![Can I rank for the term [Jonathan Jones]?](https://vlexo.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/MrJonathanJones-240x240.png)
Can I rank for the term [Jonathan Jones]?
14SHARESFacebookTwitter So just last week, I created a vCard website, which also has a blog on it called Mr Jonathan Jones. Why did I create this website? Well, first of all, I’m looking to up my game on freelance & consultancy. Having a memorable domain and more professional named service is something I’ve struggled with, with this domain name and others that I own. It’s quite easy for me to say, go to ‘MrJonathanJones.com’ if I’m at a conference, and that can be easily remembered given it is also my name, so will come up often when speaking to potential clients/contacts. I can also use the website as a point of reference in the future if I decide to do any presentations at any sort of conference and try and earn recognition within the industry that way as well. I eventually want to develop this out a bit more (freelancing) and now that I have my own office, I can do this with more comfort, let’s just say. You can see a picture of my home office below: I want to rank for my own name The second reason why I’ve created MrJonathanJones.com is because I want to rank for my own name. My ambition is at some point in the future, I’ll be able to either Google ‘Mr Jonathan Jones’ or ‘Jonathan Jones’ and my website will appear. That’d be impressive in my honest opinion. However, I do have some competition – the likes of a Guardian journalist who shares my common name. Using, ‘howmanyofme.com’, I can see that my surname is the 5th most popular in the US, and my first name being the 119th most popular, so a good indicative guide as to how popular/common my name is. You can see from the search results below that the journalist appears to dominate, but also there is someone who works for the Civil Service, and they have their own page on a government domain – so tough competition! I am looking to consolidate my blogging effort to Mr Jonathan Jones I have about 3 blogs, and I’ve got to that point where I no longer have time to update any of them. If I can consolidate, then it’d give me more time, as well as an extra push to update my blogs more frequently. I’m off to a very good start with Mr Jonathan Jones, as I’ve gone somewhat viral with a post I published on Twitter last week on Thursday around a Google Data Studio template I created that anyone can use – which sort of aides and replaces the new Google Search Console, Search Analytics...
Catching up with Google’s Gary Illyes in Brighton
15SHARESFacebookTwitter If you headed over to Brighton SEO this September, you’ll have seen that the keynote speaker was Gary Illyes at Google. Jennifer Slegg asked some really good questions during the keynote Q&A! Though as Gary can’t really give away much, there were not very many actionable things you could take away. Other than it is pointless to ‘chase the algorithm’, off the back of the comment that 95% of algorithm updates are not actionable. I walked up to Gary after for a chat, and managed to get a picture too, but also attempted to ask some questions and listen to others questions. The answers he gave were a little more detailed than what was stated up on stage, so it was a real good bit of insight that most others didn’t get. Gary was previously an engineer for the search ranking team, so he does know a thing or two, but whether he gives anything away is another detail however. Does AdWords interaction have any sort of impact on Organic Search? My question to Gary was around AdWords impacting Organic search. At first when I asked this question, he stopped me before I could complete the question. The question was not whether the AdWords team interacts with the Search engineers, but rather, do the Search team at Google recognise a relationship between AdWords behavior impacting/influencing click-throughs to organic results. Gary’s answer was an immediate no to AdWords impacting organic search. I had to clarify and follow up with a more detailed question off the back of that question, which I did.. There are not too many public cases where site owners have given away the fact that AdWord results has had an impact on the results in organic search, with specific regard to the brand in question appearing. There is a case study with eBay, in fact, from 2013 showing the CTRs for brand searches, and what the impact on organic CTR looks like when turning off AdWords. You can guess that it increases, as people will look for the brand in the organic results. But what about for generic results, and how does impact rankings over-time? The interesting thing for me is that Gary mentioned at the conference that Rank Brain, the mysterious machine learning algorithm, is an algorithm that looks at “historic trends” in Gary Illyes’ own words. As an aside to this, outside of the Q&A on stage, I was with others asking questions, and whilst I did not bring the up the question, he did bring up the terms ‘head tail’ and ‘long tail’, which makes me think that Google categorises their data sets in this way...
