<p>Agreed on AMP being ONE more thing to do, and that's a drag. One option to consider is making your entire site AMP (both desktop and mobile). Of course, that comes with a big commitment to learn how to do it, and to exceut it successfully.</p>

<p>The AMP Automatic plugin still has some challenges, and I currently prefer the AMP for Wordpress plugin, as it allows more customization. Truth be told, some of our AMP pages are actually hand-coded in AMP, rater than using the plugins. Try the Gravity Forms plugin together with AMP for Wordpress, and you may have better luck (we did).</p> <p>Also, watch the AMP Automatic plugin because Google is helping them with a major update to that.</p>

<p>This is the Myntra case study page: <a href="https://www.stonetemple.com/amp-case-study/myntra/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stonetemple.com/amp-case-study/myntra/</a>. However, it doesn't provide additional metrics. Sorry about that!</p>

<p>agreed!</p>

<p>It does take time to implement AMP. In fact, it's critical that you spend that time. The most important pages to convert are your main landing pages. It's true that conversion may suffer some if a user goes from a fast AMP landing page to slower pages, but it will still better than it would have been if you're landing page was really slow.</p>

<p>Hi Tom - great write up overall. One thing I want to point out though, and this is why I still believe that links remain a very big deal, is that in our study that you linked to above (<a href="https://www.stonetemple.com/links-remain-a-very-powerful-ranking-factor-study/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stonetemple.com/links-remain-a-very-po...</a>) we provided more than just a correlation analysis. We also included a section called "Cementing the Point With Case Studies", in which we shared our experiences with a number of highly competitive keywords.</p> <p>For client confidentiality reasons, we did not identify the specific keywords, but the case studies are real, and have been repeated many times over. We continue to see that a process of driving links to existing pages surely and steadily drives up their ranking. We've done this across several different marketplaces.</p> <p>That does not mean, of course, that it works for all marketplaces.</p>

<p>Hi John - I'm alluding to many factors, one of biggest of which is the raise of voice search. The more people use voice, the less they'll not be interacting with a search box.</p>

<p>Hi Abbas - some more tactical stuff can be a big part of what you do, just make sure that the quality level is high enough that it doesn't negatively impact the brand in the process!</p>

<p>Agreed Simon! And, if you're intending to be a long time player in a market, this approach will net you the best links anyway.</p>

<p>Absolutely makes sense to focus some energy on influencers to build your reach and influence, but you can't ignore the rest of the audience either!</p>

<p>Discuss why it’s so important to go to where your audience is on the Interwebs instead of simply expecting them to come to your site, and how that impacts your overall marketing strategy.</p>

<p>Hi Paul - my point of view on RankBrain is quite a bit different. You can read about it here: <a href="https://www.stonetemple.com/rankbrain-myth-busting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stonetemple.com/rankbrain-myth-busting...</a>. Basically, my understanding of RankBrain is that its sole purpose is to help Google better understand user queries That's it. It won't replace link algos, Panda, or other algos at all.</p> <p>However, the more general concept of machine learning or AI may be what you really meant to focus on. I agree that these will play a bigger role over time. However, as someone that has built a few different machine learning algorithms myself, I believe that Google will be slow to replace successful human generate algorithms with machine generated ones.</p> <p>I'm not saying it won't happen, just that it won't happen as quickly as many people think. And even when it does, well still come back to similar factors, such as content and links.</p>

<p>Hi Elanor - I don't know if traffic through 3rd party links is important or not as a specific thing that Google would measure. However, it seems likely to me that Google would prefer you to be obtaining links from place where your target audience actually spends time, rather than abitrary third party web sites.</p>

<p>Hi Joe - I'm sure they use Chrome to gather data in some form, but it's hard to know how. Could they be trying to model consumer usage patterns with it? Possibly, but I honestly don't know.</p>

<p>Hi Jonny - no great way to prevent someone from linking to you, but fortunately, the great majority of us don't really need to worry about it. The best thing to do is to monitor your link profile and do your best to disavow the crappy ones as they come in.</p>

