The first episode from our technical SEO cohort is officially live!
In this introductory episode, Carmen Domínguez explains that SEO is crucial because Google sorts content into different categories, with bots acting like librarians to organize and review it.
She discusses how crawlers, which are mainly from the US but can understand different languages, help with this process. Carmen also outlined the steps of crawling, from reading robots.txt to indexing, and stressed the importance of technical SEO, like meta tags and schema.
She also mentioned how updates like Panda, Penguin, and BERT, as well as external links and branding, affect SEO.
A huge thank you to Uproer for sponsoring our 5th Technical SEO cohort and making these trainings accessible to BIPOC folks in developing countries!
Uproer’s services include:
Elevate your online presence and reach your growth potential with Uproer.
Name: Carmen Rodriguez Dominguez
What Carmen Does:h at
Noteworthy: Carmen has over 7 years of experience in digital marketing, specializing in content, translations, and digital PR before focusing on SEO.
Connect with Carmen;
🗝️Google’s Crawling Process
Google uses bots or crawlers that constantly navigate websites across the internet to find, classify, and organize content. These crawlers function like librarians, regularly checking the quality of content and its organization.
They ensure that websites are properly structured so Google can easily understand and display them in search results. The better a website is structured and organized, the more easily Google can rank it, making technical SEO a critical part of any strategy.
🗝️ Ranking Factors
Ranking on Google involves numerous factors, including site structure, user experience, and content quality. Google looks for clear site navigation, high-quality links, and optimal page load speeds.
For example, technical SEO ensures that crawlers can navigate the site properly, while factors like broken links, slow speeds, and irrelevant content can negatively affect rankings. Brands with strong recognition also receive additional ranking points, showcasing the importance of both technical and brand-building efforts in SEO.
🗝️ Google’s Market Dominance
Google holds the majority share of the global search market, except in specific countries like China and Russia where local search engines like Baidu and Yandex dominate due to government restrictions.
This market dominance is attributed to Google’s ability to understand multiple languages better than its competitors, making it the most widely used search engine globally, especially in Europe and the Americas.
🗝️Algorithm Updates and Their Impact
Google frequently updates its search algorithms, and these changes can significantly affect website rankings. For example, major updates like Panda (focused on content quality) and Penguin (addressing spammy links) have shifted how SEO strategies are executed.
Google has also been increasingly targeting helpful content, ensuring it is fresh, useful, and relevant. Websites must stay updated on these algorithm changes to avoid ranking drops
🗝️ Importance of Technical SEO
Technical SEO is fundamental for ensuring that Google’s crawlers can properly access, interpret, and rank a website. Key technical aspects include internal linking, site speed, and crawl budgets.
For example, if Google cannot navigate a website or access important pages due to poor internal linking or slow page loading times, those pages may not be indexed or ranked. Technical SEO issues such as JavaScript rendering problems can also prevent Google from fully understanding a page’s content, which can lead to lower rankings.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 0:00
For example, there will be corridors where you can see books about medicine. So the same is Google. Google organizes all of these into corridors of topics, and then from topic that is more relevant to least relevant with each subcategories.
And then we can think of SEO like the work of making the cover of this book, making the intro of the book, and making the guide within the book, but before we do we talk about SEO, organizing content and showing content to people is what Google is meant to do.
And when I’m talking about Google, I’m talking about Bing, I’m talking about Yandex, I’m talking about Baidu and many others. Why do people only focus on Google? Is because Google has the biggest share of the market in terms of content, and as well, the biggest amount of content available.
And how does Google find the content on the internet and then groups it so Google, or any other search engine, uses bots or crawlers that go through the whole of the internet, investigating and researching this content, classifying it.
Think of this person as a librarian who is working in the library, organizing the books all the time, reviewing that they are of good quality, review, that the cover is set up properly. And this crawler also, every now and again, checks what new books are available and decides to get these books for the library and organizing in in in the different categories.
So these bots are checking every single website on a daily basis, and checking that the quality of the content and that the technical setup of this content so the organization is working properly, it is really important that you take into consideration these bots, these bots or these crawlers are always going to be the most important part of any SEO strategy that you do, because you need to make sure that these bots, which are robots, can navigate your website and can understand your website the best possible once you understand that this box that represents the search engine is where is deciding where Your website is going is going to be way easier to do any SEO strategy.
And these bots, normally, they come from the US, but they are present in every every single country, and they also understand different languages, and some more than others. So for example, English, Latin languages are better understood, and then German, Dutch, Chinese, etc, they’re less understood. And that also is a way to understand why Google is the biggest in the Europe as well, because it’s the one that understand other languages the most is the one that has more share in other countries.
Therefore, why is so big? And this is why I was saying Google has the main market dominance everywhere, but in China. Why not? Does anyone know what is common in China? Baidu, so the the country, the government of China, has forbidden Google to actually be crawling the content in China, because they want to be able to control what content is surfaced, to surface to the people. So Google is free everywhere to navigate everywhere but China and now Russia.
Before that, it could go in Russia as well. Not anymore, although in Russia, back in the day, we also used to have Yandex still yandas is still there, and at some point, was the second biggest engine out there. But here we can see the share of the market of Google compared to the rest of the search engines. We can see here that the difference is massive. So that’s why, whenever it talks about anyone talks about SEO, they always talk about Google, because Google is leading.
The market. Is leading all the innovations, etc. Now there’s a lot of people talking about other search engines, and realistically, none of these in here are what we will consider as an engine, because they don’t classify the content, they don’t group it, they don’t crawl it or navigate it in the same way. However, lots of people are using these tools to actually find content and to read content and to buy in many instances, because basically, you can almost buy from Instagram and Tiktok. So uneven Pinterest, I think so. There are lots of people who say, Are these search engine? Yes or no. Technically, they are not, but they do the same purpose of a search engine.
Why am I? An emphasis on this, because whenever we talk in the future about SEO strategies, these are going to play a significant role, and they say that Google has always been very open about how search engine works and how the ranking factors make your site rank, and which ranking factor they ask. And that is absolutely not true. So whoever says that Google has always said the truth, do not believe that person.
And also do not believe Google, because Google obviously they want. Another thing that you need to consider is they make a lot of money from paid so they will always want to have all the ads above everything, and they will want people to click the ads, because that means that they’re making money. But for that, they need to make sure that SEOs are not doing a great job, right? So you need to listen to what Google is saying, but do not always believe whatever Google is saying. And in fact, until a couple of years there was a hack on the agenda, Yandex codes. People never knew 100% what these ranking factors were.
And even, even if Yandex is not the same as Google, Yandex was creating to rip off Google and many use many engineers that were working in Google then moved to Yandex to develop the code.
So that is why it’s very important that when this was released a couple of years ago, when the work with Ukraine started, every single SEO suddenly got really into Yandex code, and that is because it was actually telling what ranking factors they are in Google.