The Growth of Featured Snippets (2016 – 2017)
9SHARESFacebookTwitter Featured Snippets was a pretty hot topic back in 2016, especially in the Finance sector, an area that I work in. It’s only just begun in terms of the topic really as we’ve experienced 700% growth in terms of Answer Box/Featured Snippet appearances in this area. Google are making further changes to these snippets, which I’ll dive into a little below. This article will effectively look at Featured Snippets from my point of view, which is an area that I’ve been working on since 2015. The Featured Snippets came to light in Google’s search results for a relatively small number of queries back in 2014, but then only really impacted my area at the end of 2015. Google Trends Research You can see ‘featured snippets’ has seen its interest over time in Google Trends grow, and that’s likely due to the higher number of appearances and therefore interest in these types of results: Featured Snippet Growth from 2016 to 2017 Across 10,000 or so of the top finance related keywords I am tracking, Featured Snippets show up for 33% of those keywords. This is huge growth of around 700% when looking at February 2016 to February 2017. We’ve only seen the number of these Featured Snippets growing from last year, even for highly commercial search terms, which don’t appear to even have questions showing up that you would think would trigger a Featured Snippet. Either way, I think the growth is quite startling and can even be overwhelming when trying to optimise your content for these queries. You can see the growth visualised in the chart below. We first really spotted them becoming a much bigger thing back in October 2015, and it looks like in October 2016 there has been further growth from that point on wards: What’s the Biggest Challenge with Featured Snippets? As an in-house SEO, my biggest challenge with these is that they change all the time. One day they’ll be there, the next they’ll be gone, or you’ll appear in one, then someone else will, then you will again. You purely take turns with others. However, there are some lucrative terms that have maintained a Featured Snippet presence, and we’ve done some analysis to identify what uplift that brings whenever we do appear in one of the long-term Featured Snippets, and it’s roughly a 2% increase in Click Through Rate, which can mean a huge difference if it’s for very large commercial search terms. This can obviously pay off for the all the work you’ve been doing around it, if you’ve managed to land a highly commercial term. The Future of Featured Snippets We’ve seen huge...
Google Search Console vs Google Analytics (2017 Edition)
12SHARESFacebookTwitter Russ Jones at Moz recently came out with an article around the reliability of Google Search Console data – listing examples of where they had tested some of the platform’s features versus what they saw as the realities. It’s a really interesting read, and it poses the question whether SEOs should even be using the data from Search Console if we aren’t getting the correct information from the tool in question. I am an extensive user of Google Search Console, but also use other tools to validate the work that I do, so reading Russ’ article really does pose many questions. However, in this article, I am purely going to focus on the aspect around the reliability of Google Search Analytics data – the part of the tool that provides web owners with what I consider to be highly valuable keyword data. I am going to keep things really simple, and will compare Google Analytics session data with Google Search Console click data. Comparing Sessions and Clicks If we take Google’s article on comparing AdWords data with Analytics data, then comparing these two metrics, Sessions and Clicks, they will never match 100%, as the two metrics are calculated differently. And that’s just from an AdWords click and Google Search Analytics click comparison, not an Google Organic Click perspective. I think it is safe to assume that PPC Clicks and Organic Clicks might be measured similarly in nature, but perhaps there might be more filtering in PPC to remove fraudulent clicks etc. Either way, comparing Search Analytics Clicks to Google Analytics Sessions, should show a fairly close correlation between the two data sets. In short: Google Analytics Sessions data records when a user enters a site, but the browser must first download the Google Analytics JavaScript file, then that must be interpreted by the browser. A session also lasts for 30 minutes, so if a user does a search, lands on a site, then does the same search again, and lands on the same page, then that counts as 1 session. Google Search Console records a click whenever a click is conducted on a listing in the search results – pretty straight forward. Unlike sessions, there are no 30 minute timers, and a Click is classifed as multiple clicks, if even from the same person. From this, you’d expect any data in Google Search Analytics to be higher than Google Analytics. Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828#click Examples of high correlations First comparison – a relatively low volume page: I decided to pick and compare a page with a low click count, as Russ mentioned that in their tests, they did analysis that looked at a...
