SEO A to Z - part 9 - "Google Patent Applications to Guest Posting"

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 the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed, as usual.

So today we're going to start with Google Patent Applications. We're on to part nine, so we're about halfway through G, so we'll see how many more G's we can knock off today. So yeah, let's get into where we were last time. So yeah, google Patent Applic applications is the first thing on my list today. So, while Google tries to keep its cards very close to its chest as to how exactly its search ranking algorithms work, they do record a lot of the research work they do into patent applications. So, while not everything they patent will make it into live search algorithms, there's a lot that can be learned from reading Google's patent applications live search algorithms. There's a lot that can be learned from reading google's patent applications. I've actually done complete episodes on certain google patents, um, not just individual patents, but also the whole how to dive into those patents in detail. So just have a look through the back catalog for more information on particular um google patents. Now google patent search is the next thing on the list and, quite handily, google provide a special search engine that indexes patent applications worldwide at Google Patents I'll put a link to all these things in the show notes, obviously and it's very useful for discovering patent applications they've actually made themselves. So, yeah, you can learn a lot from the patents and they actually handily provide a nice search engine for it.

Next up, we've got Google quality raters. Now, google quality raters are people employed as contractors by Google to spend time reviewing web pages based on the steps outlined in the Google quality rater guidelines. Now, ratings given to web pages don't directly impact the ranking of those individual pages, but rather they're used to train machine learning models which are then used within google's algorithms to rank websites. Um, there's and there's many thousands of your quality raters they reckon 15 000 plus people and yeah, so they use these um machine learning models to also test ranking changes they're going to make. They test those ranking changes against the data that Google quality raters have pulled together. So it's a really key, important job that these people do in terms of providing that data set that Google use.

So now onto the Google quality rated guidelines themselves. Again, a link to these will be in the show notes. The Google quality rated guidelines are contained in a very detailed, publicly accessible document, and these guidelines detail how Google wants to classify pages, from pure spam to very high quality, along with examples of each site, type of sites, and these are the guidelines that are used to train the Google quality raters. I mean these should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in SEO to be able to understand what Google would actually like to see and what it doesn't want to see in websites and webpages. I've done a whole series of podcasts on these Google quality rate guidelines back in late 2023. So read those guidelines yourself. Also, if you want to just listen to me talking through the complete document, then just go back and listen to those earlier episodes.

Next up, we've got Google reviews. Google reviews are a core part of local SEO, so every business with a Google business profile, which we mentioned in the last episode can receive customer reviews directly in Google and good reviews will help in your local rankings. So if you have a local business, you've got a Google business profile. Do encourage your customers to leave Google um reviews. You know, if you're a restaurant or a coffee shop, you can encourage people by offering discounts if they leave a review that kind of thing. Google people won't like you doing that, but they're not going to find out. Don't publish that. You're offering just gaps online um. But anything you can do to garner positive reviews if you're a local business is really really important.

Next up, we've got the google sandbox. Now a much shared but with little evidence theory is that new domains and websites are placed in the sandbox by google and are unable to rank well for queries for a certain amount of time. Now there is some stuff in the google api leak around the age of domains and google storing information about that kind of time based data. Now, personally, I don't think it's necessarily the case that every domain is sandboxed. It might make things more difficult. It might give you a boost to start with just the fact that they know how old your domain is. It's much more likely that the effect people blame on the sandbox is just a function of the site being new and not yet established, rather than any artificial dampening effect. I've certainly like keywords people use. That was on a brand new domain when we launched it. It launched very quickly. We got lots of result backlinks very quickly and we ranked fine for some very competitive keywords very quickly. I didn't see any sandbox effects. So I think the sandbox is something you just I don't think it's an actual thing. All sites get sandboxed, but there are definitely age-related factors within the algorithms.

Next we have google search. Google search console is a set of free tools available to every website owner that help you. Help you with by providing information to google about your site, as well as also seeing performance and troubleshooting information about how your site performs in terms of crawling, indexing and ranking and a few other things. I've done whole episodes on the Google Search Console, so just look back for those. It's something every site owner should have. The Google Search Console. All you need to do is just register your domain and then you have to do a few pieces just to qualify that you actually own the website, normally by just changing some DNS entries, and you then get access to the search console, for your site normally takes a few days when you first register it before you start seeing any information, but then you come back. You can see performance clicks over time, queries that you're ranking for. You can provide site maps, a whole bunch of stuff. It's you know, completely stuff. So if you haven't got your site Google Search Console set up already, go and do it. You won't regret it.

Next we've got Google Search Essentials. Google Search Essentials are Google's guidelines on how to make your website accessible and easy to index, what practices Google considers spam and also what are best practices to get your site as much visibility as possible in Google. These were previously known as Google Webmaster Guidelines, and you'll probably hear me talking about Google Webmaster Guidelines throughout loads of episodes because, force of habit, I just use the term that Google used for the past 20 years or so, but they renamed them Google Search Essentials recently. They're very much worth going and reading. Whether you want to be white hat, black hat or somewhere in between, it's always worth knowing exactly what Google is looking for and what it considers to be good and bad practice, because even if you're going to break the guidelines, you still need to know what the guidelines are. So, yeah, go and read them. Link will be in the show notes.