So we can see here that there are a lot of them. To be honest, there were 2000 ranking factors, or even more. I just grouping here the ones that are more important, and then I subdivided in groups. So links are important, user experience. Click through, rate broken videos, broken content is important. The site structure. And site structure is really important, because, as I said earlier, you need to make sure that the bot, the crawler, Google crawler, can navigate your website properly.
So if you cannot navigate it, it cannot find your content, it cannot show anywhere. So technical SEO is a very important part of the ranking factors, and also is branding. So as an SEO you will rarely be able to manipulate branding, because branding of a company is something bigger. However, branding plays a very significant role, and for many of you that might have heard about this recently, there is a part of the ranking factor called nav Boost, which basically gets your brand allocates a certain amount of points and give whatever ranking factors you have extra points based on your brand.
This might sound like a very complex and you might not understand, but we will talk about this in the future. And voila, this is how Google works, from the perspective of code and from the perspective of machine learning, and I absolutely do not expect you to learn this by heart or to even understand this right now. It’s just so you can see how complex it is in the background. And sometimes you might do one part of SEO very well.
For example, your website might might be technically perfect, but if there is one of these parts that is not working, then that means I that you might not be showing in the Serb in the Serbs. So that is why it is important to understand the overall of SEO and not focus only on one part. And please also ask me any questions whenever you want.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 8:38
Now, obviously we are not going to be focusing on this in the whole in the whole session, or even from here to November, because, oh my god, this is too complex. So I try to summarize it in some parts so you can understand it whenever you are going through the process of doing an audit, or through simply the process of actually understanding what’s going on. So we start with the crawl.
There’s this scroll or bot that we said earlier is coming to your website, and the first thing that it says is the robots txt. This robot txt is like when you you go to a library and you have all the information above you that says healthcare, you need to go to the end of the library or fantasy, you need to go upstairs.
That is what the robux txt is. So this crawler will actually follow the information on the robux txt and your sitemap, and it will start navigating the whole of your contents as if you were in a library. Now, then will render the content. And rendering the content means actually translating the content.
So it will be like you get your book and you start understanding the images and understanding the words. That is what Google is doing. And then from there, it will index it, so that means it will put it in. In a shell, put in the right place, so you can easily find it whenever you’re looking for the content. Now, when you are in the library, you put books in front of your eye or on the top or at the bottom. That is what ranking is, right.
You might as well see it in front of you. So that means you’re ranking in position from one to 10, or it might go really high or really low, and you are not able to get the get the book. So that is when you’re ranking in position beyond 10. And then finally, trust, which is you choosing the book that you want based on wherever. So we can see here that this is the whole process that it follows.
But there are lots of different things or errors that can be that can actually break the crawler from growing from one side to another, and that is internal linking on being right, a lot of cannibalization, blocking, rendering, blocking, indexing, core web vitals, which means your website is so slow that the crawler can be bothered to actually check it and then trust, is my content right? Is my content not right.
So lots of things that we need to understand, what is blocking this process. But if you understand this process, if you understand how the crawler is getting from crawling to trusting your sites, you almost understood and found the right strategy to look for all the errors that can cause this. Now I’m going to stop there. Do you guys have any questions on this before I continue? No, okay, okay, see, I couldn’t see your faces.
Okay. Still, I need to go back now, obviously, this is a very simplified way of understanding SEO and understanding Google. Now, Google is really friendly, and they love updating the ranking factors. They love updating how the crawlers work, and that is what we have all of us heard before algorithm we have learned. We have heard about core web, about core algorithm updates, about specific updates targeting one thing or another.
It’s really important that we understand this, because it means that every whatever you understand of how Google works, it might change from one day to another, or any strategy that you have done, it might change from one day to another.
And in fact, it has happened a lot of companies that have gone bust because an algorithm hit them. So it’s really important that we understand this. This one call algorithm updates every single year, tends to happen. Ah, I cannot record, by the way. I cannot. I just notice I write it here, I cannot record because I don’t have a business account. Can you record?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 13:00
I don’t know if she’s hearing me.
JaQueen McNair 13:05
She might be on mute. I think mine is working.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 13:12
you can record?So you’re recording,
JaQueen McNair 13:17
yeah,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 13:19
Thank you so much. You’re fantastic, awesome. I hope I didn’t make many weird faces. So going back to the algorithm and why it is important. So we have understood all of these. We have done all the work. Now Google comes and August, and it’s like, okay, Google algorithm changes everything that you know they are one for sure every year, which is the core algorithm, and then another ones that can happen.
For example, this year we have the August one that was the core algorithm updates, but then we have the one in March, and we have a few more by and we and then we have a few more for review. So which is called the review update. I’m going to go through the main ones, but we’re going to be talking about all of them in other lessons, because it’s very important that we understand what they stand for and what they did.
So basically, this is where it says they they had since Google started in 2000 even before, but mainly from 2000 they have been a few that basically have changed everything. This is Panda.
So Panda was focused on update of on content quality, but not the content quality that we understand now, not the content quality of being able to read the content properly, understand that it’s not telling us bullshit, basically.
But is the content is the update focus on keyword stuffing. You probably don’t remember this, but. I remember this when the internet started and it was basically full of keywords everywhere, even. So there were times where they were putting the keywords at the bottom of the page repeated 1000 of times with the same color of the background, so the users couldn’t see it, but Google could find it.
That’s how bad it was. So this is an update that actually changed the internet quite a lot. And lots of people say that it actually coincided when AI started, not AI, as we know it today, but large language models, or birds, or the previous birds, when it came to place, when we was able to understand contents. Penguin is another of the main, main algorithm updates that everyone in the SEO will remember, because it was focused on the spammy links.
Now we still, every now and again, get get spammy links update. There was one in February, but not to the point of Penguin. Penguin before, people used to buy tons of links and get lots of links from blog, and it actually was affecting quite a lot how people rank. So there was a point that people were buying links from Russia or from China, and these were the pages that were ranking many of the times. It didn’t mean that the quality the content that was ranking was the one that was most useful for the user.
Then Bert, I just talked about birds. And bird actually, it was the name of the content of the update. But bird is also the name of a large language model that even chat GPT, for example, is based on birds. And bird basically starts understanding content in a way more complex way. Is able to understand topics. He’s able to understand when the content is positive or negative. So it’s a step farther from focusing just on keywords or keyword stuffing and more on the quality of the content and if the content is actually giving the answer to the question of the user. So this bird, this is when also snippets started to showing up in Google, then helpful content updates.
And the helpful content update has been one of the most disruptive Google algorithms. It basically tries to identify if the content has been created by AI, if the content is being created by people who are experts on the topics, if there’s too much content being created, if it is useful, if it’s actually aligned with it. And we’re going to be talking about it in other in other trainings as well.
