Speaker 1: 0:02

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.

Speaker 1: 0:30

Hello and welcome back to this latest episode of SEO is not that hard. It's me, Ed, here, as usual, and today we're on to part 16 of our SEO A to Z, which is today we're going to cover niche to no index. So let's get started. So niche niche or niche, I think, if you are in America is simply another word for a topic area. So a site's niche is the topic area that the site covers.

Speaker 1: 0:51

The word niche has had a bit of a bad press recently since probably the helpful content update hit what a lot of people would regard as the niche site community. So these were people who create sites based on an interest of theirs. There were lots of travel niche websites, for example, and lots of food niche websites. They got hit by the Helpful Content Update. So these were sites that are created with the main intention of monetizing them through display ads and there was a whole load of people who were very vocal about the amount of money they were earning doing this and they called themselves Niche Site. This Niche, this niche site that most famous one probably is niche site lady, who is actually just quite really good stuff, good websites. She unfortunately got hit a little. She still does quite well, but anyway, I digress. The niche site industry and the niche site term has taken a bit of a hit, but I think that's unfair, because what's wrong with people creating websites, uh, on subjects that they're interested in and then being able to earn money from them?

Speaker 1: 1:46

But hey ho, next up we've got naked link. So a naked link is one where the anchor text is just the plain url that's being linked to. So, for example, if someone linked to our site broadbandcouk and they just use the anchor text broadbandcouk, then that's a naked link. This works well for exact match domains. If you get lots of naked links, then Google may look at that and start to pass relevance based on the exact match of the anchor. That's just a personal theory of mine. But, yeah, naked link, just exact example. Naked domain is the anchor text of the link.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Next up, we've got named update. So a named update is any Google update, except their core updates, which Google announces. So named updates usually target specific areas, such as reviews updates or the helpful content update or certain link spam updates. So this is when Google's targeting a particular thing. They'll name the update and announce it on their google search central blog. Core updates are slightly different because they don't tend to name them other than generally just the time. So it might be the the june 2023 core update, for example, would be how they name those core updates. But the core updates generally aren't targeting a specific thing, whereas named what we refer to as named updates are ones that that tend to name the actual action that they're trying to target.

Speaker 1: 3:10

So next we've got name address phone number, or NAP, so NAP is short for name address phone number. It's a set of information that Google looks to see consistency on when it discovers items related to your business in different places online. So if Google sees multiple different names, addresses and phone numbers for the same business, then how does it know which one to trust? And having trustworthy data is a key part of ranking well in local SEO. So you need to try to ensure consistency in your NAP and any other data about your business in all the sources so those are the ones you own and on other sites that publish it.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Next we've got Natural Language Processing, or NLP. So Natural Language Processing, or NLP for short, is a branch of computer science that looks to enable computers to understand and manipulate human language. So NLP aims to be able to categorise and extract information and insights from text documents. So in SEO, nlp is often used to try and determine the intent of language and to discover the entities within documents. Nlp was used quite a lot by tools that try to work out the intent of documents, the intent of search terms, those kind of things. It was used a lot more before people started using search terms those kind of things. It was used a lot more before people started using AI to try and do these things. So now people really who used to use NLP a lot tend to now use things like ChatGPT and a large language models to try and get the same kind of insight out of text compared to using NLP, because it's a bit harder really, you know you need to know a bit more about coding, you need to know certain libraries to really use NLP well, whereas you can just ask the same questions of a large language model and get pretty similar answers, although at a greater cost in terms of cost of using AI is greater than using some of these NLP natural language processing libraries that you get with Python, for example.

Speaker 1: 5:09

Next up, we've got natural link. So any link that a website receives naturally, so without outreach or without solicitation, is known as a natural link, otherwise known as organic links, editorial links. These are just links that you would you acquire naturally, without any effort on your part whatsoever, and these are kind of the gold standard link. These are the links that Google wants to count. These are the links that, if you get, you should be really, really happy with and they're the perfect link, the one that Google wants to count and you don't have to do anything to get them. They're perfect.

