Opinionated SEO - Digital Marketing News

Philip Mastroianni

Weekly review of everything SEO and digital marketing. The opinionated SEO, where we talk about recent news and updates in the digital marketing world of SEO, Paid Advertising, and Social Media that impact you as a marketer. I’ll also throw some of my 20 years as a digital marketer opinion into the mix. Episodes release each week and we try to keep them around 15-30 minutes. Show notes with links to all the stories are available if you want to dive deeper into each news item. read less

ChatGPT - What is it and what should I know about it as a marketer
Dec 16 2022
ChatGPT - What is it and what should I know about it as a marketer
In this episode of the Opinionated SEO, I discuss the capabilities of and implications of chat GPT, the free AI-based service from Open AI. I break down what GPT is, what it's good and bad at, how to craft requests correctly and how to avoid detection from search engine algorithms. I believes that GPT offers great potential as a tool, but should never be trusted to replace human content writers, especially for investigative reportage.Full Article and Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/2023/01/chatgpt-what-is-it-and-what-should-i-know-about-it-as-a-marketer/Main Topics Covered:Overview of Chat GPTWhat Chat GPT Is Good AtWhat Chat GPT Is Bad AtHow To Craft RequestsAvoiding Detection from Search EnginesImplications for Content Writing & SEOI talk about how AI-based content can be used to create content more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional methods; I look at a past piece of content that I outsourced to a writer, compared to the same one using AI with the same prompt.I recommends trying out Chat GPT, an interface into DaVinci 3.5 from OpenAI, to produce creative, long-form pieces of content without much effort. Scott Aaronson was recently interviewed about AI safety; he mentioned that OpenAI research suggests that watermarking could help identify AI-generated content. Google's AI tools are able to pick up on certain key features such as punctuation and word choice that may indicate the content was generated by an artificial intelligence program. I believes that GPT 4 and 5 will make it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between human-written and AI-written pieces of content without adding original research or interviews. Have a happy holiday season and I look forward to seeing everyone next year!
Screaming Frog and the Search Console URL Inspection API
Feb 12 2022
Screaming Frog and the Search Console URL Inspection API
Today is February 10th and I wanted to talk about Screaming Frog as well as the new Search Console URL Inspection API. Full Blog Post / Show Notes: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e20Let’s jump right in, what is screaming frog and what can you do with it?Let’s start at the beginning, it’s free but limited, and you don’t run it online. The paid version is 149 pounds / year, or about $200 US dollars. So you are talking about $16 a month if you wanted to break it down that way. Buy it, write it off, and call it a day, it will save you that money in the first hour you use it.So what can it do?Screaming frog is an SEO spider, think GoogleBot but you get to save the data it captures.Here’s a list of the top features for it:Find broken links, errors, and redirectsPage title and meta data analysisMet robots and directives reviewAudit hreflangDiscover exact duplicate pagesGenerate xml sitemapsCreate site visualizations.You can do up to 500 URLs in the free version, unlimited to your computer’s capacity on the paid version.But the real power comes in when you use the paid version, and I’m going to just touch on a few of the features.Javascript rendering: Actually being able to view the page as a fully rendered version. This includes a screenshot as well as being able to review source code for the rendered version.We’re using this to better understand how the rendering affects crawlability, as well as what’s on the site and what isn’t depending on JS.If you do any kind of client side rendering, using react, or just not seeing Google crawling your site like you think it should, this is a great way to better understand.URL Inspection API Integration - I was going to save this for last, but it’s just too good to not put at the top of the list. There are a few integrations you get with screaming frog out of the box. 1 - Google Analytics 2 - Google Search Console - this includes the inspection API integration. 3 - Page speed insights And non Google related companies like Majestic for backlinks, ahrefs for things like backlinks and URL rating, and Moz for data like page authority and backlink info from their open site explorer metrics.Site VisualizationsCustom ExtractionMeta Tags - Titles, descriptions, etc You can even generate XML sitemapsFind out all pages that have broken links both internally and externally. 301s - Integration with the new Search Console URL Inspection API which was officially launched on January 31st, 2022 by Google - and it allows you to see indexation status of your URLs via an API. This was integrated in the latest release in the last few weeks and you’ll see a good share of tutorials out there. You probably want to know - what am I doing with this new data, and what data do we get that we can use?First, the data is used to understand indexation status in Google, errors that are coming up, and last crawl date.And what am I doing with that data? Let’s start with indexation status - you have a few variations of the summary of indexation, things like index and submitted, indexed not submitted in sitemap, crawled not indexed, discovered but not crawled, soft 404, error, and probably a few more I’m forgetting. By pulling this data on pages, you can get a better understanding of how Google sees your site.