<p>Hi Abel, sad to say, but you're right, sometimes people with crappy link profiles do indeed rank, even with poor content. Fortunately, it's getting rarer though, and it's crazy for any real business to use mass link collection (to use your phrase) as a strategy. Better to play the game for the long haul!</p>

<p>Hi Andrew - I disagree on the point about relevance. If a user does a query for "best boston hotels", and article about "best places to see in Boston", that mentions some great places in a subsection in the article, is somewhat relevant to the topic, but not nearly as relevant as an article that is 100% focused on an article solely about the best hotels to stay at in Boston. See what I mean? That's what I mean by "partially relevant". Hope that helps.</p> <p>Also, a unique approach to content is usually achievable in most markets (but probably not all). Most companies don't invest in their on site content, or content marketing, anywhere the way they should. That's good news, in my opinion though, as it spells opportunity for those of us who do!</p>

<p>I'm not sure, as I'm not familiar with PageFrog at this time, although, I've heard great things about it.</p>

<p>Glad you liked it! One of the big things I'm pushing people to realize is that there is SO much opportunity in the land of mobile. Opportunity to gain a competitive advantage, and that's worth pursuing.</p>

<p>In principle, whether you do mobile subfolders or different web sites should not matter from an SEO perspective, but you do need to get the mechanics of setting them up properly (with all the right redirects and tags).</p>

<p>Hi Luis - I think it will happen both ways. Sometimes spoken responses are more appropriate, but on the other hand, if you ask for directions, you probably want a maps style response, and the directions may be spoken one by one.</p>

<p>Mostly I've read a lot online and took the Coursera course. I had not checked either of these 2 books like, but they both look quite interesting.</p>

<p>Neural networks are one approach to implementing machine learning. There are several others, but it was a neural network that I used to train my algorithm for the retweet prediction tool.</p>

<p>Agreed with the concept of well written content, but it also plays into e-commerce pages where the quality of the user engagement and the comprehensiveness of how the person's needs are met are considerations.</p>

<p>I don't think that CTR is the only thing they can do. They can look at data from their human quality raters and see how they rate sites, and use that as training data for a machine learning algo. That's just one idea.</p> <p>But, I do agree with you that CTR, or more precisely, after someone clicks on a link in the SERPs to your site, how long do they stay before they come back, and how does that compare to other sites?<br /></p>

<p>Agreed. I don't think that the algo will be 100% machine learning based any time soon, but the portion that is machine learning based will grow over time.</p>

<p>Hi Andy - I think that part of this though is that Google (and other search engines) will do more and more to measure the way that user engage with content. I think this makes it harder (though still not impossible) to game the system.</p>

<p>Tim - I understand your objection here, but I don't mean my point to be that you must be the best at everything in your business. You need to be the best at some part of it, and have a clear differentiation for your business that people can attach to. Otherwise, you get lost in the morass of all the competition out there.</p>

<p>Delance, 1x is really just the notion as being more or less the same as the competition. If you truly want to get ahead, you should plan on producing content and being so engaging as to be MUCH better than them, e.g. 10x better.</p>

<p>That's a big question! The best advice I can give you without writing a long post is to focus on the very first few steps, starting with establishing yourself as an expert. From there, may opportunities can unfold over time.</p>

<p>Hi EGOL - when I talk about freely sharing the best content of others, I'm not thinking about republishing it, but instead of linking to it in related articles I write, or sharing it in social media.</p> <p>If you want to truly republish the whole piece, I'd probably NoIndex, Follow those pages. Of course, if you can get the author to write a fresh original article for you on the same topic, ideally with a different spin as a part of it, that will work too.</p>

