SEO A to Z - part 15 - "Main Content to Multivariate Test"

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. Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed, here, as usual, and we're on to part 15 of our SEO A to Z main content to multivariate test.

So let's dive straight in with main content. So the main content of a web page, also known as the MC, is the content which is the purpose of the page's existence and which helps it to achieve the purpose of the page. These are Google's words, and this could be a text, article, an image, a video, a tool, a game, user generated content or anything similar like that. It's the content that is the reason that a user has visited page. Four and now, main content is one of the three types of page content as defined by google, together with supplementary content which is like the things around, like navigation, your footer, things like that and ad content ads. Now, main content is covered in detail in the Google quality rater guidelines. We spoke about the Google quality rater guidelines back in an earlier episode. Go and read them if you haven't already. It's where Google sets out exactly what they do and don't want to see on websites what they consider high quality, medium quality, low quality content and spam. If you want to really know what Google wants for a web page from a website, read the google quality rated guidelines, because that's where, fundamentally, they set out what they do and don't want to see. What main content is. The part of a page is defined by google where that's the main action of a page. What people are going to achieve and gain from the page should be in the main content.

Next, we've got manual penalty. So a manual penalty, also known as a manual action, is one where a member of staff at Google has manually reviewed your website and the metrics that Google holds for it, such as its backlink profile, and they've determined that you've contravened one or more of Google's guidelines. That penalty is then given to your entire website or pages within your website. The penalty now it can vary in severity. Sometimes this, these penalties, can be a complete de-indexing. They remove your entire site from the index. Sometimes they might just remove a certain portion of your site from the index. They may put a penalty on. That sort of puts a filter on and pushes you down the ranking so you may still rank, but it's nowhere near as high as it did before. These penalties can really vary in severity and if your site is registered in google search console, then you will be notified by email and inside the search console it will um, it will show you that you've been manually penalized and for what reason. You can then make reconsideration requests if you believe the penalty has been unfairly given or if you've since taken steps to remedy the cause of the penalty. But it will take time for Google to review any reconsideration requests and they don't have to accept reconsideration requests.

Recently, with the recent spam updates, google did a hell of a lot of manual actions against lots of people, lots of SEO influencers, who are probably more on the black cat or pushing the boundaries of what the Google guidelines do and don't allow. Google went out and hit a load of people with manual actions. There was one recently where NicheSite niche site lady who's quite well known in the niche site community. She got hit for some with a manual action for doing guest posting from some old guest posts that she'd done previously and they went and did a manual action on her which she shared with all her followers. So, yeah, manual penalties are something you want to try to avoid if you can, but you know you follow google's guidelines. They need to like it to be an issue for you. This is the kind of thing when I always talk about the risks of any black hat techniques or any gray hat techniques, which are really pushing and blurring the boundaries. This is the kind of thing that can happen to you and you don't want to happen ideally. So say this is that this is the risk I always talk about when I'm talking about the risks versus rewards of different tactics.

Next, we've got marketplace. So a marketplace is a type of website that brings together buyers and sellers who are independent of the website. So examples obvious examples include eBay and Etsy. There are other marketplaces that sometimes blur the lines a little, like Amazon, because Amazon will sell the stuff directly to you. But it is also a marketplace. It allows third-party sellers on to use its website to sell products. It might even fulfill them for you, but it's a marketplace for the sellers as well. So a marketplace website is one which brings buyers and sellers together. Simple as that. Our next m is merchant. So merchant is a term used in affiliate marketing to describe a company with a website that sells a product which works with affiliate who drive potential customers to the merchant's website. So an example would be when I had broadbandcouk, we were the affiliate, we were affiliate website. We were affiliated with broadband providers. They, as a, we would drive traffic from broadbandcouk to the merchant websites, the broadband providers websites, who would then sell the product to the people that were referred to them. So they were the merchant, and it's just a term that we use across affiliate marketing to determine. You know what side of the relationship a different company is on. So affiliates drive traffic to merchants. Merchants sell products to customers, and that's as simple as that.

Next we've got meta description. So page meta description is a html tag that's put in the head of a html page so it's not visible on the page in the web browser. There's a space for a website to give a description of what the content and purpose of the page is, google will sometimes use this descriptive text as the description of the web page in the search results. However, if the meta description is missing or if it believes it can provide a better description, then Google will write its own descriptions, which can be a bit frustrating if you've spent a long time doing your own meta descriptions. But what can you do? It's Google.

Next, we have meta keywords. Meta keywords is a html tag, so similar to a description, um, in that can be put in the head of html page. So again, it's not visible in the page in the browser. It's a space for a website to give a list of keywords that this page targets. Now, because this is so easy to manipulate, it's long been ignored by search engines a ranking factor, so there's no seo reason why you should be using them. Anyone who tells you that putting meta keywords in is valuable is completely wasting your time, so don't bother. I've mainly included it in here just to essentially put this warning in not to bother using the meta keywords HTML tag.