Google Office Hours with John Mueller January 28th, 2022 Recap
Feb 2 2022
Google Office Hours with John Mueller January 28th, 2022 Recap
Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 28th, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about ten minutes.Full blog post, show notes, and transcript @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e19How does Google recognize paid links?They have a lot of factors that they look into, not just did someone report this as a paid link.Does Google care where the internal link is located in the site, header / content / footer?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=36Running a blog type site without any actual products, but more information about products, they want to know if Google will treat it as a classic product review site?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=265Local Directories:Does Google really care if you are listed on local directories and the information is correct?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=451Links:Are there any issues with linking to a site that is also linking to you?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=685Myths:Are there any myths or inaccuracies that you see out there that you can just debunk right now?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=785 Malware:Malware is still being shown in the search results.https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1449A tool to help index sites faster:https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1718Emojis in titles and descriptions:https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=1971Search Console API Data Accuracy:Is the data from the API more accurate than the web interface? https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2054FAQ Schema:Our schema looks good from a technical perspective, but isn’t showing on Google.https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2176Seasonal content:What should we do with content that’s seasonal like Black Friday?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2257CWV Impact?Of the 3 metrics, my CLS isn’t passing, how much of an impact will that have?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2418Will CWV impact crawling?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2555Migrating from a subdomain:The subdomain is old, like 20 years, and we’re looking to migrate to the main domain.https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=2677New Local Site Starting out:What signals should we look out for or pay attention to.https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=3015Geo redirects on site:Should you geo-redirect on a new site?https://youtu.be/a5J73nYDU8E?t=3195The last question had to do with branded search - I don’t think it was relevant as it seemed they may have other issues, but feel free to watch that part if you are having any issues with your branded search being visible.
A New meta tag and Walmart is making big moves into the Metaverse
Jan 27 2022
A New meta tag and Walmart is making big moves into the Metaverse
A New meta tag and Walmart is making big moves into the Metaverse Full Show Notes / Blog Post @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e17Last Friday, January 21st, 2022, Google Search Central released a new tag.This tag called indexifembedded, you can tell Google you'd still like your content indexed when it's embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag.There are a few use cases which Malcom Slade over at Creative Race outlined in their blog post. I’ll give a few here and a link to the full blog:1- Embedding sharable content2 - Embedding comments - like Disqus where it’s an iframe and the comments are not indexed3 - Embedding video where you want the video to be indexed on the page4 - Reviews from 3rd party embeds5 - They asked for other ideas. One that we’re talking about is a widget that we’ve had around for a while that other companies embed and they can display specific content. Think being able to embed stock tickers. Now, with each of these being indexed, and having links coming back to us, this could really change our link profile.Overall I like the idea that we can have more control of our content in the wild, but also to allow others to have that content indexed.https://creativerace.co.uk/indexifembedded-what-does-this-new-meta-tag-do/https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/01/robots-meta-tag-indexifembeddedAnd it’s been a week or two since I mentioned the metaverse, but it looks like Walmart is the next big name to file patents associated with the metaverse.One trademark application was for “Financial services, namely, providing a digital currency and a digital token of value for use by members of an online community via a global computer network.” In another filing they mention an on-line retail store featuring virtual merchandise.If you remember I mentioned other big names like Nike and Disney with similar type filings, but also Under Armor, Urban Outfitters, Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch have also filed similar trademarks with intent on virtualization of retail stores.Right now, Meta (the King formerly known as Facebook) seems to be pushing both the software and the hardware to the masses. With their Oculus headsets and requirements for a Facebook account, we’re seeing virtual connections that are coming right from existing web 2.0.So Meta has Oculus, Microsoft has HaloLens, Apple is rumored to be working on hardware, and Google just ramped up their AR hardware with plans to ship in the next 2 years. Remember Google glass came out in 2012, so they have a lot of previous hardware experience in this field, and I know they don’t want to lose out to Meta in the coming MetaVerse wars.https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/16/walmart-is-quietly-preparing-to-enter-the-metaverse.htmlMy personal belief is we are going to see a huge transformation in the next 2-4 years with how we work and interact in business. Right now we are seeing that you don’t necessarily have to be in an office together, though there are some advantages to having access to people right away. Middle and upper management like to have a visual that people are focusing on their work, whether you agree with that or not, it’s something that may never go away.