<p>This was interesting to me: "flatter your target" - I usually counsel people to NOT do that. Reason is that it nearly always comes across as inauthentic. Know your target, very, very well, and know how to describe to them the value in a way that they will appreciate is a much bigger point of emphasis for me.</p> <p>All covered in my article right here on Moz earlier this week! https://moz.com/blog/preparing-your-killer-content-marketing-pitch</p>

<p>Agreed!</p>

<p>Great stuff Brad!</p>

<p>Joe - the byline should indicate that they are working for your client (the truth is, they are). Be careful though, that your freelance writer is truly and expert in the topic matter. Given the types of sites I recommend you target, expecting a writer can't create thought leadership level content unless they are already an expert in the topic matter when you start to work with them.</p>

<p>I really don't worry about scale so much. To me, one killer link is worth far more than 100 crappy ones, so I don't need big numbers when I am picking the right targets. Of course, patience is also required. If you do this the right way you are talking about a long road to building your business. That may be frustrating, but it's better than trying quick and easy tactics, perhaps getting some short term gains, and then watching your growth stall.</p> <p>With the right targets, I am setup for long term sustainable growth</p>

<p>Nick - you're right, it may well take longer than creating the content itself!</p>

<p>Great question Jason. First of all, authority is relative to your market space. For a local business, the ultimate authority might be the local newspaper.</p> <p>Also, when you start out, you may need to start with somewhat lower authority sites, and then work you way up the ladder. That's OK. Just make sure that you are mindful of the goal of moving up over time, and use your initial publishing relationships to establish your expertise and set yourself up for moving up over time.</p>

<p>Chad, John, it's true that we want the business to solve a problem for us. However, given a world where there are many who can solve our problem, we want to have some level of trust in the company behind the product/service.</p>

<p>You need to pull the data from a keyword density tools one ranking position at a time. Pull the data for position 1 first, then position 2, etc.</p>

<p>I am not sure I would use the phrase "Accurate". I'd phrase it as being concerned about whether or not the company honors it or not, but Google has no way to measure that.</p>

<p>Hi Amit - this is one of the tricky aspects of this post. I am not really pushing for going back to keyword density analysis. I am pushing for using TF analysis to come up with observations about limitations and deficiencies in your content.</p> <p>When I run this type of analysis it's quite common for me to find pages that are missing entire concepts that belong within the content. That's the direction you want to go with these.</p>

<p>Hi Sam - I'd be careful with being too artificial with your analysis. We don't want to drift into a pure keyword density approach. A different question is whether or not the general concept of having testimonials is benefiting them. That may be the case. I understand your UX concerns though.</p> <p>Not knowing your site at all, I would use the observation about the testimonials and consider testing it. You can try some on the home page of your site for a couple of months, and see how it does. If you don't see a major benefit, than back off of it and place them elsewhere.</p>

<p>Hi Slava,</p> <p>You need to replace the data in the current tab, in columns B, C, D, E and F from row 4 on down with the keyword information you gather from the keyword tools I referenced in the post. You should also update the numbers in B2, C2, D2, E2, and F2 with the value of the most popular keyword for that column.  I.e. in B2, put the number of instances of the most popular keyword in column B.</p> <p>Hope that helps!</p>

<p>Definitely a user first world, so generate content for users first. I tried to be clear in the post that I do NOT advocate writing code for search engines. However, we can use search engines and the process outlined in this post, to help us get more input and knowledge about what we might be missing from our content.</p> <p><br />All of this still requires human interpretation and filtering to make sure that we are applying the resulting data in the right way.</p>

<p>EGOL - as I noted in the article, the purpose of the technical analysis is to provide insights and generate ideas. In no way was I suggesting that you do this as a purely mechanical analysis that you acted on without interpreting the results. I think I was quite clear about this in the article.</p> <p>So I agree with you, the first thing to do is to be a great natural language writer. But, you can use technical analysis to help you better understand what you might be missing that is of value to others.</p>

<p>Ivan - most likely, it's the 1 word keyword that is used the most often. It does not need to be anything specific.</p>

