There has been a lot of back and forth for years on whether the post date is relevant to rank position. We have ready so many posts and have seen some say yes, there is a direct effect – while others say no way.

Well, we decided to run our own unscientific test.

We started this post on August 11, 2016 by noting all current rank positions for the pages we were testing, changing the post dates of these specific posts to August 11, 2016 and noted what we changed below.

From the dates of 8/11/16 through 8/30/16 we did no other work on the website that would influence the outcome of this test.

TEST POST 1 – UNNATURAL OUTBOUND LINK POST
Unnatural Outbound Links

Original Post Date: April 12, 2016
Edited Post Date: August 11, 2016
Post Edits Done: Made no post modifications – just removed a line that stated “updated April 19, 2016”, changed post date to reflect “Last Updated 8/11/16 and saved.

Key Word Rank 8/11/16:
#6 – “unnatural outbound links”
#6 – “links warning”
#9 – “outgoing links penalty”
#12 – “unnatural links warning”
#21 – “google unnatural links penalty”

Key Word Rank 8/30/16:
#5 – “unnatural outbound links”
#6 – “links warning”
#7 – “outgoing links penalty”
#9 – “unnatural links warning”
#19 – “google unnatural links penalty”

TEST POST 2 – THREE BASIC GOOGLE ANALYTICS METRICS
3 Basic Google Analytics Metrics For Non Profits

Original Post Date: October 18, 2015
Edited Post Date: August 11, 2016
Post Edits Done: Modified some on page content for aesthetics only (font sizing, color etc) and saved to update the post date to last updated August 11, 2016.

Key Word Rank 8/11/16:
#8 – “google analytics for nonprofits”
#27 – “google for nonprofits review”
#41 – “metrics for nonprofits”
#51 – “nonprofit analytics”

Key Word Rank 8/30/16:
#12 – “google analytics for nonprofits”
#19 – “google for nonprofits review”
not in top 50 – “metrics for nonprofits”
not in top 50 – “nonprofit analytics”

TEST POST 3 – MOZ KEYWORD EXPLORER
Moz Keyword Explorer Review

Original Post Date: May 12, 2016
Edited Post Date: August 11, 2016
Post Edits Done: Added a blurb to the final thoughts section about the stopping use of MOZ and added the last updated date of August 11, 2016.

Key Word Rank 8/11/16:
#11 – “moz keyword tool”
#16 – “moz explorer”
#26 – “rank tracker reviews”
#33 – “moz ranking”
#44 – “moz open site explorer”

Keyword Rank 8/30/16:
#17 – “moz keyword tool”
#13 – “moz explorer”
#33 – “rank tracker reviews”
#31 – “moz ranking”
#40 – “moz open site explorer”

Once we made our post edits and saved the changes to reflect the updated date – we went to our Google Search Console to submit the URL’s to the Fetch As Google feature so Google can come and crawl the pages a bit faster.

TEST POST 4 – FREE SEO TOOLS
Free SEO Tools

Original Post Date: May 26, 2015
Edited Post Date: August 11, 2016
Post Edits Done: Added 2 new tools to the page and removed last updated text at the bottom of the post and changed dated to last updated August 11, 2016.

Key Word Rank 8/11/16:

We currently have no real keyword rank for this post that is worth noting. Our goal is to rank for “Free SEO Tools”, we may do another case study on this as we try to improve this page. We do rank for a lot of terms related to “small seo tools” but that is related to a set of actual branded tools and not what we were going for.

Keyword Rank 8/30/16:

For this post we have acquired a few spots since we started tracking data on 8/11/16. We actually jumped in to a lot of top 100 spots for terms we would want to to rank for.

#44 – “top free seo tools”
#46 – “best free seo tool”
#48 – “free seo tools 2016”
#46 – “the best free seo tools”
#21 – “free seo tool”

OUR RESULTS
In our own testing – we do not see an association with the post date and rank position. There are a lot of things to consider when doing this kind of testing – we just did a basic test with no other variables.

In our test we removed the Date Published time used by WordPress by default and replaced the post date with the Modified Date so that our posts always reflect a date that is consistent with our content updates. Now every time we update a post – the date we did the update will show instead of the original post date.