Next up we have google suggest, known as also as autocomplete or google autocomplete. It's a cover in detail in part one of the seo to zed and it's essentially just to recap. It's the as you type into the google search engine, you start typing in a query, it will start list related queries, sort of suggest other queries to you, those who there's what is in google's suggest, googleomplete, and it's also part of Keywords. People Use tools. We can automatically mine those Auto Suggest keywords for you from a seed input. So worth a really good keyword research there.

Okay, next we've got Google Tag Manager. Now. Google Tag Manager, also known as GTM, is a free service from Google that allows you to easily manage adding, updating and removing JavaScript tag code for services such as analytics and other third-party services on your site. So you just have to add the GTM code to every page on your site, usually by just putting in a header template that's used on every page, and you can add third-party scripts by the tag manager interface, rather than having to edit your website directly again. So it's super, super useful and we use it on again. So it's super, super useful. We use it on all our sites. It's really, really handy and it's great for adding in and out scripts and doing triggers. So, yeah, if you're not using Google Tag Manager but you are adding JavaScript tag code to your site, then put it on a Google Tag Manager. It will just make your life so much easier.

Next, we've got Google Trends. Google Trends is a tool that allows you to see how popular keywords and topics have been with Google users over time, and then you can also compare topics to each other to see how popular they are relative to each other. It's really good for seeing how trends have changed over time and what are current trends, current topics that are trending up and trending down Really really useful. Google Update yeah, google Update occurs whenever Google makes changes to their ranking algorithms. Some updates are significant enough for them to be announced, such as core updates and named updates. Other, smaller updates occur much more frequently and Google claims they make minor updates to their algorithms almost daily. But the big ones they will name and those named updates will be visible in Google Webmaster blogs. They will announce them and they have pages on there that list all the different named updates over the years and the dates they ran through.

Next up, we've got Google Webmaster Guidelines. Now this is the old name for Google Search Essentials I talked about at the start of this episode, so I won't go through what they are, just that. That is the original name for what is now Google Search Essentials I talked about at the start of this episode, so I won't go through what they are, just that. That is the original name for what is now Google Search Essentials. Google Webmaster Tools is next and that is the old name for Google Search Console, so we've just talked about that, so I won't say any more about that. But if someone talks about Google Webmaster Tools, they're talking about Google Search Console. Next we've got Googlebot. Googlebot is the name of Google Spider, also known as a crawler software that visits, downloads and discovers new pages and updates to existing pages. So if you're looking through web server logs, if you go into that level of detail, you'll see if Googlebot has been and visited a page. You'll see Googlebot turn up as a user agent in your search engine logs.

Next, gpt or generative pre-trained transformer. A generative pre-trained transformer is an AI model that is trained on a large data set. So GPT is a type of large language model and it's why chat GPT is called chat GPT? It stands for chat with a generative, pre-trained transformer. Simple as that.

Next we've got grey hat SEO. Grey hat SEO is a tactic, so those which kind of straddle the boundary between black hat and white hat. These tactics kind of push the boundaries of Google's guidelines, often in areas of plausible deniability. So you're not doing something that is overtly against Google's guidelines and you are not being whiter than white and reading them exactly as they are written. Necessarily, lots of things can end up being grey hat, particularly around some of the link building things where, if you can kind of do link building, where you might be, for example, soliciting links that aren't quite editorial, that look very editorial, but in a way that can't be traced, you know that is potentially like a grey hat type SEO. So yeah, so if someone describes themselves as grey hat, they're kind of, as I say, straddling those boundaries.

Next we've got ghost posting, also known as ghost blogging. Now, this is a version of the guest blogging tactic, which I'll talk about in a moment. But instead of appearing as a guest writer and taking credit for the post, you instead allow the site owner, author, to take credit for the posts you provide. So this is an evolution of the tactic as google's begun to crack down on guest posting for followed links there's no guest post author is mentioned, it's hard to determine if the links in the posted article are paid for or not and essentially it's still link buying and it falls outside google guidelines so it could be penalized. This is kind of like an example of a grey hat SEO technique that we just spoke about. Grey hat SEO you are doing guest posting that isn't over-trackable. So if we now talk about guest blogging, guest posting, which alphabetically comes below ghost posting that's why I didn't talk about it first.

So guest blogging or guest posting is a link building tactic where a site owner or the employee of a site owner will guest post content on a third party blog in return for a link back to their own site. Now, for a long time this was considered a white slash, grey hat tactic, but more recently Google's been advising against this unless any links are set as nofollow or sponsored. And there have been blogging for followed links because, even if the google argue, even if the um content was given without payment, the fact that you gave the content, the content itself is payment and the fact that you wrote the blog. You wrote that blog or and post yourself. You put the links into your own website. They're not editorially gained because you put them in, so they've penalized people for it. Hence why this new ghost posting tactic, um, has sort of come in, where people essentially are doing guest blogging but rather than having a. This was written by blah blah blah of blah blah blah dot com. It's just made out that it's written by the site that the post is, that the post is posted on so rather than by a guest, so any links in it to a third party site are not being um sort of disclosed as being by that particular author. So, yeah, there's two tactics there which sort of tie in quite neatly with the grey hat seo that we talked. So, yeah, that covers everything in g that I've got in g.

If you think there's any I've missed, please do get in touch. Let me know them and we can get them added. And until next time I'll see you again. Take care. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that Keywords People use, that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

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