And in this case, the algorithm update that happened just in August was to try to fix what happened in the helpful content update is really difficult for AI or for a machine or for a crawler to understand if the content is really useful for the user or not, because in many times, because to see this, you feel you Need to Be a human now, Google has 2000 people higher for to check that the content is helpful, but these people are money mostly based in the US and mostly based and doing the working in English.
And it has not been the same for other countries and other countries and other languages. Let’s say lots of people have been affected wrongly by this update, which is what this update in August try to fix. Again. This is where I said at the beginning. A couple of times a year, Google does this broadco algorithm updates last year was the year they were the most. There were seven, and all of them really big, and some of them were targeting products.
Some of them were targeting reviews, some of them were targeting the helpful content updates, spammy links. So again, very important to keep track of all these algorithms that are happening. And in order to do so, just follow people in LinkedIn and and also follow Google. Google will always update you when there is a new color. Algorithm updates and again, as I said, lots of people that come here negatively, yes, question.
Oluwaseun Unique 19:15
I have a question please. Yes, yeah, like I read something online, then that concern the algorithm about hummingbird. So I don’t know if there’s other name for it or something like that, like HUMM, ing, then bird, BIRD, if it is part of the algorithm by Google?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 19:38
I don’t understand the question, can you say it again?
Oluwaseun Unique 19:41
Yeah? Like I read something online concerning Google algorithm, but I remember the year the algorithm was released, about Humming Bird, H-U-M-M-I-N-G then B, I, R, D, so, but it’s not part of the one you listed. So I just want to know maybe there’s another name for it?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 20:06
Question is, okay, can you write it so I can, I can give you an answer later, because I work. Sorry, sorry, so yes, this is a case where the Google algorithm update affected someone negatively, and I’ve been affected negatively and positively in some websites I have looked into, and in many of the instances, I was doing exactly the same strategy for both. So that’s why I’m saying it’s difficult to always believe what Google is saying if you are actually doing the same strategy that they normally recommend.
So whenever you are affected by a Google algorithm, do not freak out. The first thing is to wait for the Google algorithm rollout to be finished, and then see what other competitors like you are experiencing. Sometimes you might not be affected by the Google algorithm, but your competitors might be affected positively, which means they start ranking higher. You rank down, so you have not been affected, but other people have been affected positively.
So that’s why, whenever you are affected, don’t freak out the best. The most important bit is to wait and understand what has caused it, and then come up with a strategy so on all of this. What is SEO? Someone can tell me what SEO is in a very concise way. I Yes,
JaQueen McNair 21:45
Search engine optimization?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 21:47
Yes, that’s less concise. What is it? Exactly
JaQueen McNair 21:57
describe it better than that, making your website and the contents on your website in a way that Google thinks is helpful and valid and authoritative, like expertise. Maybe,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 22:22
yeah, no, maybe no, You said it perfectly. So SEO, which is obviously stands for search engine optimization, is basically making sure that the Google bots so this crawler can navigate your website easily, can surface all the content that you have written and showing to the user, and then also making sure that the user finds your content useful so it clicks and reads your content and buys your products, buys your service or whatever that you are selling.
So that is ACO is a SEO is not just getting ranking in number one. Oh, well, okay, the question I’ll answer in a minute. So SEO isn’t about getting your keywords to rank number one, because you might as well rank number one. But again, no one buy your products. Isn’t about getting a lot of clicks and impressions and users. What it’s about is making sure that your website performs better in organic search and the users find your content useful.
At the end of the day, what is important when you do SEO is actually people buy your products, that people enjoy your brand, that people enjoy is navigating your website. It’s not about just ranking position one.
If you run position one with your keywords, but no one buys anything from you, you will be fired if you are an SEO because actually you’re not providing anything to the websites. So yeah, is. It’s a classic from SEO perspective that people only focus on keywords, but this is what we call vanity KPIs, or vanity objectives, because, again, a keyword doesn’t mean anything, and we will look into this as well during the process, we’re going to be talking about setting up KPIs are useful for you, and what every objective of KPI means exactly.
So we have just gone through this. And SEO is about making sure that you are ranking for the right keyword or the keyword that your user cares about at the top of the position. So obviously that means that we need to we will be ranking behind or after ads. And this is a very old fashioned serve, because we can see in here that we don’t have any sort of snippets, and in another session, we’re going to talk about all the different snippets that they are and how we’re going to get to ranking those snippets.
But yeah, SEO is anything that is not paid, so any. In the east organic, and that includes not only the search, because what we’re seeing here is the search filter, but also news, if you have news images, if you have an E commerce video, if you have a training company shopping again, if you’re trying to sell anything. And more and more and more. And here we can see the the different the different parts of a search engine.
You can we can see, sorry, over SERP. We can see the title. We can see snippeting here with the rating. And we can see different oppositions. I don’t know if you remember, but a couple of years ago, Google decided to get rid of the positions because they thought that that was not important and they made infinitive crawling. But a couple of months ago, they put back again position and pages because they said that people prefer pages. Really.
Once upon a time, people used to click always in position one, position two and position three. Nowadays, people will click whatever they find useful. And the way that to prove that something is useful is optimizing the methods. So that is what it says technical SEO certification, and also the meta description. And in here I just mentioned CTR changes depending on the position that you are, but also the position that you are will change on where you yourself are based and whatever you search with your account.
So that’s another topic that we will be talking about, which is thus your previous history, in your search or in your users will affect this the Serp that that you’ve been shown. And the answer is yes, which is something that you cannot really manipulate. But again, here is another type of snippet, which is the people also ask snippets, normally a way to show up in here is with the schema, which we’re going to be doing a training, only in the schema, and then the rest of the search.
Again, this is under the schema. And if you are in E commerce, probably there is this, sorry, the snippets, a few searches and another snippet you also changes in mobile, because what we were looking at is desktop, but in mobile is also totally different, because mobile, the screen is smaller, right? So that means that Google needs to try to put as much content as possible in in this, in the in the in the smaller screen. And that means also for paid, so many times you will have organic, paid, organic paid, and then different, different things that distract you, like, for example, the reviews on different other snippets. Now, any questions about this? I need to see your faces.
No Okay. Why SEO is important? Because particularly for me, I’m a proper geek of technical SEO. If your if Google cannot find your content in this structure, your content is never going to be able to be surface if Google cannot navigate your site properly, or the crawler cannot navigate the site properly, you’re never going to rank for the right keywords. Then it’s more likely than not that if you are not doing SEO properly, your competitor is which means that you are actually losing a lot of traffic.
And since covid as well. If you’re looking after any commerce since covid, after covid, more than 60% of people, depending where you’re based by online rather than in person. So if you are selling products and you are not online, or you are not optimized to sell online, you are definitely losing out. So SEO again, once upon a time, was a nice way to try to get traffic. Nowadays, it’s almost mandatory if your website wants to succeed. I this is not working.
