Where Most SEO Goes Wrong

UPDATE: Video transcript available for ‘Where Most SEO Goes Wrong’

I had a lot of questions last week about the 30 minutes work that was done to get our client on the front page. It wasn’t some sort of magic SEO sauce or a dastardly deception to trick Google. It was far more mundane than that. It was simply good SEO housekeeping. It’s how we start all campaigns. We eliminate what we consider to be noise first before we do any “optimisation” or as the SEO spam emails I get call it, “SEO Optimisation” (I think they also use ATM Machines) .

SEO Noise

In the case of Karin’s site (not Clare as I wrote), there was a lot of duplication of pages in the index. As we’ve shown before duplication will kill your SEO.  Here’s what our initial analysis found.

• site:sitename.com.au, reported 112 results were but there were only 81 actual pages when you scrolled to the last page . With a difference of around 40% between those numbers it immediately sets off alarm bells. Typically it means Google is dropping pages off as it realises they are duplicates.

  

• When we crawled the site ourselves we found 65 results and the sitemap that was submitted to Google had 56 pages in it.

Match These Three

All that our dev Cain did was match these three numbers up. As it was a wordpress site he simply went in and configured the Yoast plugin properly and and made sure Google would noindex category and archive pages. In the 25 minutes work that he did I think it may have included making himself a cup of tea as well.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.