We prefer this as a usability item for our readers – letting them know our content is kept updated is important to us as it defines our dedication to keep our content fresh and lets readers know how current the information is. This is critical in our niche since things change so quickly.

In other niches, the date may not be as critical. If you have a lot of evergreen content the date issue should not really be an issue for you.

SIMILAR POSTS

Below are a few posts that are related to our test – some show improvement in rank and traffic while others have seen no affect like us. Some have reported seeing increases in traffic to posts – no rank improvement but traffic improvement for a short time. We did not find that in our results.

Shout Me Loud
Moz
The SEM Post

Jill Caren

Jill Caren brings over 12 years of WordPress and SEO experience to help you improve and grow your website. She has spoken at several events on SEO and has been published in several top SEO publications. You can learn more about her here.

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What Is A Website Audit?

A website audit is a full analysis of everything related to your website’s level of search visibility. A complete and detailed one will give you a deeper understanding as to why your site is not generating the traffic you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving.

A comprehensive audit service will provide you feedback on everything from your technical issues to your content. This type of website checker will help ensure that you are giving your visitors the best user experience and the search engines the best crawling experience possible.

Can You Just Use An Automated Audit?

There are many “automated” SEO analysis tools where you can do it yourself, but these are not mean to be a full scope audit and will give you limited help in what really matters to rank well. Typically these type of checker website tools will give you a generic outline of pre-determined SEO “norms” like how many H1 tags you have, how long is your meta description and those types of things, while they make a great guide – they are not a true in-depth analysis.

You may visit other sites and see a cool tool that says “What Is Your SEO Score” or “Get Your Free Analysis” – and then you put in your URL and voila’ in a few minutes you have this really pretty report with some great information!

But now all you really did is trade in your email for a basic level report that gives you no real value.

While this can be a useful low level overview of your web health, these reports are really meant to be “lead generation” tools and not meant to be a replace a full in depth review of your website. Often when you use these tools you will have to enter your email – or the report will come back showing issues and they encourage you to contact them for help.

These tools are in no way a true representation of the health of your site and do not provide real value in terms of what needs to be fixed to improve traffic and conversions.

Examples Of Free Automated Audit Services.

Although as noted above we do not recommend these free tools as a replacement for a real in-depth review process– we wanted to share a few options if you want to run a quick check to see how you are doing.

A really popular one that a lot of people use is Woorank, and at a glance it is an OK tool to give you a general overview of the health of your site. But important to note is that it only pulls data for the URL you input. So if you use your home page URL, you only get the results of that page.

You are missing out on the other hundreds of pages or so that are on your website.

And also note that on the page when your report appears, you will see a button that says “Start Your Free Trial” – this is lead generation to sell you their services.

Here are a few more audit tools you can try:

SEOptimer
Raven Tools – this tool does require a Google login
Website Grader

Remember – these are all low level reviews that only tell a small part of the story of your website. You may try running several of these audits and find that they also return different results – which can make it all the more confusing for you to address any issues they return in your reports.

Unfortunately, there is no free tool that will give you a full comprehensive look at how to improve your website.

Why Do You Need An Audit?

You need an audit because things change in the search engines and it is important to make sure your code, content and speed are up to par throughout these changes and updates!

We have been involved in the SEO world for over 12 years and we have seen incredible changes from the search engines in how they compute the search rankings. It used to be that you could just add keywords to your title tags and content and header tags – get a few back links and there you go – you are ranking in the search engines!

It is NOT AT ALL like that anymore and if you want to see great search engine rankings – you need great content, site structure, technical SEO and backlinks to make it all happen! All of these items matter as well as taking a white hat approach to keep the search engines happy and users happier!

Some of the more recent additions to these factors include:
–Site speed
–Responsiveness
–Content
–Authority
–Technical Code
–Internal Linking

How many of these questions can you actually answer?

1. How many back links do you have?
2. Are any of your back links low quality?
3. Do you have any broken links?
4. Do you have Schema implemented?
5. Does your site have load time issues?
6. Is your URL structure helping or hurting you?
7. Do you have any Meta issues?
8. Does your mobile version pass validation?
9. Is your Robots Txt file correct?
10. Are your users leaving your pages too quickly?

