The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #29 - Weekly SEO Tips & News

September 11, 2022

Here are the weekly SEO insights for the SEOs Diners Club members. You may also join our free SEO Diners Club network to ask questions and share your thoughts on these topics.

Google Helpful Content Update Completed

The update started on August 25 and was completed 15 days later on September 9.

Google has confirmed that the helpful content update is rolling out. The update started on August 25, 2022, and was completed on September 9, 2022.

I want to remind you that Google's "useful content" update is a site-wide signal. This update targets websites with a relatively high amount of unsatisfactory or useless content, where the content is primarily written for search engines.

In short, did you write your content to rank higher on Google, or did you write it to help users?

What Should You Do If Your Organic Traffic Has Dropped Significantly After This Update?

Google has provided a list of questions you can ask yourself about your content. Read the questions I linked below and objectively ask yourself if your content is compatible with this update.

In English

Google's Content Quality and Helpfulness Questions,Question Type,Answer,Add example of how this is better done by outranking competitor ,Comments and Recommendations

Is the content primarily made for humans rather than to attract people from search engines?,Helpfulness and People Sati...

If you're affected by this update, keep in mind that it may take several months to recover if you do everything right and change your content over time.

The update started on August 25th and completed 15 days later on September 9th.

11 Ways to Improve SEO Performance of Ecommerce Category Pages

Learn to improve the SEO performance of your e-commerce site's category pages.

If you've been doing SEO for a long time, you know that SEO and UX experts disagree when it comes to category pages.

An important reason is that SEO professionals tend to want to add more content and links. UX professionals, on the other hand, want to prioritize clicks on products.

However, there is a middle ground where we can preserve the commercial nature of the categories of e-commerce sites and add content to help users make their purchasing decisions.

Throughout this guide published on Ahrefs.com, you can learn how to improve your e-commerce category pages for SEO while keeping the user at the center of your decisions.

Category pages are a common area SEO and UX experts disagree on. Here's the middle ground.

Basic SEO Practices for Health Sites

When doing SEO for your health site, you should consider Google's strict rules about health content and think like a patient.

YMYL, also called Your Money or Your Life, rules for related health (and finance) websites.

I have to say that you analyze the content of Google's finance and health sites much more carefully. Content creators for your health site need to be especially careful about this. If you are looking for SEO practices for your health-related website, check out the top tips outlined in the post below!

Optimizing the SEO of your healthcare site requires thinking like a patient while considering Google's strict rules around health content. Learn all the tips here!

Do Reciprocal Backlinks Hurt Your SEO Performance?

Reciprocal backlink efforts do not harm your SEO performance when done correctly. Learn the right and wrong ways to reciprocate backlinks.

Reciprocal backlinking happens when an agreement is made between two brands to trade links to increase SEO and site authority, basically saying, "You give me backlinks, and I will give you backlinks."

Don't look for reciprocal links to get more site traffic or improve your backlink profile. It won't work, and you could get a Google penalty.

Instead, understand that being helpful and valuable with your in-site links will naturally lead to reciprocal backlinks.

Connecting with relevant, reliable sources is an excellent way to build authority and develop relationships with brands in your niche.

You will also value your readers by directing them to sites with reliable, relevant, and helpful content. It builds trust in your audience, nurtures them, and draws them further into your brand ecosystem.

For example, a company can organize a webinar by collaborating with another company. In this context, both sites mentioning this webinar and giving backlinks to each other will be perceived as a very natural way of providing backlinks, according to Google.

Reciprocal link building isn't bad for SEO, but only if you do it right. Learn the right and wrong ways to build reciprocal links.

What is Quality Content?

Find out what it takes to create quality content that is useful to users, ranks well in SERPs, and surpasses the competition.

It would help if you had real expertise in creating quality content. You can only make your content quality if you:

  • Share your experience, stories, and insights.

  • Share only the data you have.

  • Have an opinion, a unique perspective, or a different perspective.

Most of the pages you want to compete with that are already ranking high on Google have probably been ranking for years. They may have updated and improved their content during this time to make it better. Existing content can also have lots of solid and relevant backlinks.

There is a phenomenon where top-ranked content tends to get more links, making it harder to beat. You have to be extraordinary and make an effort to overcome content like this. It will not be easy. If you want to beat them, you will probably need a team.

You can find a roadmap for creating quality content in the article below.

Learn what it takes to create quality content that is helpful for users, ranks well in the SERPs, and surpasses the competition.

New YMYL Guidelines: What Does It Mean for SEO?

To comply with the new YMYL guidelines, you must ensure that your website provides the trust signals that Google wants.

Search Engine Watch's YMYL guide has been updated to clarify what Google is looking for as part of quality assessment guidelines.

Content will already be at the forefront of many SEO professionals' minds, given that Google's "Useful Content" update has been rolled out.

AdditionalGoogle'st"s to the YMYL "guide shows that your site content significantly contributes to how pages are rated for expertise, quality, and authority.

Google emphasizes in section 4.2 that “The quality of MC (Main Content = Main Content) is one of the most important criteria in Page Quality rating.”

That's why we know that the main content on the website is something Goo"leThat's a close look at, especially if your website falls under this YMYL category.

Ensuring that your websites give off the best trust signals to Google to align with the new YMYL guidelines.

Do You Need Directory Registrations for Local SEO?

Local directory listings can help or hinder your local SEO, depending on how you do it. Here's what you need to know.

The primary purpose of Local SEO is to provide visibility for a local business in the Local Map Pack and the top three organic search results. These are usually found just below the paid Google ads and Map Pack.

From a local SEO perspective, several factors are local presence, relevance, and authority. In other words, from a common sense perspective, local businesses need to prove to search engines:

  • Indeed, they are physically located close to their customer base.

  • They provide services or products that fall into specific categories.

  • They are a reliable/authoritative content source and answer their customers' questions.

  • Local directories, by definition, are a tool by which businesses can address all three of these factors.

So yes, you still need directory submissions for local SEO. But we need to ensure that this is done correctly.

The following article will guide you in this regard:

Local directory submission can help or hinder your local SEO depending on how you set it up. Here's what you need to know.

Books Of The Week: "Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything" - Martin Ford

Whether you are interested in the field of artificial intelligence or outside of it, for the time being, you will learn a lot from Martin Ford's clear and critical perspective.

If you have a smartphone, you have AI in your pocket. AI is impossible to avoid online. And it has already changed everything from how doctors diagnose disease to how you interact with friends or read the news. But in Rule of the Robots, Martin Ford argues that the true revolution is yet to come. 

In this sequel to his prescient New York Times bestseller Rise of the Robots, Ford presents us with a striking vision of the very near future. He argues that AI is a uniquely powerful technology altering every dimension of human life, often for the better. For example, advanced science is being done by machines, solving devilish problems in molecular biology that humans could not, and AI can help us fight climate change or the next pandemic.

It also has a capacity for profound harm. Deep fakes—AI-generated audio or video of events that never happened—are poised to cause havoc. AI empowers authoritarian regimes like China with unprecedented mechanisms for social control. And AI can be deeply biased, learning bigoted attitudes from us and perpetuating them. 

In short, this is not a technology to simply embrace or let others worry about. The machines are coming, and they won’t stop, and each of us needs to know what that means if we are to thrive in the twenty-first century. And Rule of the Robots is the essential guide to all of it: both AI and the future of our economy, our politics, our lives. 

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything [Ford, Martin] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything

I hope you enjoyed my weekly SEO insights. Hope to see you the following Sunday in the new episode. I wish you all a great week.

Best,

Mert Erkal