Speaker 1: 5:42

Next, we've got navigational intent. So navigational intent is where a user's trying to find a specific website or web page so they may search purely for Amazon, so looking for the Amazon website or, more specifically, amazon customer services, for they're trying to find the Amazon customer services webpage on that website. So it's one of the four intent types, um, and it's the one which is probably least interesting to seos in terms of trying to, you know, target and manipulate, because generally there's really only one, very few places people are trying to get to when they're doing navigational type intent searches, but it's one to be aware of if you're trying to understand intent in its entirety. Next we we've got negative SEO. So negative SEO is where a competitor or just someone with a grudge who doesn't like you will attempt to use black hat techniques to get your website penalized by Google. So they may, for example, do large link spam campaigns tends to be off page to do a negative SEO. So they might leave negative reviews about you and try and do things that make Google see you poorly or make Google implement some kind of penalty against you. Negative SEO can go to the point of where they might try and hack your website and, you know, deface your website, put negative content on your website. That obviously goes beyond um the realms of where it's a moral choice. It becomes illegal if people start hacking things, um, but yeah, essentially it's. It's where someone tries to take your site down, um, usually from the outside, google reckon and claim that they can cope with negative seo and will discount it, but obviously there are cases, I know, where people have actually been taken down by negative seo, and obviously google do penalize people for, you know, link spam and lots of these other things. So what's to say? They won't, you know, get a false positive and essentially penalize a site for actions that weren't taken by that site. So, yeah, one to watch out for. It's rare for it to happen to anybody, but it it does happen.

Speaker 1: 7:50

The next, then, is a newsletter. So, yeah, newsletter is an email sent out for a person or a company to a list of subscribers. Newsletters might be published at set intervals or they may publish as and when the newsletter publisher has something they wish to share with their audience. Um, very common thing, you see on websites sign up up for our newsletter. 99% of them tend to be rubbish, because it's just one of those things that people seem to decide oh yeah, we've got a website, we've got our e-commerce site, we need to have a newsletter, and then they never really use them very well. But if you do have a website, it is worth collecting people's emails, but try and do it with a purpose. Try and do it with an end goal in mind, rather than just endlessly putting out kind of generic rubbish information.

Speaker 1: 8:33

Next n is niche edit. Now, niche editing is? It's a? It's a type of link building that is against google's guidelines, so it could be considered black hat, and it's where you pay the owner of a web page on a third-party site to insert, backlinked with targeted anchor text into an already existing article. We covered this in an earlier episode under its other name, which is link inserts. Some people call them link inserts. And again, you need to just be aware that if someone is selling you a link insert or a niche edit, that what they're essentially doing is going and paying other people to put a link into already existing content and there are risks to this. Google consider it link buying. They consider it link spam, so you don't want to get caught doing it.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Next, we've got nofollow. So nofollow is an attribute that was introduced by google that can be attached to a link that originally was designed to allow people to link to web pages where there may be a commercial link. So, for example, if you've got an affiliate relationship, if you're creating an affiliate product, google doesn't want to count that link for page rank purposes. So they designed this nofollow attribute so that you could say to google do not page, pass page rank or crawl this link. It would then protect sites from being penalized for having commercial relationships involving links, as the links would not contribute to ranking the destination page. Now, more recently, google has changed the definition slightly of a nofollow link, so they do reserve the right now to pass page rank or to crawl the link if they decide to. However, the protection from penalization still applies.

Speaker 1: 10:08

So, yeah, this is where an attribute that allows you to sell a link on a web page or have a commercial relationship with the site that you're linking to, but not get penalized for it being paid or having that commercial relationship, because you're essentially saying to google don't count this as an editorial link or as an organic link. We have a relationship between these two sites, so we don't want you to count this for ranking purposes. It's a way so you can have those relationships and not get penalized by google, and google can take a call itself on whether it's going to pass page rank or not with those links. They have actually since modified this, so, as well as nofollow links, you can also take a link as sponsored directly, so it's like a sold link or it's a link with an affiliate relationship, you can mark it as sponsored. They also now have the UGC link so you can say this link was placed by user generated content, not by the website directly. Again, that's something you might have used nofollow for in the past. You can still use nofollow for cases where it's a sponsored link or a sold link or a user generated content link. They just provide those other new versions so that you can more tightly define the relationship if you want to.

Speaker 1: 11:17

And finally, today we've got noindex. So noindex is a tag that can be added to a web page that instructs Google and other search engines not to include the page in their index. So you can use this tag for any pages you want Google to be able to crawl but you don't want to include it in their index. So you might choose, for example, to remove your contact page or your terms and condition page or pages that you don't want ranking or you don't want google to really bother with on your site. You can have them no indexed if you wish. So that's everything for today.

Speaker 1: 11:50

I hope you found that useful. If there's any ends that you think are missing, then do let me know and we get them added. And yeah, I hope you find these useful and I'll be back next time when we move on to the part 17. Thanks very much. Before I go, I just want to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at 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 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.

Speaker 1: 12:36

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips, then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeoplescom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.