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 and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, as usual, and today we are on to part 21 of our SEO A to Z, which starts with query deserves freshness. That's the only cue that we've got in the SEO glossary, although I suppose technically we could just have query as probably the first entrance.

And a query is obviously what people put into search engines when they're asking a question. They query google, they query bing. So query is the question you ask a search engine and query freshness, or qdf, is a ranking factor which applies to certain topics and niches where Google very much wants to surface fresh content, such as current affairs and news. Now, this factor does not apply universally to all search terms and topics. Some people hear of query deserves freshness and think that Google constantly wants fresh content all the time on every subject, and that's not actually true. Constantly wants fresh content all the time, on every subject, and that's not actually true. There's plenty of times when google is quite happy to serve with very old content if that's the right content. That applies in the situation that people are asking about broadbandcouk. There's plenty of guides and pages on there that are over 20 years old. In some cases they still get traffic, so you don't have to just produce fresh content. However, if your topic is one which does deserve freshness so, especially if it's a news topic, it's a trending topic. So, say, some big event happens worldwide could be the Olympic Games, which is coming up at the moment that kind of thing might all of a sudden have a QDF factor applied to it, where it's a breaking news story and Google is going to try and surface the freshest.

Fresh is newest content on it. So that's query deserves freshness. So that's it for queues. There's not many queues. If you think I've missed any, do let me know and we'll get them added in. Brings us to r.

So the first one in r is rank and rent. Now this is a monetization strategy for lead generation content websites that target local service niches, such as plumbers, electricians, cleaners or any other kind of product or service that's delivered in a local area, and rank and rent. Website owners will work to rank their site for local queries for the product or service and then send all the leads from a certain geographical area to one company in return for a usually fixed sum, rather than lead by lead monthly rent. Now this is a topic, a sort of a way of doing SEO and of monetizing that's been quite hyped almost since the end of 2023 till now. Um, I actually did a whole complete podcast episode on this back earlier this year, which is actually one of the most popular episodes I've ever produced, for some reason. But if you want to learn more about rank and rent, go and listen to that podcast episode and you'll get the full, in-depth detail from it there.

Our next R is rank tracking. So rank tracking is the process of monitoring how your website is ranking for specific target keywords over time, and the very simplest way to rank track is just to manually keep an eye on them yourself. There's probably a few in your website targets that you keep a close eye on. There's probably a few in your that your website targets, that you keep a close eye on. But if you want to do it on an automated or at scale, then there are several rank tracking services or pieces of software available to do it. So, yeah, if you want to track at scale, just do a google, do a search for rank tracking software.

Next up, we've got ranking factor, also known as a ranking signal. So a ranking factor is anything that Google considers when looking to decide what and where a web page should rank. For Now, google's never given a definitive list of what they consider as ranking factors, and there's much debate in the SEO community about what is and isn't a ranking factor. And even those items where there is general consensus that they are a ranking factor, then the debate can still rage at how important a factor is compared to others. The google api leak gave us lots more information and surfaced a whole bunch of potential new ranking factors. Um, but these are all the individual little things that all added together then cumulatively work out as to where you're going to rank. So that's what people consider as a ranking factor. Next, we've got rankings. So rankings is just a shorthand for Google search engine result pages. So if people say how are you doing in the rankings, what they mean is how are you doing in those search engine results?

The next R is reciprocal link. So where two websites have an agreement to link to each other, it's called a reciprocal link. They reciprocate each other's links. It's probably best considered a grey hat term and if done in excess it could lead to a penalty. Now, that's not to say you should worry about linking to a site that links to you. It's quite normal in many social circumstances for two sites to be related and they link to each other. What will become suspicious if google sees you have a huge amount of reciprocal links with lots of sites, especially sites that don't really aren't topically related to you, and you can be seen that you are doing this as a way of manipulating the search rankings. So at scale, potentially problematic, but where it makes sense, completely normal and don't worry about it Next time is reconsideration request.

So if you've ever received a manual penalty for breaching Google's guidelines and you can submit a reconsideration request in your Google Search Console to ask for that penalty to be reconsidered, it's best practice to do this after making changes to your site to reverse whatever had caused the original manual penalty, because they will tell you in when they penalise you. They will tell you in Google Search Console what the reason for the penalty is. Might be a bit of a broad reason, but they will give you information to what it is. And then you want to take action before doing the reconsideration request, because if you don't take any action they're very unlikely to make any actual changes.

Next we've got redirect. So if you move or remove a web page, you can use a redirect to tell google and other web browsers where to go for the page's new location or its replacement. The most common ones of these are 301 redirects and 302 redirects. A 301 redirect tells the search engine that this is a permanent change, so this page is permanently moved from one place to another. A 302 redirect says this is a temporary change. You might temporarily be taking a page away and redirecting the traffic to a, say, a temporary holding page, for example. So a 302 redirect says they could say it's the search engine. I've just temporarily moved this page. Come back later because it might be back where it was. The original page might have been returned.