<p>Agreed, I hate the keyword density concept as well. The key here is to use this analysis to stimulate thinking about deficiencies in your content. Consider it a way to generate ideas on how to make it better.</p>

<p>I agree completely with the notion of making content first for your audience, and not Google. Nothing in this article is meant to suggest anything different than that!</p>

<p>Great to see that it's here Cyrus!</p>

<p>If Google is right, and HTTPS penetration does go way up, then not being HTTPS-compliant may become a larger ranking factor. But, it will remain small for now.</p>

<p>Agreed that the world of apps is a tough one for the average small business. This could lead to some major challenges in coming years though, as people are adapting new devices and demanding new use cases for the information they want on those devices, and the form in which they want to consume it.</p> <p>This could really put some serious additional pressure on those small businesses, if larger ones can satisfy those use cases, and the smaller ones cannot.<br /></p>

<p>Bryan - I agree on AWD as a solid direction for a mobile strategy. The 2 use cases can be quite different!</p>

<p>I agree that there are challenges, costs, and risks, but Google believes that the entire web will eventually operate over HTTPS.</p>

<p>Hi Borislav - Google disagrees! They want the whole web to go HTTPS, and they believe that it will. If they are right, this will go up over time as a ranking factor.</p>

<p>Hi - sounds like a non easy problem to resolve without really digging into it in detail I am afraid. Wish I could help more, but I think this will require many hours of work to figure out. Let me know if you are interested in consulting help for that.</p>

<p>When you moved the site, did you implement 301 redirects from the pages on the .com domain to the corresponding pages on the new domain?</p>

<p>Do you have any links from sites hosted in the UAE or other .ae websites that show up in the Google.ae search results? It feels to me like Google.ae may not be crawling the site yet. You can also check the log file to see if they are crawling the site.</p>

<p>If the amount of money is small and a reasonable compensation for the effort of removing the links, it might make sense to pay it. But, disavowing them is an option too.</p>

<p>Hi Junaid - For the most part, if someone asks for money, I just disavow them. In rare cases, if the fee they request really seems like reasonable payment for the few minutes they might spend removing the link I might pay them - but usually not.</p> <p>Have not tried Cognitive SEO at this point.  What is your experience with it?</p>

<p>Daniel - My bet is that your links from the comments are NoFollowed anyway, so I would simply let the requester know that this is the case, and that NoFollowed links don't matter.</p> <p>Of course, there will be many out there that will not be happy with that response, but really very little you can do if it's not within your control to remove the links.</p> <p>One other question though - would you be able to delete the comment?</p>

<p>Hey Ryan - no doubt that the concept of mindset could related to nearly any part of SEO!</p>

<p>Shariq - that's exactly what you want to do.  Start building high quality links going forward. In the traffic chart I shared you can see that the site now has higher traffic than before the penalty. That's because we have also been doing high quality content marketing for them.</p>

<p>With Penguin, I find you may not need to be quite as aggressive, but dealing with anchor text is a major must.  I would also still take out the comment links and the links from countries where you don't sell too.</p>

<p>Matt - sound strategy. Not all clients are ready to go full tilt, but getting them to work towards a two step path can be the next best thing.</p>

<p>Agreed that negative SEO is an issue. It's not as prevalent as many fear, but it does happen.</p>

<p>#1 Agreed that there are exceptions to the rule.</p> <p>#2 will have someone check that out!</p>

<p>Agreed! So important to dilute the bad links with better links too. Will not only help you recover faster, but will also help you grow stronger than ever before.</p>

<p>Hi Jeremy - here at STC we have seen too many situations where Webmaster Tools data was not enough. That's why we recommend the larger data set you can get with the other tools.</p> <p>My reason for making this recommendation has nothing to do with other people recommending them at all. It has to do with the 200+ situations we have worked on over here.</p>

<p>Hi Calin - glad you found it useful. Sounds like you are have the right approach!</p>

