Zyppy SEO

Our first edition of the SEO Tips - Free LinkedIn Edition is live! 1. Google's New Over-Optimization Triggers 2. Keep Your Topics Focused 3. Lying to Google in Your XML Sitemaps 4. Getting A Better SEO Salary 5. The Best Guide to Removing Negative Search Results We've Seen And more...

New: "How Recent Google Updates Punish Good SEO: 50-Site Case Study" Something is seriously sneaky with Google updates, including the Helpful Content Update and the more recent March Core Update It's almost like Google is punishing good SEO. This makes sense, as in a recent interview, Google’s Elizabeth Tucker said Google needed to understand “why were we showing this (unhelpful) content in the first place.” To investigate, we looked at 1000s of data points—with the generous help of Ahrefs!—and ran correlations across dozens of common SEO practices, including: • Backlinks • Internal Linking • Schema Usage And tons more. Link in comments

Google says the most important part of E-E-A-T is "Trust" What's the best way to explain Trust? Free Download: Google Page Quality Rating Scorecard Imagine you have elderly parents—or grandparents—shopping online. Or they are looking up medical conditions. They come to you and ask if you think they can trust a particular website. Most people can answer these types of questions pretty quickly & accurately. "Yes you can trust the Mayo Clinic." Or "Yes, it's generally safe to shop at Amazon." Or "No, this looks like a scam site." Google wants to replicate this experience. They train their algorithms with the help of 14,000 Quality Raters who evaluate sites in a manner similar to how you might talk to your parents. I created the Google Page Quality Rating Scorecard to help folks self-evaluate their websites almost exactly like a Quality Rater, based on Google's guidelines. Nearly 2000 people have downloaded it in the last 2 months. Link in comments. (If you don't see a link, Google "Zyppy Scorecard")

Google asks Quality Raters to assign a "Quality" rating to each web page they evaluate. For example, when looking at your site, they might assign one of the following ratings: Lowest → Low → Medium → High → Highest ... and half steps in between are also allowed, e.g., Low+, Medium+ To understand how Quality Raters arrive at each rating, we created the Google Page Quality Rating Scorecard. Taken directly from Google's own Quality Rater Guidelines, these are the exact instructions Google publically gives to Quality Raters on how to assign quality ratings. (Google internal documents may be different.) Here's page 2 of the scorecard. Grab a copy. Rate client sites. Feedback and shares welcome. Link in comments

New: Introducing the Google Page Quality Rating Scorecard Google Quality Raters assign a "Quality + Needs Met" score to every web page they rate Because I work as a Quality Rater myself—about an hour a week—SEO clients occasionally ask for a "Quality" audit to rate their sites like Google would To accomplish this, I created a Google Page Quality Scorecard. This is the *exact* same scorecard I use to rate client sites And it's 100% based on Google's own Quality Rater Guidelines Now, you can use it to rate your own/client/competitor pages in alignment with Google's Rater Guidelines Grab a free copy. Link in comments

What's it like to be an SEO "and also" a Google Quality Rater? This is one of the best podcasts I've ever been invited to, and might get me fired. :) Well worth a listen... thanks James de Lacey and Gareth A. Boyd!