SEO A to Z - part 5 - "Deindexed to Duplicate Content"

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome.

Back to SEO is not that bad. It's Ed here, as normal, and today we are on to part five of our SEO episode. Today we'll get from de-indexed to duplicate content, so let's dive straight in. So de-indexed when Google removes a page or a website from its index, the process is known as being de-indexed. Now, de-indexing can happen at your request. You might request that a page, or indeed your entire site, is not indexed using robotstxt or the robots no index tag on a page. De-indexing can also happen outside of your control if Google decides to algorithmically remove a page from its index, and the worst case is to be de-indexed by manual action from google, where you've breached their guidelines to such an extent they decide to manually remove your site or sites, or parts of your sites from the index. So yeah, purely it's just the method of you know what happens. How we describe having a page or site removed from the index for whatever reason it's de-indexing.

Next we've got digital PR. Now, digital PR is a white hat link building tactic to attract third-party sites to link to yours. This process involves building a compelling story around the niche your website operates in and then putting that story out to journalists in the hope they'll cover your story and reference your website as a source with a link. The good thing about digital PR is, generally, you are going to get links from sites that are genuine, have traffic, and these should be the kind of links if the Google API leaks anything to go by that are going to pass a page rank. You'll find, though, that lots of times, with digital PR, you get no follow links, or maybe the people won't link to you at all, and there are theories out there that this is still a good thing for you. I mean, google have themselves said that, um, no, following a link they take just as a hint rather than a definite. So it might be that if you get a no follow link from a really good site, they might still decide to follow some of the page rank through that link. But yeah, so digital PR is a white hat link building tactic and one that is very popular.

So next up, we've got digital product. So digital product is one that can be sold and delivered virtually as soon as a customer purchases it. So examples would include software, ebooks, online courses, cheat sheets, spreadsheets, video and audio downloads I mean keywords people use is a digital product, you know you can purchase it and instantly get use of it. It's a software as a service type software tool. Some software might be downloadable software, but nowadays more and more stuff is online subscription software.

Next, we've got direct traffic. So if someone refers to direct traffic, that's traffic that arrives at your website directly by entering the website address into a web browser. So that's where someone wants to go to. You know googlecom. They tend to just type googlecom straight into the browser and off they go, and you might do that with a few sites that you use most regularly. Now there is going back to the google api leak. Again. There is sort of information in there, there's attributes in there that might suggest that direct traffic could be in itself a ranking factor because google, you know, has a chrome click data, has the chrome data of the how people use the chrome browser. It knows when someone types a site url directly into the web browser and goes to a site. So having lots of direct traffic could potentially be a ranking signal itself. I mean, it certainly would be, you know. You know that people are going there directly to the brand. It's a known brand. If people are going direct to a site, they've already heard about it from somewhere else. That's a good authority signal really. So I can see why google might be using that. So it could be a good thing to encourage direct traffic. If you can Next up, we've got disavow links and if you've got a large number of spam links artificial, low quality, paid links that have caused or are likely to cause a manual action penalty against you, then you can use the URLs of those pages and disavow them.

And you perform this disavow by using the disavow tool in Google Search Console. Now, this is something we did with broadbandcouk when we got hit by Penguin back in 2012 time, 2013 time, and that's how we solved the algorithmic penalty we had with broadbandcouk by disavowing lots and lots of the spammy links we'd bought. Now Google now say that you really don't need to disavow. It's very rare cases you have to disavow and it's only if you're in a real bad situation, when you've done something really quite bad when it comes to spammy links, that you might need to use disavow. And they have said that they are at some point going to take away this disavow tool because it won't be needed anymore. So they say um, but just be aware it's there if you've got real problems. It might be something you want to um consider looking at.

Next we have display advertising. So display advertising is one of the methods of monetizing the website by allowing adverts to be displayed on the website, usually via an ad network such as adsense, medivine, raptor or zoic, and you usually get paid by the impression. So for every um load of the web page which shows an advert, then you'll get paid. And it adds a price, usually in per-thousand impressions, known as revenue per milli, so you'll see prices. People quoting that they are getting say $10 RPM. Their RPM is $10. So that means for every thousand impressions they'll get paid $10. Pm is ten dollars. So that means for every thousand impressions they'll get paid ten dollars. Um, I'm not a huge fan of disperbitizing, because a lot of people do it, tend to overdo it, um, and that can cause you problems itself, because there are definitely in the google api leak there's lots of stuff about um ads being, you know, over intrusive ads and too many interstitial ads, that kind of thing. So you need to be careful with disper by advertising you don't overdo it. But it is a, you know it's a good method of monetizing sites that don't have an otherwise obvious monetization method, such as e-commerce or affiliate or anything else like that.