Google Increased Width of Organic Search Results
16SHARESFacebookTwitter Table of Contents Extended Headlines for PPC Organic Search Extended Headlines What does this now look like for Organic Search? (Do a Google search!) Answer Box / Featured Snippets Normal Search Results When did this happen for Organic Search? How prominent is this layout change? Extended Headlines for PPC In the SEO community, we always hear of updates on PPC that can potentially impact organic in a negative way, but I’m here to give some good news for SEOs that Google have applied to the search results – without even telling us! Shock, horror… So you’ve probably heard the latest round of news that Google are running a closed beta that will expand the PPC meta data – therefore potentially making their ads more prominent. And for simplicity – whether this is the official name or not, I’m going to call it Extended Headlines… just because I can. You can find more on this subject on Search Engine Land where they cover the Extended Headlines closed beta that Google are running with probably only the bigger brands. This change is unheard of in SEM and is big news, and can potentially take away eyeballs from Organic Search. You can see the example screenshot below of what I’m talking about: Moving on to the good news from the bad news… Organic Search Extended Headlines Yes, that’s right. Google have actually released this before they have done so for PPC. I know through watching interviews with Matt Cutts, ex Head of Webspam at Google, and through watching a very recent Q&A with Paul Haahr, a software engineer at Google, that the paid search team and the organic search team at Google work completely separately. However, I am wondering if this idea of the Extended Headlines originated from the organic search team, then moved over to the paid team at Google who took this idea as a way of increasing ad clicks, based on potential tests that the organic search team at Google have conducted. Speculation. What does this now look like for Organic Search? (Do a Google search!) Answer Box / Featured Snippets First up is the Answer Box or Featured Snippets, these have increased significantly in width, but have seen a decrease in height. The before shows that the Featured Snippet box has gone from a width of 557 px to 644 px (+87 px), but the height has seen a decrease from 195 px to 176 px. This is a significant decrease, but this is potentially beneficial to results below the Featured Snippets as they will have become slightly more visible as a result of the decrease in height for results with the...
Search Console Hacked Site Manual Action Review Still NOT Automated
18SHARESFacebookTwitter Update – 20/10/2015 – Google have now removed the hacked content notification from Search Console after 3 days. It didn’t take too long and in the message, all I put was that the sub-domain hosting the so called ‘hacked content’ had been suspended, and that my web host was looking into the reasons why this had been an issue in the first place. So, I was surprised to find out today that my site has been hacked or more so Google had detected ‘hacked content’ on this very website. Google recently stated that for 2015, the number of hacked sites had increased by 180% and a 300% increase in ‘hacked reconsideration requests’. They’ve been trying to make the process of getting any partial penalties removed easier by automating it, but it seems in my situation I’m still going to have to have my site manually reviewed as they’ve not gone as far as rolling out the automated review yet to everyone and have limited it to beta testing (as of the GWC post I’ve linked to above). Thanks to Google for spotting this, as I would not have noticed this. I wouldn’t say my site has been compromised, but more the fact that another customer (with my web hosting company) on the same shared server on this website simply created a sub-domain and put up a really spammy website that linked out to pornographic websites. Not what I wanted to hear on a Saturday evening. Right now my home page is coming up with the ‘This site may be hacked.’ messaging just above my meta description. I simply contacted my web host to find out what was going on and they’ve now suspended the sub-domain ‘wap.vlexo.net’. I’m also trying to figure out how this even happened and if whether it’s a security flaw on my web hosts side of things. I’ve submitted a reconsideration request through Google Search Console, so I just need to wait now I suppose: I explained the situation to Google and exactly what had happened. The is the message that appears once you hit the submit button for the review of your site by someone on Google’s end. It’s a shame that the process is not automated because I’m betting the process that found that bit of apparent ‘hacked’ content is very likely automated. Google’s message, as you can see below, clearly states that ‘This process may take some time’, which clearly isn’t good enough. I mean, imagine if this was large website or a bank that had been hacked — they’d literally have to wait for Google to remove ‘This site has been hacked.’ from...
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