So again, where I’ve said this is not just about ranking for a keyword nowadays, one keyword won’t rank everywhere and won’t rank with the same content. Is about making sure that the search engine both and the user can discover your pace, enjoy your content, your page, enjoy your content, and get to know your brand, and then ultimately buying the product that you sell. Now going to the different parts, because I have said a lot of things in the last 36 minutes.
I have talked about how the crawlers navigate your websites, what is important as a ranking factor? Google algorithms, what the different parts of the crawler we’re going to be talking about how in every single part of this navigation of your website, what can you do as an SEO and how you can manipulate the cell. Now, the most important one, obviously, is technical SEO. And we already seen this, and going back to this because we, whenever we do more specifically trainings on technical SEO, we’re going to be spending time in each of these parts.
So in the crawling, in the rendering, in the indexing, in the ranking, and in the trusting, because at the end of the day, a website is code and the crawler is a machine. So communicating, the crawler needs to communicate properly with your HTML codes in order to do every single part in here, so the crawler will have a certain amount of time to go through your website, and I’m giving you a lot of information today.
Don’t worry, because we’re going to be repeating and hammering everything in the next sessions. But there is a thing called crawl budget that is every single crawler will be allocating a certain amount of time to crawl your websites. So it’s like you are going to the library, and you have one hour to find this book. And now, if you go to a library that is very well organized, where you have your information on the top, everything is organized in the right alleys, and the alleys have their subcategories. Very likely you’re going to find that book in the time that you’ve been given, very fast.
But now imagine you don’t have indications. You don’t have two categories. The name of the books are not put at the bottom. You cannot see the cover of the books. How are you going to find that? More than likely, you’re going to be like this library. I don’t like it. I’m going to go to the library and next door where I know that it’s better organized, it’s shinier, it smells better, it’s faster. I’m going to go I’m going to go there. So that is what crawl budget is. Now, the bigger your website is, the more pages you have. The bigger is your crop budget.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 32:25
Thank you. The biggest your is your core budgets. You whenever you are doing SEO, the first thing that you need to make sure is that within the crawl budget that you have, Google is finding everything, and if it’s not, how can we make sure that he finds it. Internal linking is a way, a way of doing it. Next. You have already started, and we will see how to how you guys can find out about your core budget whenever we do the session on Google Search Console, because that is Google Search Console is like the guide for everyone whenever we start doing SEO so internal linking is one of them. Next we have sorted all the crawl. We know that the crawlers can find our content.
We know that the crawler can spend time on the right web, on the right pages, because you have put the pages that you care the most at the top. Next is rendering, and this rendering for, in my opinion, as an SEO Yes, you can find out the crawl budget in Google Search Console, but we will look into that. I mean, you won’t have, like, a number that says your crawler have 15 minutes and it took 20 to find the page, but you will have some information in how long it took the credit to spend time in your website and rendering, in my opinion, rendering is the most complex of all of them, because for rendering, you need to know a little bit of code, and you need to know a little bit of design now, again, rendering, also, there are few tools I’m going to also be recommending for me rendering.
The best way to check it is in Google Search Console. Again, you will hear me a lot talking about Google Search Console because I hate and love Google Search Console a lot. It’s a love hate relationship. So rendering it means that the crawler has taken all the codes that is in the background and has understood so it’s like if you are looking at the cover of the book, and you understood what the cover of the book is trying to say, and you understood what the introduction of the book is trying to say, all the part in the background. Okay, this is a summary of the book.
You understood everything. But now imagine you get the book, but the the description of the at the end. And this happened to me yesterday. I watched a trailer of a trailer of a movie, and I didn’t understand what the movie was about. I was a very beautiful trader, but what is this movie about? This is rendering. Google needs to understand what a piece of content is saying. Now, more often than not, designers and developers will put JavaScript within your content.
And I’m sure that you have heard this before, JavaScript rendering is an issue. JavaScript is really heavy and very difficult for the crawlers to understand. Google crawlers always prefer HTML code because it’s simpler and easier to understand. Whenever you have JavaScript in the middle, so JavaScript at the top, in the middle, we will struggle to understand the content. So there are many times where the content is hidden behind code.
So Google is getting to the page and suddenly finds lots of gibberish that it doesn’t understand, which is JavaScript, then a little bit of content. So that means that you might have written 2000 pieces, 2000 words in that page, but if it is hidden behind, behind JavaScript, Google won’t find it. That is why rendering is the most important one, because you need to make sure that Google is actually understanding and translating the code properly.
One this is done, and we’re going to be looking into how we do this in the next sessions. I keep doing a lot of spoilers. The next one is indexing. So once Google has done the crawling and the rendering, it will it will decide if you can index this page. Now, here there are 1000 and 1000 of errors that can actually limit the indexing. Canonicals, what else index on an index? You know, I’m sure that you have heard of this tags before, index and indexing. So those are some of them that is a classic for Google not not to index your page for a force soft for a force for CO three, the server not showing the page fast enough, redirects.
So, so many things that limit indexing. So again, these ones are the classic ones that the tools will tell you. The tools tend while crawling and rendering. You will find all the issues in Google Search Console indexing any tool will tell you. So the tools that we got Screaming Frog and Cyborg, they will tell you all the errors with indexing and more you need to solve. And once all this content has been indexed, then we need to get it to rank.
How do we get it to rank? And how do we get it to rank for the right keywords? Because this is the only time where, for me, keywords are useful to know what people are searching for, and how to surface surface it. Then once you have done that, you need to focus more on converting. So now ranking, you need to get this piece of content that first you go to crawl, then you go to Render, then you solve all the issues with indexing.
Now finally, I’m going to get this page, finally indexing this in the search engine. Now you need to get it to rank for the keywords that you want, which is also quite difficult. So for that, you need to have a meta titles. So you need to make sure that the right keywords are in the meta titles, the right keywords are in the h1 and that is when we’re going to understand the different parts of the website and what is really important for you.
So for example, to give you an example of an issue I found in one of my clients, I realized that the developer had put all the H ones so they 1h and one and all the H twos with a keyword, choose your size. So what happened in there? Every single page in this e commerce, every single page had the same h, h1 and h2 which was choose your color and choose your size. What did Google do? Does anyone know what Google did with this? Yes,
JaQueen McNair 39:04
did they think it was duplicate content?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 39:08
Exactly? He thought it was duplicated content and remove it from the from the certain so that is another new thing. Once upon a time, you will be indexed and you won’t be removed. Now, Google is removing the pages that people don’t click or that they don’t follow any the recommendations by Google.