These are just a FEW of the many things needed for proper SEO optimization and to give users the best online experience to keep them onsite longer!

If you do not know the answer to these questions – you need to take those first steps and get some help and direction to get you going in the right direction to help your users have the best experience and get the search engines to love crawling your site!

What A Good SEO Audit Includes

An in-depth SEO audit is not a quick process. Properly done it can take several days to several weeks depending on the size of your site. When we check a website at 2 Dogs Media we usually note that it will typically take 2-3 weeks to deliver a final document.

Why so long you ask?

Because we care about finding all of the issues and providing simple and easy to use direction on how to improve your web presence. We take an in depth manual look at your site as well as run several reports to retrieve a variety of data that we then analyze and input into a well organized spreadsheet!

Our hands on approach and immersion into data from various sources gives you the best chance of improving your online business using only white hat techniques!

SEO audits may include the follow depending on your goals:

• 1) Technical – making sure your site is well coded and runs fast, uses robots txt & .htaccess properly
• 2) On-site – full analysis of all pages for proper keyword use in all pertinent areas (H1-H6, title tags, content etc.)
• 3) Off-site – analysis of back links and anchor text and authority and trust
• 4) Social – find current mentions and visibility
• 5) Local SEO – if you are a local business, we make sure your website is optimized for local and that you have citations and other elements needed to capture local listings

An average final report can be upwards of 20-30 tabs in a spreadsheet!

Can You Audit Your Own Website?

We understand the cost for an in-depth audit prepared by a professional can be prohibitive for some. There are a few options available for running your own audit that can make some impact on your business – we have noted a few programs above that provide free trials – then there are additional options with monthly pricing for more features.

Below are 3 of the more common auditing tools we use here at 2 Dogs Media – we highly recommend any of them for your auditing needs – we do receive compensation from the links if you make a purchase.

Ahrefs

With the Ahrefs site audit tool, you can do a full check of your website for 110+ common technical and on-page issues that can affect your position in the search engines. With such a wide scope, you won’t miss a thing that could downgrade you in SERP – empty tags, duplicate content, broken links, problems with a server, nofollow internal links, too large or broken files, etc. You don’t necessarily have to know what all those 110+ issues mean. The dashboard gives a commentary on each of them and ways to get things in order.

Just like other tools in Ahrefs’ toolkit, it is a cloud-based tool – so, you won’t need to bother with any installation. Just enter your domain or URL, configure a few parameters, and crawling will start.

SEMrush

We use SEMRush for a bulk of our SEO services – and it does offer a decent audit tool that will help you get a good overview of issues that may be going on with your website.

The tool below will help you see what you can expect to see with an SEMrush account. Once you enter your domain you will be taken to a page on SEMrush where you can see a lot of great information about your website.

SEMrush is a monthly fee based service, and it is pricey if you are a smaller website or blogger — it is really more used by SEO agencies and big brands. But even using it for 1 month is a great investment and will allow you to get some great data that can help you improve your website.

TIP: enter your domain as mywebsite.com (no www or http – this will give you the best results)

Website Auditor

Website Auditor by SEO Powersuite is another fantastic option and the one I recommend highly for beginner users who may need something a little more affordable. Website Auditor is a website auditing software that you install on your own computer and is a powerhouse when it comes to auditing functionality.

Below is a screenshot from the software – this is just a small portion of what this technical seo and content audit software can offer. Not only does it give you the issues your website has like broken links, crawl errors, schema issues and more – it also offers suggestions on how you can improve those issues.

Website Auditor is a one-time purchase for the software – then there is small fee to keep the software updated with the latest algorithms. It is probably one of the most cost effective options on the market for running your own audits.

We have the full SEO Powersuite line of tools and can attest for their value. Learn more about Website Auditor here or read our full in depth guide and Website Auditor review here.

Why Should I Use A Professional For My Audit?

Simple – websites are complex! You are an expert in YOUR field – why not leave it up to the experts to do what THEY do best, which is make your website SEO friendly.