Google Office Hours with John Mueller Jan 21st, 2022 Recap
Jan 26 2022
Google Office Hours with John Mueller Jan 21st, 2022 Recap
Today I’ll be recapping the Google Office Hours with Google’s John Mueller from January 21st, 2022. As always, I’ll provide a synopsis of the question and answer, my opinion, and a link to the question in the video. The video ran an hour, I’ll try to summarize this for you in about 15 minutes.Full Show Notes / Blog @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e16Questions seemed to focus a bit on internationalization, and internal linking. Hope you enjoy:The value of internal links in header, footer, or in content?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=41Seeing links - they are paid, and the sites are ranking #1, why is that contradiction from what Google says?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=88Some links are not crawling according to Google Search Console.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=20325% of the pages have dropped being indexed, quite dramatically a few months ago. Submitted pages dropped by 50%. They thought it might be structured data that’s not valid.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=342Seeing images in organic search results, not the image tab. There isn’t documentation in google Search Central. https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=655Multiple websites for each location but just a different phone number and address.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=833Allright, then it was my turn. We have a strong US presence and moving into international. Should we go with ccTLDs or a single domain with subfolder country / language. Technology isn’t an issue, and I think being able to target Google Search Console to each unique domain by country may be the most advantageous option.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=1217Is there a way to capture a folder without a trailing slash in Google Search Console adding a new property?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=1998Site downtime, and how that affects indexing.https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2064Splitting the domain, what should we do in search console?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2321This is kind of a reverse internationalization, removing the countries from the site and just focusing on one. But all the countries were already in subfolders, so would moving the main language to the root have a big impact on ranking?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2684This person really asked, can we trust the answers given. https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=2868Internal Linking, more important than URL structure?https://youtu.be/Waynp8mMqRg?t=3058I then had a chance to talk to John again and ask about client side rendering issues a client was having, this particular client was having trouble replicating the issue as GoogleBot sees it.
Privacy in Search Engines & Blocking Extensions
Jan 25 2022
Privacy in Search Engines & Blocking Extensions
Today I wanted to focus a bit on privacy and security. This is central to every marketer and I think it’s something we should be considering heavily.Full Show Notes Blog Post @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e15The biggest name right now in private browsing is duck duck go who is averaging 105 million queries per month so far in January 2022. Duck Duck Go is actually the #2 search engine on mobile in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. On desktop, it has about 2.5% market share in the US, around what Bing’s market share is at. If you feel have been using Bing for advertising or doing SEO for Bing, then don’t discount DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is also launching their desktop browser which will be in my opinion a major competitor to Google. Their mobile browser has a huge install rate, and it would only make sense that mobile users would like this experience on the desktop systems.Another search engine that you may have heard of is Neeva. This is a subscription based search engine with no advertising created by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube). Some things that I really like about their platform is that they give 20% of their topline revenue with content creator partners when their content is used to directly answer a Neeva customer’s query. This is great for newspapers and other content creators to get revenue back for content that a search engine like Google would normally have as a zero click result.They just introduced a free (at least for 3 months) tier, and then it’s $4.99 per month.https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-neeva-premiumhttps://neeva.com/blog/supporting-humanitys-curiosity-with-quality-contentAs you are looking at marketing channels, consider that this model may become more popular as people prioritize their privacy over highly customized ads. I do like the idea of paying under $5 a month and knowing that my search results are not skewed by how much an advertiser spent. It also has a lot of privacy features which help keep other advertisers from being able to track.As marketers, we may not love this, but it emphasizes why we need to make sure to fully utilize all marketing channels and not rely on a single one. It also emphasizes how important SEO can be as well as creating top quality content.Now I wanted to talk about browser plugins that you may not realize are affecting your numbers. The main ones are ad blocking plugins, and I wanted to focus on one in particular as it’s the most popular, but does one thing by default that may surprise you.And that one thing - it blocks Google Analytics by default. There are over 10 million installed users actively blocking Google Analytics with this one plugin. It may not seem like a huge number, but depending on what vertical your users are in, you may be surprised with the percentage that use a plugin like this.One thing I suggest doing is pull your Google Analytics data, and cross reference that with your Google Search Console click data and then against your server logs. You’ll have to take into consideration things like bots that GA doesn’t count, but this could give you an idea of the number of people visiting your site that don’t trigger Google Analytics.So in summary, we’ve got millions of users blocking your tracking software, millions of users moving to new search engines which tout privacy first, and even search engines that have no ads. How are you planning for these numbers to grow in your marketing. What moves are you making to measure impact of your marketing efforts that don’t involve digital online tracking? I’ll be talking about privacy updates and impacts as part of marketing regularly, so keep listening.
