possible? My site in the field of medicine with exclusive content has suffered a severe fall. Our content is completely unique. All articles have infographics. Even a dedicated video has been produced. It seems that your algorithm is working wrongly on the Persian web”

To that question, Google’s John Muller replied “To be frank, none of those attributes mean that the content is good, accurate, and helpful. Making something good, especially for medicine, takes much, much more than writing unique text, adding infographics, and a video.”

Like I have mentioned numerous times in the past, you need to write helpful content following the E-EAT principle. Need help? Reach out to us for guidance.

5. Google: Use “rel=me” Attribute To Follow Your Social Media Instead Of “nofollow” - What do you do when you are linking to your own social media profiles from your website? A lot of people likes to use the “rel=nofollow” attribute. But first, what is a “nofollow” link.

Google originally introduced the nofollow tag in 2005 to combat comment spam. From Wikipedia, “nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.”

Now, Google's John Mueller wrote on Reddit that when it comes to linking from your site to your social media profiles you should add the “rel=me” attribute because it is an open standard indicates that its destination represents the same person or entity as the current page. So you are explicitly telling Google that you're not just linking to those pages, but you actually control them.

6. Google: Your Options If You Are penalized For Having Irrelevant And Low-Quality Links - Mastodon user @[e-mail] asked Google’s John Muller if he should say goodbye to the page that is penalized for having irrelevant and low-quality links.? Or will he have another chance to be ranked?

John replied “Ultimately that's up to you. If you find that something on your site doesn't work the way you want it to work, you can fix it, make something new, or just move on to something else. For algorithmic effects, your changes will be taken into account over time (though it might take a lot of time, so fix it right & for good). If you're talking about a manual action / penalty, you can also submit a reconsideration request for it. There is no magic immediate answer - even creating something new takes time. If you've built the foundation of your site on bad links for a longer period of time, that will have a lasting effect even if you suddenly fix some things. It's tempting to build a house out of cardboard, it's cheap & it looks like a house quickly. Removing the cardboard doesn't make it a stable house.”

This is why I like to say that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Do not hire and give full-control to your Marketing/SEO team without oversight. If you need help, reach out to us.