No matter how many different do it yourself options you try, you are going to find issues that you do not know how to address.

• Canonical issues
• Duplicate content
• Redirects
• Robots txt files and tags
• Internal link structure
• …and so much more!

This is why SEO agencies do what they do – they live and breathe websites and SEO and know how to not only provide an exceptional experience but can address those issues to bring you the fastest improvements.

Many agencies do website audits – and then will consult with you and your team to help you implement the appropriate changes. This allows your team to learn more about how to handle the website and can help keep costs down.

Other agencies do everything – from the website check to the on-site improvements. This we do believe is the best option if you are serious about improving your website. It is an investment – but one where you should see a ROI if done well.

What A Successful Web Audit Can Do For You

A well done website SEO audit will give a business owner a great starting to point to improve their online presence. It will include all of the current issues the website is facing that is preventing it from doing as well as it could and also a complete assessment of what the business owner can do to improve the areas that are lacking!

Once a client implements the suggestions – they should begin to see a positive impact to their online business, it can take several months to see the full impact these changes will have!

The ultimate goal of any good audit will be the following:

• Increase in targeted organic traffic
• Improvement in conversions
• Growth in revenue

Website Audit Services From 2 Dogs Media

One of our favorite and most popular services is our website audits – so if you are looking for a partner, then we can definitely help! Below is an image that shows a sample of a Google Sheet that we provide to our clients so you can see what you will receive at then end of the auditing process!

Every analysis we complete is a combination of software reports and a manual review and then we compile and analyze all of the data into a spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet will be a fully detailed outline of all the items on your website that need improving as well as those that you are already doing well with. A few of the things you will find on the spreadsheet include:

• Suggested Web SEO Strategies – this will give you an overview of the core issues we found and how to fix them using only white hat techniques.
• Overview – lists all important components of your website with a rating as it applies to your website and the important of that item for SEO purposes so you know where to start with your improvements. We break it down into easy steps ranked by important so you can improve your ranking quickly.
• Backlinks – a list websites linking to you and if your profile is good or bad.
• External Links – websites you are linking out along with status (not found, broken, etc.).
• Internal Links – all links within your website where you link from page to page or post to post etc.
• H1-H6 – list of all header tags on your website and how well they are optimized.
  ….and so many more tabs with great information to help you improve your website.

How Much Is A Website Audit?

A typical audit ranges based on website size, types of audits you would like completed as well as the goals for the project. We have seen prices range from several hundred to upwards of $6+ by those with exceptional experiences.

At 2 Dogs Media you can expect a price range from $500 (small blogs) to $2,000 (mid-sized B-toB websites). Typically delivery time for your results is 2-3 weeks.

Ready To Improve Your Rank?

Contact us today to get a quote for a complete and comprehensive audit that will help you find issues that are keeping you from success in the search engines!

Jill Caren

Jill Caren brings over 12 years of WordPress and SEO experience to help you improve and grow your website. She has spoken at several events on SEO and has been published in several top SEO publications. You can learn more about her here.

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There is no way to guarantee a Featured Snippet box listing in Google, but there are ways to increase your chances of having your content showcased in a featured listing box with some time, research and great – well formatted content.

We recently noticed a huge jump in page views on one of our blog posts and knew something was up. What is a website audit was written to help people understand why an overview of your onsite SEO is necessary if you are serious about your website. When we saw the increase in traffic to this page we began our investigation. Surprising to us – we found we landed a coveted Featured Snippet in the Google results. (we noticed on June 9th that we lost that spot – we are testing theories on why now, but we think we know and will report our findings!)

The image below shows what a Featured Snippet looks like. It offers an answer about a question that searchers may be asking – sometimes with an image and often with the title and URL. This will be located at the top of the search results, just below the ad section. And if you take a peak at the below – it will even outrank major players – like Search Engine Watch.

WHAT IS A FEATURED SNIPPET?

In simple terms a Featured Snippet is a result displayed by Google that answers a question. The answer is sourced from a site that Google deems worthy and offers value to the reader.

WHY WOULD I WANT A FEATURED SNIPPET?