Next up, we've got redirect chain. Now these are related to redirects, because a redirect chain occurs when there are multiple page redirects between an initial request and a final served page. So, for example, if page a redirects to page b and then page b then redirects to page c, you see these hops or these chains. So redirect chains should be avoided where possible, as a they slow down the page loads as each redirect has a loading overhead. So long chains of redirects may cause Googlebot to abandon a crawl, and I think five redirects is the maximum number of redirects it will do before giving up. Additionally, you do also lose a small amount of page rank for every hop in a chain, which compounds the more hops you have. So you can use site calling software such as Screaming Frog to search for and report on redirect chains so you can resolve them, because obviously, ideally, you don't want to have these chains exacerbated over time. And if you've got an old site where lots of redirects have been put in place over time, you might find these chains start to happen without you really noticing them. So that's why you should use the query software to find and act on them.

Next we have related searches. So related searches is a search feature in the Google search results that shows similar related searches to your original search query that other users have made, and I'm surprised that this is something that people don't talk about more. We actually use it in keywords people use. When you do a search for any PAA, we'll always give you the related searches that also are surfaced along with that and you can then go and interrogate them, because it's a good next step in your keyword research to look at those related searches to your original broad match term that you were looking at. So yeah, those related searches.

Next, we have relevancy. So relevancy is a concept based on the idea that links from sites or pages that are more relevant topically to your site or page will carry more weight when it comes to determining rankings than those from sites which are less relevant topically, and we saw evidence of this in the Google API leak, where Google looks at the context of the wording around the anchor text of any link. So they are looking definitely to see if sites are related topically, and they're probably looking at that for a reason. So this relevancy concept, I believe, does actually work. So, which is why it's good advice to always try and get links from relevant pages where possible, that's not to say, don't get links from pages that aren't relevant. If you can have a topically non-relevant site that happens to be covering something similar to your topic linked to you, yep, great, go for it. Still get those high authority links, but, yeah, never knock back a relevant link either.

Next we have request indexing. So if you've got a page that Google hasn't indexed yet, then you can use the request indexing feature in Google search console to try and speed the process up. So we need to simply search for the URL in Google search console then click the request indexing button when the results show for that page. I use this all the time when we put new content up on keywords people use. I always, you know, putting a new guide up, I will always use the going to Google search console and request indexing. You are limited to I think maybe it's about 10 to 15 pages a day. That let you add in. When we first put the SEO glossary on the site, which is obviously about 30-odd pages, I couldn't do them all in one day. I had to do it over a couple of days to do the request indexing and after I did the first few it was starting to crawl and find others. Anyway, but it's a good little little, um little hack to know that you can go and request that indexing yourself straight away, without having to wait for google to come along and find the page automatically.

Next, we've got responsive. So a responsive web design is that which allows a web page to alter depending on the size of the device that's viewing it. Now responsive design is good from a user perspective because it allows you visitors to get the best view no matter what size of screen they use, and it's also a factor that google considers when it's sort of doing a comparison of pages. Which to rank. It will all because it does mobile first indexing. It's always going to prefer responsive pages, and it's just best practice nowadays. Don't create sites that aren't responsive unless you have an incredibly good reason to do so.

Next, we've got reviews. Now, third part of reviews are really important for online marketing in general, as your audience will pay attention to them and, in many cases, they actively seek them out, so they're worth investing some time in trying to attract reviews and manage any poor reviews you receive. Sharing positive reviews on your website can help with conversion optimization, as adding social proof can really help people get over the line when it comes to making a purchase decision. Third part of reviews can also be important for seo. Google reviews can impact sites ranking for local queries. So if you have a local business, then aim to get positive google reviews. And for sites with a wider audience, then we know that eeat experience, expertise, authority and trust. Google asks its quality raters to research third-party reviews when trying to establish whether a website is trustworthy, so it can't be discounted that this may also play into ranking algorithms more generally. So do pay attention to reviews.

Next, we've got rich snippet. So when Google shows additional data alongside a search result most commonly sort of using structured schema data from the web page that it's listing that is called a rich snippet. So this might be like adding stars to you know, review, stars to things and information like that. That's what a rich snippet is. Finally, we've got robotstxt.

So at all websites, robotstxt is a text file that contains instructions to crawlers like Googlebot as to what they should and should not crawl on your website, and it also lets you provide links to things like sitemapxml or an image sitemapxml. So essentially, it's a little piece of text file that you can put on your website that says to search engines go here, don't go there. You can also give different instructions to different crawlers. So you might say Google, you're allowed anywhere you want on the site. All other bots block, you're not allowed in.

Now, crawlers and software don't have to respect robotstxt. Google will. All the main ones will. Anyone with any credibility will tend to respect them. But if you've got someone who's calling you maliciously or just doing it and are not part of a service like this, then people can ignore them if they want to. But generally, google and others like that will respect your robotstxt. So that's everything we've done Quoted service, freshness all the way to robotstxt.

I hope you found it useful. If you've made it this far, please do consider giving us a subscribe and leaving a review, because it really helps us reach new people. And yeah, until next time. I'll see you later. 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. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

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