The reason is because there are more websites on the internet than crawlers, so the crawlers should not be spending time on pages that are not complying with the recommendations. So this only started happening a few years ago where Google was actually the indexing, and it has been an imer. So imagine this shop that sells shoes, and suddenly not a single product of the 200 products that they have was being found by Google. August.
Three, they didn’t sell any money. So that’s why it’s really important that we look into the basic things, like H, ones, h2 h3 is two as well. And we look into cannibalization, because in this case, duplication, as as you said, is a is type of cannibalization, and is quite important. And finally, trusting. So trusting is when we comply with alt text, making sure that all the images are being uploaded properly. So core web vitals are really important in here.
Normally, people always think that trust is only part of content and it only belongs to content and SEO, but it’s technical SEO as well, because if you don’t put the schemas, Google won’t understand what type of content it is. So it won’t Google won’t trust it. If you don’t put the Google won’t trust it. If it doesn’t have it doesn’t comply with accessibility, Google won’t trust it. So all of these are very important part of technical SEO, and now I have yet to not talk about international, because International is another story. And if you have heard of hreflang, hreflang is a way for Google to understand what page needs to serve in what country.
So if you, for example, have your content in English, but you want to target us, you want to target UK, you want to Target Canada, and you want to target Australia. Once upon a time, you didn’t need to put anything in the code, because there were no so much competition. But nowadays, you might sell one product. If you are a company from the US and you’re selling this product in all these countries, Google is going to be like and why am I showing you who are, who are from the US in Australia, we have competitors in Australia who sell the same products you want to sell in Australia, you need to tell us in the code that you want to sell in Australia.
So that is what hreflang is, and that is why international I put it in ranking and trusting, because Google needs to trust that you can actually sell these products in Australia. So you might, might as well say, Oh yeah, I sell it in Australia, but then you don’t have the capabilities to send the product to Australia, so you need to prove it. And this is where Merchant Center is also very important part. So normally, when we talk about SEO, we only talk about Google and Google Search Console, but Merchant Center, if you have any commerce, is really important, because we also need to optimize in Merchant Center. So I just told you so much information about technical SEO.
Any questions for now? And actually, now that we’re here, I’m gonna get to see the question that you ask is Rudy didn’t mention hummingbird is another one that is quite important, but that is quite old. When was its release? Hold on, hummingbird. Let me check. And then there’s another question. Hold on, I’m trying to remember when it was 2013 Yeah, yeah. Actually, that is also a very important one, but I didn’t mention it because I don’t, I didn’t see so many websites affected us, for example, with Panda and the other ones. But thank you so much. It’s also an important Google update. Stephanie,
stephanie inabo 43:34
hello, Carmen, hello everyone, Good evening. So I don’t know. Can you hear me?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 43:41
Yes.
stephanie inabo 43:42
Okay.
stephanie inabo 43:44
While, trying to find a website to work with, I reached out to one of to an NGO, and the owner said that they have Dev. Their dev added a lot of plugins to their former website so it had virus issues and kept going down.
They had high cyber security experts, and then end up moving to another website. So he’s, he was he once he hears anything like software tools, he’s petrified, just afraid. So I, I put it on some groups and LinkedIn, just ask, Has anybody had this experience? Because I know from From the little I know we’re not putting we’re not linking these tools to the CMS is to GSC, so I need to reassure them that there’s no problem or the risk is minimal. So I wanted to raise it up that okay, how do I reassure these clients?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 44:41
This is a very good question. You know, the client might have a reason to be scared, because, depending on on the CMS that you are, and depending who is the creator of the of the plugin, it can cause issues. So what CMS is this that you were talking about?
stephanie inabo 44:58
It’s WordPress. From what I know,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 45:00
Oh WordPress
stephanie inabo 45:01
He still hasn’t given me access, so I’m working with the site I created
carmen domínguez rodríguez 45:06
and and so the client is worried about the changes, or is worrying that you’re using plugins. He
stephanie inabo 45:13
I don’t that’s even part of what I want to know, because I told him, we’re not using plugins like we’re just I’m just getting access to GSC, putting the linking into site bulb, that’s the thing
carmen domínguez rodríguez 45:28
okay. Just what you can say is that there are no major changes that you can do in the in the website called through Google Search Console. So in Google Search Console, all you’re going to do is see data, and then the most of the changes need to be done in the code on the CMS, but because you are not accessing the CMS, there is no error that can become because now I will say that anyway, if you are ever the SEO any changes that you need to do, you will be asking for permission beforehand, So there’s nothing that he needs to worry about the changes.
Thank you. No worries. So everyone is going to have access to Google Search Console in here. That is good, because I wanted to do a good session on Google Search Console, where we see the different errors in your Google Search consoles and how we can answer fix them. Okay, anything else in technical SEO that we that you want to know before we move on? Yes,
JaQueen McNair 46:40
It might be a silly question, but can you briefly explain index? Again, you gave a really good example in there about how the bots kind of use you use the library example about how the the bots go.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 47:03
I always use the library example, okay, so indexing, uh okay,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 47:14
so indexing basically is putting the right is deciding what that page is and then putting it in the shell. So imagine you are a library, a librarian. You have a lot of books, and you need to decide where this book belongs and where to put it. So it will depend on is this book the same as another book. Is this book unique? Is this book easy to read? Is this book understandable? And then when you have that book, you already can classify it in in the place that it belongs to, so in the right corridor, you know that it belongs to health.
It belongs to how to treat diabetes, and it was, it’s been written by this person who only talks about top level and is not super scientific. So you you know where it belongs, and you put it in the right place that is indexing. But obviously before that, that person had to be able to get the book and understanding with understanding which is rendering, finally, also what’s all the errors that we can find? Yes.
Actually, categorizing is part of indexing is a good is a good way of saying it yes, there are a lot of arrows that can, let’s say, limits how Google indexes. And this is what I was saying. So if you have imagined the person in charge of the library bought two books that are exactly about the same topic, they are exactly a similar and the person doesn’t and only has a space for one. The person doesn’t know which one that is, which one to put in in the shell.
That is what we call the cannibalization issue. Imagine that it has the wrong label as well. So you have a you can see that it’s about health, but you are telling someone that is about washing your hair. So if the librarian doesn’t know, probably the chances are there is going to leave it there and figure out at some point. So this is how indexing tends to be blocked. And frankly, well for me, it’s not the most difficult, because rendering is the most difficult.
Indexing is the most common, the most common one that can cause issues. And you will going to be talking about canonicals self. Canonical can analyze that is one of the most common issues that you’re going to find. And I like to use the example in this case of Twilight the book. So you have to ally. Then another one that has a very similar name, and then it’s all about lighting, but it’s really about vampires, right? But you need to tell Google that they all belong to the same series, right?
So that is what canonical is. You have the title Twilight. This book is the number one, number two, number three, number four. You need to put a canonical, but we’re going to be talking about that more in the in detail in the next section, actually, what we’re going to we’re going to be talking about all these steps and all the errors that you can find on all these steps. Yeah, just realize I always use the sample of the library. I didn’t realize. Yeah. Any other questions? Did you clarify?