Next up, we've got dmca notice, the digital million. Hello, I'll start again. The digital millennium copyright act. Dmca. It's a piece of legislation that's used to protect websites from having their content pirated. So this is where, if someone has basically just completely ripped off your content and just put it on their own website, you can file what's called a dmca notice with google to have the content removed from search. So this is a way of protecting your content and a method of informing Google that your content's been stolen by somebody else and you want them not to index it anymore. With all these things like the disavow tool, the ABC notice link on Google, I've put all these links in the showroom.

Next, we've got do follow link. Now, there isn't really such a thing as a do follow link, but it's a term that you'll hear. So a do follow link is just a normal link from one page to another with no additional tagging. So this is um, you know not where people have put no follow on. So, for example, people call them do follow links because they're expected to pass page rank, which is the opposite of a no follow tag linked which is not expected to pass page rank. So other people will call these followed links. So they're essentially just, you know, the original old style links from the HTML, original specification before Google started adding on these extra things, like you know, nofollow and UGC and sponsored links that you could tag them. It's just a basic this link from one page to another and it will pass page Next up.

We've got domain. This is what's pretty self-explanatory, but we'll do it for completeness. So domain or domain name, is what all websites are built on. Googlecom is Google's primary domain, for example. Simple as that.

Domain rating, dr. So domain rating or DR, is a metric which was invented by Ahrefs, which allocates a rating of zero to 100 based on the strength of domain's backlink profile. It's important to note, though, that DR is not a metric that Google uses. So even if a site shows a high dr and hrefs, it doesn't necessarily mean the site's well regarded by google and people. Some people know how to have worked out how to game this dr metric, so you've got to be careful when you look at it. Essentially it's hrefs guests really, essentially at page rank. They're trying to work out what sites have got hyper likely, likely to have high page rank, and which ones are likely to have lower page rank. But just, it's an interesting metric. It's a good one to look at to see how well your site's doing or other sites doing relative to yours. But just be aware that a site might be penalized by Google. Have a manual action by Google and HHS will say it's got a hugely, hugely high domain rating, but it doesn't mean anything, anything from that side. Any links are still completely pointless, so just pinch of salt with that one.

Next up, we've got doorway page. Now a doorway page is one that's designed to rank for certain keywords but will then redirect users to a different page. Unloading, and it's often combined with cloaking that we covered in an earlier episode. It's considered spam by google. It's a black hat technique. Essentially, a site set up to show googlebot a certain piece of content. That googlebot will then rank that page on and then its rankings will be based on search. Rankings will be based on the content on that page, but when a user lands from search onto that page, the site will quickly redirect that user to another piece of content. So essentially it's it's kind of cloaking and, yeah, it's black cat. If you want to do black cat, fair enough, but if you don't want to do black cat, don't do that.

Next, we've got downtime. So if there's a problem with your website or you take it offline yourself, then the website is considered to be in downtime. Now, too much downtime is bad for your rankings, you know. So why would google want to send traffic to a website if it's not sure it'll be online? So you want to pay close attention to your site's uptime. Uptime is the opposite of downtime. If it's up, it's in uptime. Um, there's plenty of uptime and downtime monitors out there, such as uptime robot. It's really good to put some kind of monitoring on your website so that if it does go down, then you're going to get either an sms or an email notification so you can go and take action on it.

And finally, for today, we've got duplicate content. So duplicate content is content that appears in more than one page online, so it might cover all or just the major part of the content on a page. Now, issues caused by duplicate content can be solved by using the canonical tag that we talked about here, and I think it's part three, I think it was now. Basically, if you've got lots and lots of pages that appear to be exactly the same, google doesn't want to put them all in its index because it's a waste of indexing space and time. They will choose just one of these site, one of these pages, to be in the index, and it might not be the one that you want. So you can use the canonical tag to say to google if you see this page on a different url, the url that you should consider the canonical version is this and you do this to make sure that the site, the page that you want to rank, ranks. This is quite often the cases where you get content which can be sorted by different attributes and then it affects the URL on the top and people can deep link into that longer URL, but it's really mainly a duplicate of the short URL so you can solve these problems with Carnival Tech. So that's it for today. We've got from D index to duplicate content, which is all the Ds. If you think I'm missing any Ds that should be in the glossary, should be in the search agency, then please do let me know and we can get them added in. And until next time I'll see you later.

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