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 back to SEO. It's Not that Hard. It's me, ed Dawson, your host, as usual, and today we're on to part 25 of SEO A to Z. Coming towards the end of this. Now we're on to you, and today we're going to cover UGC link to VPN virtual private network.

So let's get started with UGC link. So UGC stands for User Generated Content, so a UGC Link is an attribute introduced by Google that you can attach to a link that is included in any page from user generated content rather than content that's been produced by the website owner. So this says to Google I can't vouch for this link as a website owner, as it was generated by one of my users, so it protects site owners from being penalized for linking to potentially bad websites, or for the case of the person who generated the content. The user who generated the content was maybe paid to place that link. So you're basically saying to Google draw your own conclusions about whether you should use this link for ranking purposes or not, that I can't 100% vouch this link. And it's the same as the no follow attribute that you attach to a link. Is a rel equals. Ugc is what you attach to the link and, yeah, it's just one of those ways that google's allowing you to give it a bit more information about the source of that link and how editorial it is, whether there's any relationships there. So UGC is when you can place in that user generated content, to let Google know you're not the person responsible for that and leave it for Google to decide how to interpret that link.

Next up, we've got unnatural links talking of links link. Next up, we've got unnatural links talking of links. Um, so an unnatural link is how google describes links. It thinks they've not been editorially or naturally earned and google may penalize you for unnatural links or, at the very least, discount them from helping you rank. So you know, an unnatural link would be one where you'd paid someone to place that link. Yeah, I mean generally, that's it. You know where they're paid for one way or the other, so it might be by cash or might have paid for it in kind. These are the kind of links that if Google decides they are unnatural, yeah, it will start to potentially cause you issues, even if the issue is only wasting money on creating those links. That's the least worst outcome and the very worst. That means, obviously, google campaign lies for unnatural link building.

So next up, we've got url. So you'll probably see people talk about urls. It stands for uniform resource locator and it's essentially it's what you type into web browser to get a web page. So, for example, if you go to https colon slash, slash, wwwexamplecom, slash, folder slash, web page dot html, that is the url, the uniform resource locator for that particular web page. So that's just all the url stands for very simple.

Next you we've got is user experience, or ux for short. Now, this describes the overall experience of a visitor to your site as they consume and interact with your content and navigate around the site. So Google wants to promote sites with great UX, so it considers factors such as core web vitals mobile user experience, site security, ease of navigation, amount of non-core content such as excessive ads or poorly separated main and supplementary content, when it's trying to assess what the UX is the experience that any user has on your site. There are people who specialise completely in UX design and UX architecture, but as an SEO, you really need to have an appreciation of what is good and what is bad user experience. You'll know this yourself from using websites. Some you'll find a pleasure to use. It's easy to find what you want. It's easy to get from one part of the site to the other. The whole experience is nice. The page loads fast. There's not too many ads, you don't get interstitials that slow down the loading of the page and all those kind of things. That's really good UX and then bad UX. Think of it. Lots of the newspaper websites in the UK have got awful UX. They're just so overloaded with ads. The page loads slow as you scroll up and down the page. The page jumps as it's loading content in. It's taking a long time to load. All that kind of thing is a real poor UX. That's what you want to try and avoid Always. Think about trying to give a good user experience on your site. So next up, we've got user-generated content, which we kind of covered at the start.

Ugc User-generated content any content published on a website that was not created by the web page owner but instead by a user of the website. So this kind of content includes things like forum posts, blog comments, reviews I mean reddit, for example. That's all pretty much all user generated content. Lots of review sites like trustpilot all relying on user generated content can be a really powerful way of producing content because obviously, if you're doing it yourself or even if you're paying people to do it, there's a limit to how much content you can produce. User-generated content is a way of producing lots and lots of content that Google likes. Google likes user-generated content. It deems it as high quality. You'll see it in how Reddit is just appearing everywhere at the moment. User-generated content is not a bad thing and is definitely much preferred by Google to AI content. On broadbandcouk we had, and there still is, lots of user reviews of individual broadband providers and that drew lots of great traffic over the years and ranked really well in Google for that user-generated content of real people's experiences on how they found working with different broadband suppliers. So if you can build UGC into your site somewhere, then it can be a really powerful method.