JaQueen McNair 50:44
Thank you.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 50:48
Anything else? Or we move into content? Okay, we’re going to move into content. Now. This is a technical SEO course, right? But I already said the technical SEO is linked to everything. Everything out there, people will say, you know, you just need to do one audit, and that’s it. No, that’s not true. Never, never listen to people if it’s me. But we need to also understand contents. Because I just said it earlier, content, H ones and H twos are classified as content, but it was causing me a lot of issues because it was set up in the code with the wrong h1 and h2 so it’s really important that we understand each of the different type of content.
What role do they play in the parts of ranking the contents, and what do you need to do about it? So the first one we’re going to talk about is methods, which is what I just said, h1 h2 h3 and also meta description and etc. Why is meta and particularly h1 important? So I said earlier that Google close the page and then, thanks to bird, gets all the words and understand the topic on that page, and understand if we see good enough to show it to an user.
Sometimes we talk about crawl budgets, and sometimes Google won’t have enough time to read all your content to go from the top to the bottom. So what does Google do? Checks the methods only the methods doesn’t read all your content, so because obviously it’s in a hurry, right? So it gets h1 one, h1 2h, one, three, and he says, Okay, these are the H ones. This page is about this. So that’s why it’s very important that the H ones are understood and properly placed in in the codes, and that they are optimized with the right keywords. Also important Google reads from Okay, from the right to the left and from the top to the bottom, like a like a person like that.
And also, if you are doing Arabic, you need to know that, because Google is going to read your content on the wrong way. Also, if you are doing Japanese, but it’s very important that the keywords are put at the beginning as well. If you are putting an internal link in an anchor text, if you put them at the beginning of the page and as soon as possible for Google to understand much better, because if Google has to run off because it doesn’t have time you are making sure that they’re reading the codes at the anchor text. So that is meta on site is what we call a content that they use to describe a page, but it’s not trying to engage deeply with the user.
So what is this? It tends to be product pages. Sorry. My my phone product pages when you have the top description of the product, but anyway you are seeing the image, but the top the product content is classified, like on site a category page, when you have the top of the category page saying, Here you can find all our red leather shoes that is on site content, content that is meant to be direct and concise, but then you have long, long form content.
And this is videos, this is blogs, this is white papers. These are the content, the type of content that is meant to convince the user that you are an expert on the topic, that you are providing it, that you know what to talk about. And this type of content is really important as well, because it needs to be fresh, right? Fresh, the fresh content update. It was also an update that happened last year or the year before, they was making sure that the content that got surfaced in Google was always the latest. And this happened. This happened particularly became a Google algorithm because of covid, because there was a lot of information about covid Coming up every single day, and sometimes all information was ranking. So Google had to make sure that the newest information was always. The latest.
So this is the fresh content, and that is why it’s very important that we update the content as soon or often at least. Why am I saying this? And you’re going to be like, Okay, this is pure content. This is it. This absolutely doesn’t have anything to do with technical SEO. It does have to do with technical SEO, because you need to put in the code of a schema. What type of content is this? Is this a blog? Is this a video? Is it written by an author? Author schema? When was it written? Schema with the dates, so making sure the right technical setup is there.
It will mean that Google will find your content, read your content, and if it doesn’t have time to read it all, understand what it is about by getting the schema. So again, it’s all about making sure that we’re giving everything the easiest possible to Google. And that’s why technical SEO always needs to be related to content or working closely with content, and finally, external link. Now external, I said at the beginning, is super important. It’s part of Google co algorithm, right? I just said, Not boost and branding, but also you need to make sure that you’re not getting links from spammy places, because a you don’t want to be affected by a spammy link update.
So as a technical SEO, you need to monitor that the links that you’re getting externally, first of all, have the right anchor text, because this is like many times that you are selling clothes and you get anchor text about economics. You don’t want that, because you want to make sure that your website is linked with the topic that you care about. And second, you don’t want them to be spammy links that are a bit dodgy, and Google will classify us.
Yeah, as I leave. So this is why it is important that we also monitor that. And I’m talking about contents and not links. But again, in SEO, everything is connected, so we cannot treat SEO as one single thing. Any questions about content? No, I think you are all experts on content here anyway, so probably you’re gonna be teaching me rather than the other way around. So yes.
stephanie inabo 57:21
So Carmen I’m having, okay, I’m working with a local brand that is actually a publishing and okay, the offer graphic design and printing services. So I’m thinking of the information architecture. Sorry, I think it’s connected to content.
That’s why I’m raising this up now, because I also did, like, drafted the information architecture for a small farm. But the issue I’m having now is this, they have so many things that they can do like this, categorize into four major services, publishing, that’s Bucha magazine, publishing, printing, graphics, design and branding, because the brand for company organizations.
So the issue is, I see their competitors get very specific and and have pages for wedding cards, Islamic wedding card, Christian wedding card, white wedding card. And the thing is, they are a small team. I’m still I’m, I am. It’s just one person I have as collaborating with me. Really, I noticed everything I was delegating was on her table. So I’m careful not to take too much work, but I want to get them results.
So I for now, I say, Okay, let this site just go up. I focus on the core, like the general pages and created an FAQ section and stuff like that. But I am seeing I when I checked the search volume for one page, I saw about 2000 per month that’s within my country.
So I’m thinking, Okay, do I create so many pages for each team? For example, they say customization and custom umbrellas, custom T shirts, custom do I create a page for everything in order to target the keywords? Or I’m really trying to think about the content here.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 59:20
So it really depends how different it is. In general, if your competitors are doing it, probably you need to do it. But again, it will always depend on, is it the primary thing that they sell on the time that you have to do it? Because if you only, let’s say you only do five hours with them, there is no point on you trying to do pages with low quality content. It’s better for you to focus on one with proper content, with proper research and with proper internal linking.
But in general, by you said, in the long term, they should have one page because Google will in. I obviously always show whatever has the right description, the right content, and if they have very little description about a service and other competitors are showing loans, long description, long blog posts, and also internal linking, white papers. Google is also always going to prioritize the other one that is showing more expertise.
But there are also things that you were saying there that you could do, and we can talk about it if you want to use them in an example in the next lessons, because we can look into different things.
stephanie inabo 1:00:35
Thank you. Thank you.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:00:37
And you just said, I have not mentioned local yet, but local, it can be a good way of actually targeting over competitors, because I said it at the beginning, Google will show whatever you rank best, but will choose your location to show it. So if I search for gold shoes, and any of you searches for goals, I can guarantee you that my SERP is not going to be the same as yours, because it will depend on the IP where I searched before Google will know that I am searching gold sandals.