Next, we've got the meta robots tag. So again, this is a HTML element that you put in the header of a page. So it's not something that's visible on the actual web page as a browser, but this one is valuable. What it does is it allows you to give directions to web crawlers whether to crawl a page or not crawl a page and whether to index or not to index a page. So it's where you can actually give instructions directly to google bot and other search engine crawlers on whether to crawl or index a page. So it can be very useful if you're having issues with pages that you do or don't want being crawled and you can give those directions explicitly at the top of the page for the search engines.

Next, we've got mobile first indexing. So much of the web traffic nowadays is consumed on mobile phones, so Google now will crawl, index and rank pages primarily based on the mobile version of a website, and this is something that Google have been moving across for several years. I think now almost everything is now mobile first indexing, which means Google will always look for the at the mobile version of a page and decide how to index it based on that, because I mean across our sites. We see on our consumer based sites, probably 80 plus of traffic is coming now from mobile phones. It's different keywords people use because that is obviously a web tool for seo tool and we find it's the opposite. There we get 85 of people use keywords people use on the. We find it's the opposite. There we get 85% of people use keywords people use on the desktop, because it's kind of like a desktop style app for people doing work and they tend to be using laptops or desktop computers, whereas many of our consumer sites yeah, it's just all the traffic now pretty much comes from mobile, because that's where people consume most of their web content nowadays and because of this, this is why google looks at the mobile version of a site when it looks to do its indexing.

Next we've got migration. So if people talk about migration, this is any kind of event where you make major changes to a website, such as moving it from one platform to another, say from one cms to a new cms, or from one design to another design, or from its current domain to a new domain name. Now, migration events are extremely risky times for SEO. Done correctly, they can be minimal or even no negative effect, but done incorrectly, they can have major negative effects on search rankings. So common mistakes people make when they do migration events are they might change all the URLs for their webpages. So while they might consider two webpages to be the same, as in. You know, we've replaced it with this new one. They then give it a new URL. Then, as far as Google's concerned, that's a brand new webpage. The old webpage is gone and there's this new webpage that's not written. It doesn't know how to relate them at all. So you either need to do it right you need to 301, redirect the old page to the new page or, ideally, keep the URLs the same. You can be moving from one CMS to another. If you use the same URLs, google will see that it's the same page. You don't even need to redirect. I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of how to successfully do migrations, because it's a big, massive topic, but just be aware, if you are ever migrating from it, is that one design to a new design, one cms from the cms, anything like that, or from it, especially from one domain name to another domain name. Really do your research, think about it, get advice on how to do it correctly before you just screw up everything that you've worked so hard for.

Next, we've got money site. Now this is it's almost, I suppose, a black hat term, really. So black hat seos will often refer to their money sites. Now these are their sites that they aim to make money from and they'll often be much more cautious with the techniques they use to rank their money sites, as they don't want to see them easily penalized. So an example might be a black cat SEO using black cat link techniques, such as buying links or doing a lot of link spam, is very, very unlikely to point lots of spammy links at their money site, the site that actually they want to rank and they want to make money with links at their money site, the site that actually they want to rank and they want to make money with. What they'll tend to do is they will do link spam at third-party sites that are linking to their money sites. They might have genuine non you know, non black hat links, you know sort of editorially earned links pointing at their money site. They'll look at these links and then say, right, if we can just put lots of links into those web pages that link into us, we can increase the page rank of those web pages linking to us, which means they'll then pass on further page rank to our money site. So they might actually do a whole link spam campaign at these links, these links that they call them tier one links that are the ones that link to their money site. They will then spam the hell out of them links from the hell out of them to point To get more page rank into them. That then gives more page rank to their money site.

So I tried to bring money site as a term that you ever hear anyone talk about their money site. These are the ones that they kind of protect. They don't want To get hit if they can possibly attempt it. Some will still use don't want to get hit if they can possibly attempt it. Some will still use sort of nefarious techniques to rank those money sites and they'll just let them get churned and burned and we talk about churned and burned as a technique in one of the earlier A to Z episodes. But generally, yeah, a money site is one where that's the site that makes them their money.

Then, finally, we've got multivariate test. So multivariate testing is very similar to AB split testing that we talked about in episode one. I think it was the first. Of the actual terms in the glossary is the AB split testing. However, instead of just having one original version and a new version being tested against each other. In multivariate testing, what you do is you test many different versions at the same time, so you might create 10 versions of a page and send traffic to all 10 at the same time and see how they all compare against each other. And this can lead to much faster evolutions of testing, because obviously you're testing many more variations in one go but it does require a very large amount of traffic to generate statistically significant results. So it tends to be only a technique used by sites with huge amounts of traffic, because, yeah, it's hard to set up, you've got to call those versions and you need a lot of traffic to test them against each other. So that's everything today, so that we've done main content to multi-variate tests. So, if you find it useful, if there's any Ms you think I'm missing, do let me know and we'll get them added in. And, yeah, I'll see you next time.

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