Discussion of Rand Fishkin's Lost and Founder (Founder of Moz and SparkToro)
Jan 21 2022
Discussion of Rand Fishkin's Lost and Founder (Founder of Moz and SparkToro)
I wanted to do something a little different today. Since I didn’t see much that was really newsworthy - the usual rumblings about a potential algorithm update, and some ongoing Twitter drama about SEO in general. I thought I would talk about a book that should speak to most of us. The book is Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin.The full title: Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, is really just that, Rand is brutally honest, to the point where you can feel his pain in his words. If you listen to the audio book, he narrates himself.This book is really for anyone who is an aspiring startup founder, an entrepreneur looking for insider tips, or just anyone fascinated with the world of business and especially how venture capital ties into that.The book really talk to you about investors and how the wrong ones can be devastating for your business. How a transparent office culture can make or break a business. And what happens when you take shortcuts.Rand started out like so many of us, doing small projects and then took the leap to starting his own company to do it full time. His story feels like the untold story of most startups, a lot of money issues, wrong moves, over-extending. But Rand had built a name for himself and his company. His “whiteboard Fridays” were the stuff of SEO agency legend, many companies would stop all work and watch, just because they were so insightful and well done.SEO Moz, or now just Moz, was really one of the first SAAS (software as a service) companies for SEOs. It started in 2004 and finally found itself around 2017, it took nearly 13 years for it to become a stable profitable company. At the time of publication, the company was bringing in 45 million in annual revenue.What I find fascinating about his next area in the book is talking about the success of companies, which 5% of venture backed companies actually become profitable, is market research. His new company Spark Toro does exactly that and I can see how his identification in the book here and his years of experience led him to starting that company. For example, Uber used search trends for “taxi” to determine their markets to move into.Once you get about half way through the book, you start really disliking venture capitalists, and I understand his frustrations. The push for large returns is never ending, and only three in ten venture backed companies will yield even minimal returns.Rand gives several scenarios where Moz simply failed internally, from how it catered to employees with unique needs to its racial diversity. He takes a long hard look at how he led the company and how it was hard to recognize the changes that needed to be made. Once made, he saw huge changes and attributes that new culture to the success of the company.The big takeaway from his book for me:Don’t let the hype about superstar startups lead you down the wrong path. Consider very hard what types of investments you are willing to take and what that means to your ability to grow the company. Be transparent and honest with your employees and your customers.If you are starting out on your own, even just as a freelancer, this is a good book to give you an idea of what the next stage might look like. Rand does go into a lot of detail about his early years building websites and optimizing them as a small business of 2 or 3, and the insights are still valid today.Thank you - I hope you found this interesting.Have a great day and see you tomorrow.
Cats got me backlinks and SEMRush buys Backlinko?
Jan 20 2022
Cats got me backlinks and SEMRush buys Backlinko?