<p>Hi Timothy - I don't use the link: command because it returns so few links. The other data sources I mentioned in the article (Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and ahrefs) return far more information, so I'd focus on those.</p>

<p>Fortunately, I don't hear that very often any more, but there are still people that think that.</p>

<p>Nicholas - agree that relevance is a critical component. In the case of this company, relevance was very high on all those DA &gt; 70 links.</p>

<p>Glad you liked it!</p>

<p>Such an important part of it! Getting on to doing it the right way, using content marketing and attracting links to your site.</p>

<p>Glad you liked it!</p>

<p>Hey Russ - glad you liked it! Missing you out here at SMX West.</p>

<p>Agreed. As I noted in the post, Google can  literally get to the point where they tell you to stop submitting for a while. Along with your observation of Google sending out fewer notes, these are signs that Google is having to manage the volume of requests they are getting.</p>

<p>For large recognizable brands, it's common to have links from their various sub-brand sites back to their main site.  Not knowing your brand, I think it comes down to what Google perceives as the intent (assuming we are talking a manual penalty here). If they believe the links are a result of an intent to manipulate, then they are going to need to go.</p> <p>One way they might recognize that is if a lot of the sub-domains have little to no external incoming links of their own. If that's the case, I'd day that the links are going to been as manipulative.</p> <p>The tough part is that you don't get to have that conversation with Google, so unless each of the subdomains has a lot of incoming link authority, you may have to consider taking the links out.</p> <p>However, since I don't know the details of your situation I can't treat that as official advice!</p>

<p>Agreed! It is a bit like going back in time. However, smart aggressive smaller businesses can steal a march on others that are not as ready to move as quickly as others are. Many larger businesses are slow and ponderous in adapting these types of philosophies.</p>

<p>Hi Toby - Google+ links are NoFollow at this point. Your other suggestions are right on. There are various ways to create raving fans for your brand, and the big key is to figure out what works best for you.</p>

<p>Great real world example!</p>

<p>I am afraid I don't. Not sure if someone from the Moz team does though.</p>

<p>Agreed, offline activity can play a huge role in this. Best way to get a raving fan? Spend 15 or minutes with them in an engaged face to face conversation.</p>

<p>Fortunately some brands are learning to do better, but I think it will be a long process before most brands get it.</p>

<p>Hi Jordan - tricky question. These things can change based on how Google chooses to weight Page Authority vs Semantic Relevance. Whether you want to change it or not I think largely depends on whether one of the two pages converts much better than the other.</p> <p>If the landing page is a far better converter, than you might want to go through the effort of trying to persuade Google to switch back. Since its relevance is already much higher you might want to figure out how to get it some highly authoritative, relevant links.</p>

<p>That's a big question, and one that's very dependent on what business you are in, and what your customers want. Ultimately, that's where it starts, is with really understanding what your potential customers want. There are many ways to do that:</p> <p>1. Survey them</p> <p>2. Run A/B tests on different versions of your pages to see which versions get the best response.</p> <p>3. Interview them.</p> <p>4. Bring them in to your offices and ask for their direct feedback.</p> <p>The reason why I am answering the question this way is that a lot goes into UX design and what makes sense for my web site might not be the right thing for yours.</p>

<p>Hi Ed - in your scenario, the affiliate links to answer a user need, so that's better than not addressing the need at all. Better still would be if there was a way to order the shoes on site, or perhaps make the shoe selections on site, and not have the affiliate links come into play until the user wants to pay.</p>