You might be searching gold boots. So local is very important way of actually trying to target or compete with your competitors, and we will talk about it in a local session as well. So might be a good example for us to look into
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:01:31
External links. So this is a content like lots of people have a lot of different opinions about External links, Google, for years have been saying that links don’t matter to rank because what it matters is that your content is good. But recently, this year and last year, Google was being investigated by the European Union and the Department of Justice about the ranking factors and how they manipulate contents in one of the things that has surfaced is that links absolutely do matter.
Now it’s not like before penguin when you will buy 10, 100 500 links, and then you will automatically run number one, but having links towards a page, it does a thumbs up, and he actually makes your page go up. And you don’t need to have that many. You have to have one from a good da with the right anchor text to make sure that your page runs. And in fact, giving you the sample I always give you about this client that had the weird age once they were wondering why they’re doing great content, if the images is perfect, if they have good branding, they were not ranking number one for a blog for a product where the competitor did and I looked into it, and in fact, the competitor has three links pointed towards the product from Da above 71 amaclam has zero.
So yes, do not listen to Google links do matter now, there are other things that Google has introduced in the algorithm that do matter as well. And probably lots of you have talked, have heard talking about entity SEO or doing entity content, entities do matter because actually use, using AI, what chatgpt does, it allocates extra value to certain entities, and if that entity is within a piece of context, it will add some value.
And I can show you how Google works in the background, and maybe I have it here. One second, I do have it in here, and I’ll probably send the link to you guys so you can test it. I’m going to show you how Google understands entities. One second. Can you see?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:04:14
Yes, awesome. I always, always use the example of Boris Johnson’s. Please don’t judge me say that guy makes me laugh. So I always use the example of the description of Boris Johnson from Wikipedia. So if you can see here, this is how natural language processing works, which is the main core algorithm of Google. It’s called mom, and also all Gemini. Now they call it Gemini. I’m sure that you all have heard of it.
So Gemini is in the core algorithm is is natural language processing, and is the same that chatgpt. So as you can see in here, this is able to identify every single entity or core part of a tech. Test and allocate a label so you can see that in here, this piece of test, I copy and paste it in here, knows automatically that Boris Johnson is a person, knows that the United Kingdom is allocation, I mean enemy Street, administrative area and a country in understands everything of this page and everything has a tag, which means that without having a link, Google is able to get a piece of content and understand it. And I can also give you the sample of myself when I started doing SEO, or well, my my background, which I gave you last time I was a translator. I did.
I wasn’t I was an SEO so as a translator, I was always very interested in an astro language processing because it meant at some point it was going to be able to translate. The machine will translate, and wouldn’t need me, which is still does. So I remember when he first started, and he was not that advanced. So I used to put my description in a natural language processor, and they wouldn’t understand anything about me. Now I put my name in this tool because I show you the free version. But now I put my name and yeah, he knows that I am an SEO. He knows that I do run.
He knows I really like coffee. And he gets all this from my LinkedIn, from my social media, from the description every single time that I talk, from whenever links into me or not just by mentioning me, is able to understand who I am and what do I do.
And that is why links matter, but also mention matters matter. So it’s very important that your brand or the website that you are looking after is mentioned in different places. That’s why digital PR is very important. But going back to the links, because I think decreasing links are important because actually it forces the crawl to end up in your site. You remember when we were talking about crawl budgets, your Yes, someone has a question.
Unzila Siddique 1:07:08
Hi, I wanted to give an example regarding these matter that External links are of value. Think of your website as a study that you publish in a scientific journal, if that study is like, valid and has any weight to it, other authors are going to cite it into their work.
And the more citations you have, the more weightage your journal would have. So even if like Google says the link don’t matter or like don’t do it. They don’t have any weight. Still link to your site and try to attract as many good quality links as you can.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:07:50
That’s true, but it’s really important that we think of good quality. What’s really good? Example, good quality and relevance is more important than quality the relevance. So to give you another example of links, when I used to work in my protein, I was doing a campaign on international markets, and my campaign was about our specific village, what this village used to do, and it was different villages in Spain.
Most of the publications that were giving me links were local publications that had nothing to do with the sport, nothing to do with proteins, nothing to do with anything that I do. So the impact of this campaign, which cost 5,000k was zero, even if I got 12 links. Why? Because it was not relevant. So it is important that the links that you get are relevant, but it’s exactly why you explain is because people need to click into it. Otherwise.
How does Google know that it’s relevant? It might as well see it, but if no one is actually clicking, then it’s not. It’s not showing the thumb up. There’s no showing the issue of interest. But if people do click, it is forcing the crawler to go back to your website. So basically, this
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:09:20
Oh, anyway, so what was I saying? Oh, yeah, if we said that, every single website has, by default, allocated crawl budget, right? So that is whenever the crawler visits your website, but if suddenly this crawler is crawling another website and finds you. Your link is going to come back to your site and then crawl it again. So it’s free. Crawl budgets is showing that it needs to be recrawled, that it is important. So from the technical perspective, that is why links matter.
And then. And the anchor tech that is used is also really important, because whenever the Google is coming, it knows that is coming to a rich red shoes, less less red sandals. So it’s Google will allocate red leather sandals with my page. And when next time someone says searches red leather sandals, Google is going to know that my page needs to book up because it has found in another place and people are clicking. So people do care. So anchor text is super ignored by SEOs.
Base there is really, really important. I, my opinion, one of the best ways of actually getting Google to understand your sites. And finally, relevancy of the domain, which we already covered, it needs to be relevant to your sites, otherwise people won’t click on it. And finally, branding, So traditionally, I say that at the beginning as well. Traditionally, branding has been ignored by SEOs because they were like, it’s not my thing.
This is for PR. This is for head of brands. I don’t care, but yeah, it is important because it is a ranking factor. And we can see here that when true text, which used to be a client of mine, was not doing PR, even if everything was right in SEO, the traffic was going down, going down. Why? Because there was no interest on the brand.
People was not searching for them. So Google understood that this site is not authoritative enough, or is not to be trusted, and it started popping down in the rankings. So brand, even though it’s not as easy as an SEO to manipulate or to work on your favor, everything right, everything right, but your rankings are going down, the chances are that branding is the reason.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:11:59
And so this is just a way that we can increase brand awareness and actually also increase it. Which is really important is by making sure that you do campaign, creative campaigns, that you have influencers working with you. They don’t need to be super famous influencers. They need to be relevant and the topic, and those are the things that you can do as an SEO but then that is once everything technically sorted.