I thought today would be fun to talk about a single marketing newsworthy campaign revolving around cats and a mixer and 100 backlinks from major news networks. (I'll also talk about a few noteworthy SEO items)Full show notes and blog post: https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e13Backlinko was just purchased by SEMRush, Brian Dean, maybe one of the best marketers out there and a crazy good newsletter. News broke this morning on Twitter and SEMRush’s news site.https://twitter.com/BrianEDean/status/1483915288815022082Someone asked John about a high DA website and spam checked score of 6+. I didn’t really read anything more than that in the question because those are number like in the Whose Line is it anyway game show, “where everything is made up and the points don't matter.”Also, the word “link juice” was used, which feels very cringy to me. Can we stop saying that. How about we just say authority, because that’s really what it is.John responded: “Since Google uses neither DA nor the spam score, it doesn't really matter either way, right? That's why I said to just ignore all of that and do something real instead. If experts are telling you to do this, then find other experts.”https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1483757660302417921?s=20OK, to the main event - Cats got backlinks.So a few weeks ago a couple name Nikki and Jessica bought a vitamix. Upon the arrival, they sat it down on their kitchen floor and promptly their cat decided to sit upon the unopened box. Jessica took a photo and posted this to a Facebook group called THIS CAT IS C H O N K Y.  The group boasts nearly a million members, and the post immediately took off. Over 10k interactions by the next day.They have three cats, and they wouldn’t leave the box. They resorted to feeding the cat on the box as she refused to get down even to eat.Jessica continued to post updates and then reached out to Vitamix via their facebook page to ask for three empty boxes, enough for their three cats. The saga got it’s own hashtag that trended, The Great Vitamix Incident of 2021 and/or #Appliancegate, has developed.https://www.facebook.com/1606875812956981/posts/2924246927886523/OK, that’s all, folks, see you tomorrow!
Algorithm Update, Reviews In Maps, Open 24/7, Page Experience On Desktop
Jan 19 2022
Algorithm Update, Reviews In Maps, Open 24/7, Page Experience On Desktop
Today is January 18th and I’ll be talking about a potential algorithm update, Reviews in maps, Google My business hours, page experience going to desktop, Travel & Google Ads webinar, Competitive analysis and more!Full Blog Post and Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e12January 14th and 15th seems to be a lot of movement in the algorithm trackers - was there an update?Some of my sites that are relatively newer content seems to have jumped up quite a bit in this time, but I think that might just be a coincidence. This podcast’s main site had a jump to about 1400 impressions in Google Search Console compared to its average 50-100 per day. That ended up dropping back down a bit, so if Google was doing something, it might have been temporary if this site was an indicator.https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-update-january-14-32762.htmlAllie Margeson, the Director of SEO  Services at Whitespark noticed review snippets getting visibility on maps. See her tweet.https://twitter.com/SeoAllie/status/1483166745980456966Colan Nielsen for Sterling Sky writes about Google My Business and when to list your hours as 24/7.https://www.sterlingsky.ca/when-should-i-list-my-google-business-profile-hours-as-open-24-7/We mentioned it a couple weeks ago, but Yoast officially launched their Shopify SEO app.https://yoast.com/release-yoast-seo-for-shopify/Google has been giving us a heads up on Page Experience rolling out to desktop. Search Console now has a dedicated desktop section in its Page Experience report to help site owners understand Google’s page experience criteria.https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/11/bringing-page-experience-to-desktopIn case you missed it, Google Ads put on the “Travel On Air” with Episode available for on demand viewing. If you are a marketer in the Travel industry (I’m talking to you Louderback and Dylan!) then this may be of interest!https://adsonair.withgoogle.com/events/travel-on-air-episode-4SEMRush published an article on their blog about not the ten, but the 12 Best Competitive Intelligence Tools for Market Research.https://www.semrush.com/blog/top-18-competitive-intelligence-tools-advanced-market-research/And, since we seem to always talk about internationalization, John Mueller answered a question on Reddit asking if Google used the same algorithm for each language.“Mostly. Search uses lots & lots of algorithms. Some of them apply to content in all languages, some of them are specific to individual languages (for example, some languages don't use spaces to separate words -- which would make things kinda hard to search for if Google assumed that all languages were like English).”https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/s64i0e/does_google_use_the_same_algorithm_for_every/