You have to be careful about what people actually post. So, depending on the type of content, we, for example, found with reviews that we pre-moderated all of them because we didn't want obscenity on the site. We also wanted to make sure people um weren't spamming it and putting on on content that was not related to the actual content of the site. So we pre-moderated. Other types of sites tend to do post-moderation. So, for example, like your Reddit, some Quora, any kind of forum where there's discussion going on, it's really hard to pre-moderate that because you'll destroy the flow of any of those conversations. So you kind of need to have good post-moderation strategies in place. That's like a lot of forums, I think. In Reddit especially, they have people that sort of voluntarily get promoted is in place and that's like a lot of forums, I think in reddit especially, you know, they have people that sort of voluntarily get promoted to the position of being able to moderate that content. And then you'll have moderation teams on top of that for real severe violations of what their standards are. But yeah, moderation does become an issue with user generated content. Just beware of that.

Next you've got is user agent. So the user agent is a string of text that any software making requests to a web service will provide in the request header. So this string will usually include information such as the vendor and the version of the software and may include additional information like operating system. So every time a web server receives a request, this user agent is part of the request and sometimes it's blank. You know, if people write their own software and they don't fill that in, it can be a blank user agent. But any web browser will send over user agent information.

Crawling bots like google bot will send over user information in this user agent header and a website may, in some cases, decide to show different content depending on the value of this user agent header. And a website may, in some cases, decide to show different content depending on the value of the user agent. This is also known as cloaking, and some people do this to show googlebot and other crawlers different content to that which it shows real users, which google doesn't like that, unless there's some very good reasons for doing it. So you want to be careful when it comes to that kind of cloaking. But if you are intending on trying any black hat stuff playing about based on changing your content depending on the user agent can be a very interesting thing to do and you can use actually you can test how different sites give different results depending on the user agent by using a user agent switching plugin on your web browser so you can change the user agent to be Google bot or any other bot or anything any text that you want, and you can see if a site is going to change subtly or even not so subtly any of the content that it shows, based on you changing that user agent. There are some more sophisticated cloaking techniques where the web web server won't just rely on the user agent information. It'll also do a reverse lookup on the ip address of the requesting agent and see if it matches like known ip ranges or known geographic locations for things like googlebot. So not everyone relies just on the user agent. Some systems also look at the IP address before deciding how to decide what content they're going to display.

Okay, so now we're moving on to Vs. We've got to V in the glossary, so first up, and there's only a very short number of Vs. First up is voice search. So voice search is searching using voice rather than text. Earlier versions of this were like using Alexa, amazon Alexa and you talk to Alexa and you might make requests and search for information using Alexa. People are now able to talk to Chrome, google through Chrome. You can just talk and make requests via that method. I don't know how popular it is, whether it's going to get more popular in time, but yeah, it just means essentially using voice to initiate a search rather than typing into a text box.

And, lastly, for today, we've got a VPN or virtual private network. So a VPN is essentially a proxy service which adds a layer of security between yourself and the proxy server it uses. So it basically means that when you are requesting information from a website, the website will see that you appear from a location other than the one you're actually physically in, so you can pretend to be in another country to where you are. It's most commonly used by SEO to enable them to appear to the websites that are in different physical locations. They may want to be checking google results in a particular country. They might want to be seeing what results are ranking for queries in the USA when you are based in the UK. So you want to be able to say you can set the proxy, the virtual private network, to make you appear to be in New York if you want to be. So that's how we might use it as SEOs. Other people might use it. If they're in a country that maybe censors certain information and blocks certain websites, they can use a VPN to essentially get around those kind of like firewalls and make requests by the proxy network and get access to information they wouldn't be able to normally in their own country. But that's outside the scope of SEO.

So, yep, that is everything for today. So we've gone from UGC links to virtual profit network. We're going to be on to WNEXT. So, yeah, this is going to be probably maybe any one or two more episodes left in the series. I hope you're finding it useful. If there's anything you think we've missed so far, do let me know and get that added in.

And just to finish off, I want to say if you can rate and review us, it would be a fantastic favor you could do us. It would help us reach more people, help us appear higher in search when people are searching for podcasts on seo. So that would be fantastic if you can help us out, and I would really appreciate it. And 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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