Now my goals, I feel I have talked for hours. This is the session for today. This today was meant to be introductory of how Google works to understand the most basic things when I think, when you get this right, when you understand this, all you can do from here is just increase, increase, increase your knowledge on technical SEO, the most important bit is to have the basis covered, which is what I was hoping to to achieve in in in The training today. Do you guys have any questions. Yes, myself,
JaQueen McNair 1:13:05
I just want to say thank you so much for mentoring us and doing this training. I thoroughly enjoyed this today and listening to all your questions as well, and I feel like you answered my question, but I still kind of have a bit of a question around the External links, or, I guess some people call them backlinks, or, I don’t know, so you said that the relevancy of the website determines, or the relevancy of the external link determines, whether or not Google will rank you Higher as an authority in that subject.
So if that site is relevant to you your industry, it’s kind of like an upvote. I’ve always wondered if social media links are useful for the companies that I work for, because, you know, I always have to put links in the content, like on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on x now, and even, you know, Instagram, you know, putting it in a bio.
And so when I’m hearing about the relevancy, it sounds like, you know, Facebook itself is not relevant enough, right for that link to improve the ranking, but And so, I guess a deeper question for me is, would the group that the link is coming from matter or like the specific LinkedIn account you know how you’ll have bios and descriptions?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:14:43
Is a very, very, very good question. I’m hoping that is somewhere here.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:14:51
So having links in. Showing you in your from your website to your social media, from your website, your social media, to your page. It is important. Google doesn’t from social media, won’t it, won’t consider it externally, because it’s not coming when I within a context of text. So you we will see whenever we do the crawling of websites that Google differentiates the type of link that you get. You can get a link from an image, from a logo, from within context of contents within the codes.
So from social media, it does help with it. It helps to identify the that you are in the right places that users can easily find, you can easily contact, you can engage with you via if you have any problems. So yes, having links in social media is quite important, and the more presence you have, the better. But it won’t. It won’t count as a backlink on in the context that we’re talking about and I wanted to see because I’m sure that I’ve seen it in here. That is somewhere, but this image is so complex that I might not be able to find it easily.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:16:24
Yeah but, yeah, it will also use it for schema,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:16:34
Knowledge Graph and also for the content it crawls. So I definitely encourage you to put it, even if I don’t find it in this image, I might go up back after and find it and then send you a screenshot. But yes, I encourage all of you to do it. Any other questions? And I hope I answered,
JaQueen McNair 1:16:56
yes. It sparked another question, though.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:17:03
Yeah, any other question that you guys have? I mean, you can also contact me. It’s like, if you have questions after, anyway, okay, okay,
Unzila Siddique 1:17:14
so I do have a question, um, it’s, it’s more of, it’s more of like asking for your opinion rather than a question. But recently, I had someone reach out to me to place their link in my article. Now, this website is pretty well known.
It’s g2 if you’ve heard about it’s like Trustpilot and everything else. So even though they are asking me to put a link in my article which is relevant, but do you think like the overall relevancy of the website would affect my rankings,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:17:56
like you giving a link to them, yeah, yeah, it might. What it might do is improve your rankings. Actually, if Google is able to understand that you are using it properly because you are, how can I say referring if it’s relevant, of course, referring to an external website,
Unzila Siddique 1:18:23
the article is relevant. The article is relevant, but the niche of that website isn’t like, it’s a review website,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:18:32
so the link is not relevant.
Unzila Siddique 1:18:35
No, like, like the domain of the website, it’s a review website, so it won’t exactly be similar to my domain, but the link they’re asking me to insert is for an article which is relevant to something that I have written.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:18:52
So if, if the page is relevant, then don’t, don’t. I mean, don’t worry about the domain, because the domain might be a review, but they might also write important content. It’s like, how can I say I don’t know a I like, I’m talking about nutrition, and a company that I mentioned that sells protein pasta is asking me for a link. So you may think selling pasta, but actually they also, myself, one product that is protein pasta, and I’m talking about nutrition.
So it might be, if it makes sense in the context of what you’re writing about and what they asking you to link. Yes, you might Google normally places the rankings based on the overall domain, but also consider topics. So if the topic is relevant, then I wouldn’t be scared. I will do it.
Unzila Siddique 1:19:51
Thank you for answering. Yeah,
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:19:52
not sure if it makes sense, because it was a complex explanation. I hope it makes sense.
Unzila Siddique 1:19:58
No, no, it does. Thank you for answering.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:20:01
No worries. My pleasure. Yes,
JaQueen McNair 1:20:09
I do have an opinion asked as well. It is around topic clusters when you were going over that does a company need to make the pillar a pillar page for every topic cluster? Or can they simply link internal pages to one another that are relevant to the keyword, and which one of those, I guess, would make the website rank higher on Google.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:20:50
This is a question and a debate that lots of SEOs have, and there are people who think you always need to create a pillar page within the blog and then link out. I think there is a very old fashioned way to do it. You need to think of what’s used, useful for the user. So for example, when I was doing content classes for visa, I wouldn’t create a specific pillar page for every product that every service that we were doing, I was using the service page as the pillar.
Because why do you need to create another one when you already have a service page that actually is the one that you will be bringing the revenue? So what I did, I use that one and then I link out to all the rest. Link from that one to the rest. I think the important bit is that the anchor text is right. They are in the right place, and people click into it.
It makes sense to have the links. You don’t need to create another page, because you might as well dilute traffic, which is, you may have one person coming to the page, go to another one, go to another one, and then dilute it, and it’s going to make it more complex for the user to find the information, and also the user might get lost in the website.
You need to think about the complexity of your pages as well. You don’t need to have 1000s and 1000s, because you might just be able to have all the information in two, three, rather than 20. Lots of people think that more is better, but I always think think about what’s better for your user, not more is better, most of the cases.
JaQueen McNair 1:22:39
Thank you so much. Excellent.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:22:44
Any other questions, guys, we have one minute No, okay, well, oh yes, one question, yay,
Unzila Siddique 1:22:57
not exactly a question. I just wanted to know if this slide would be shared with us?
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:23:07
Yeah, I was about to say this, we will send the send the recording, which I don’t own. The slide as well. I’m gonna make it nicer, because I realized that some of the slides are a bit old, so I need to update them. But yeah, we’ll send it over the weekend, on Monday or on Monday.
Unzila Siddique 1:23:29
Oh, okay, and, like, I just wanted to request if you share the agenda for our weekly meeting before, before we’re having the meeting like, a day before, so we can, like, kind of go over things that we need to study, or something else
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:23:46
Absolutely. And in fact, I’m going to, I have a template with an Excel with all of them, with all the dates and what we’re doing in all of them. So I’ll just share that, so you guys have it for from here to the end of November.
Unzila Siddique 1:24:01
Okay, perfect. Thank you.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 1:24:03
Thank you. Cool. Okay, so if this is all, thank you very much, guys. I really like the questions, and see you in one week again. If you have any questions, you can find me in Slack. I’ll might not reply straight away, but I will definitely reply, thank you. Have a lovely weekend.
JaQueen McNair 1:24:26
Bye. Thank you. Bye.
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