<p>Well said Sheena!</p>

<p>Hi Brad - agreed that the execution part of this is not simple. The first guideline is that anything you put on your page needs to have end user value as a first priority. If it's going on there because you are trying to get a keyword in there, then don't do it. This relates to both straight text content, and to the links on the page as well.</p> <p>So when it gets to keyword variations, and that old fashioned SEO stuff, the best way to do that is while creating great content for users, and not just to try and invoke a bit more potential keyword volume.<br /></p> <p>In terms of some ideas how to do that, I did write recently on Moz about Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) as you can see here:</p> <p><a href="https://moz.com/blog/using-term-frequency-analysis-to-measure-content-quality" rel="nofollow">https://moz.com/blog/using-term-frequency-analysis...</a><br /></p> <p><a href="https://moz.com/blog/inverse-document-frequency-and-the-importance-of-uniqueness" rel="nofollow">https://moz.com/blog/inverse-document-frequency-an...</a>\<br /></p> <p>These are two neat ways to dig into some technical detail on determining what users want the most, by comparing your site to the others that Google values the most.</p> <p>You might say that this approach feels like it's about manipulating SEO, but it's really more about saying - hey, here's what Google values highly, and they apply a TON of tech to figuring out what users want the most, so let's leverage that so we can offer a better user experience.</p>

<p>Hi All,</p> <p>To help illustrate, here is a sample of some potential code:<br /></p> <p>function showfacet() {<br /></p> <p> var currentPath=window.location.pathname;</p> <p> var currentPage =</p> <p> currentPath.substring(currentPath.lastIndexOf('/') + 1); req = GetXmlHttpObject(); if (req==null) { alert ("Browser does not support AJAX Request"); return; } var proxy="/app/qs_api.php?p="+currentPage;</p> <p> req.open("GET",proxy,false);</p> <p> req.onreadystatechange=handleHttpResponse;</p> <p> req.send(null);</p> <p> }</p> <p>You will note that there are no clear URLs presented in this. Google can, and may well, sample some of this code to see what happens, but I have not seen any evidence that they do this in any extensive way. Keep in mind what Gary Illyes said above:</p> <p>"If you have one URL only, and people have to click on stuff to see different sort orders or filters for the exact same content under that URL, then typically we would only see the default content."</p> <p>For that reason, my experience is that this approach will in fact save you substantial crawl budget.</p>

<p>good question, and a different kind of issue. </p>

<p>Hi Nealeg - the use of quotes or not is irrelevant to the use of TF/IDF. I simply used that to have Google help me find pages with the exact phrases. For example, 6.78M pages appear to have the exact phrases "super bowl 2015" (without the quotes) on them.</p> <p>Of course most uses search without "", but the point is that Google place a lot more weight on exact phrases on pages. So if a user searches on "super bowl 2015" (without the ""), Google will weight a page with that exact phrase more than they will a page talking about the 2014 super bowl, that happened to be written on January 15, 2015 that happens to have the article publication date on the page.<br /></p>

<p>Hi Slavo,</p> <p>Thanks for your question, what I was trying to say was it's not just about slapping the words on the page, but you need also to address the user's needs directly related to those words.</p> <p>An example might help. If you have a page about lamps, and you decided that "ornate lead glass lamps" was a a rare term, you could add it to the page, but you should only do so if you see those types of lamps.<br /></p> <p>Let me know if that makes sense.</p>

<p>Glad it was helpful!</p>

<p>Hi Oleg - it can help you rank for related terms. However, it's important that you ties this to some real value that you add, as opposed to simply loading the rare words on a page.</p>

<p>I do think I am suggesting a bit more than this. I think that IDF teaches us that it's really critical to bring something unique to the table. If you are the 2,137th person trying to rank on some major term, well, good luck! Differentiation is essential. What is it that you do that's unique?</p> <p>I completely agree though, that this is not meant to spawn some keyword spamming exercise!</p>

<p>Hi Justin - One of the main things I was trying to get at is that publishing the same old stuff that every one else does, or simply copying successful people, is not really a good strategy. You need to bring something new and unique to the table.</p> <p>However, as I will say to JibbedSEO in a moment (in response to his comment below) the goal is not to throw random rare keywords on your page (see below for the rest).<br /></p>

<p>Hi Umar - I don't believe it does. LSI is something that came in later.</p>

<p>Hi Casey - thanks for the mention in the article, and glad you found the link guidelines helpful. Great ideas in this post as well.</p>