1) Click Thru Rate (CTR) – the featured snippet brings a much higher click through rate than an average page 1 result brings – some have reported jumps of up to 20%.
2) Authority – when you land that featured spot, users will view your page as “important”. It is like being picked by the popular kid for gym – your popular status escalates.
3) Beat The Big Guys – when you land a featured snippet you can beat out the major competition in your niche, in our personal example we were jumping over pages like Hubspot and SearchEngineWatch.

HOW WILL I KNOW IF I HAVE A FEATURED SNIPPET?

There is no easy way to know if you are currently featured in a snippet so you will have to do some manual research. The best way to research is to use the Google Search Console, which hopefully you have integrated with your website!

1) Login to your Google Search Console
2) Go to SEARCH TRAFFIC > SEARCH ANALYTICS
3) Select “CLICKS” “CTR” and “POSITION” for filtering
4) For DATES we recommend you choose Last 90 days
5) Sort your report by position looking at the lower ranked items first. Typically pages that rank in spots 1-5 are at an increased chance of a snippet, so that is where you want to focus your efforts.
6) Look at the keywords in those 1-5 results that have higher CTR and click the little box and arrow next to the keyword to see how the live search results look
7) Review the page to see if you have a featured snippet and if in fact you do rank in those 1-5 results.
8) Rinse and Repeat the above for the keywords in those 1-5 spots!

NOTE: If you happen to use SEM Rush, there is a way to find featured snippets through there as well – but we won’t cover those steps here.

I REVIEWED MY SEARCH CONSOLE – NOW WHAT?

1) If you DO rank in position 1-5 and DO NOT have a featured snippet but another page does – review their page that has the snippet and see what you can do to improve your page to steal it from them.

2) If you DO NOT rank in the 1-5 results and do not have a snippet – move on to research better opportunities.

3) If you have a Featured Snippet – CONGRATULATIONS! But keep an eye on it – it can be gone in a flash!

WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GRAB A FEATURED SNIPPET BOX?

There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to guarantee a featured snippet box. Google picks and chooses what will be in a featured box and there is no real way for a website owner to control it. But by optimizing your posts/pages the best way you can – you can increase your chances of landing a featured snippet.

The instructions below are a general guide to how you can leverage your data to try and capture a featured snippet:

1) RESEARCH: Utilize the research you did above to find pages that you may currently rank in spots 1-5 for, since that seems to be the pages that most commonly get a featured snippet box. If one page ranks for several keywords that is even better.
2) OPTIMIZE:  Think about how you can re-optimize that page to answer a user question. (Below we review ways you can find what people are asking
3) ANSWER: Keep the “answer” to the question higher up in the post – it does not have to be first, but should be higher in the post. Google will pick and choose what they want to show either way – but they do usually consider higher content more important!
4) Q&A PAGE: Think about creating a page of Q&A related to your content – like this page! Use H2 tags for your questions and answer the question as simply as possible.
5) ORDERED LISTS: If you are creating recipes or instructional posts – use ordered lists to write your content so Google can easily understand it. (See image sample of an ordered list featured box we found using the search term “how to make dog cookies”.)

TERMS THAT OFTEN RETURN A FEATURED SNIPPET BOX!

You can increase your chances of getting a featured snippet box by including these terms in your posts/pages with your keywords. When doing your research for the questions you want to create a post around, you will want to use these terms in conjunction with your keywords.

sample keywords using popular terms – use these to see the featured snippet results:
“forming a hypothesis” “does a dog pant when in pain” “causes of cat seizures” “creating a site plan”

FACTORS THAT PAGES IN FEATURED SNIPPET BOXES HAVE!

In an interesting white paper done by STAT Search Analytics, there were some interesting takeaways on those pages that had featured snippet results.

1) Pages that had table tags show 22% more times than non snippet pages
2) Pages with ol (ordered list) tags had 42% more featured snippets than pages without the tag
3) Featured snippet pages were 19% faster in response times
4) The exact match keyword in the title appeared 10% more often and 21% more often if in h1 and h2 tags
5) Slightly higher back link metrics were shown for those in featured snippets

You can view the additional results in the white paper if you want to download it!

WHY HOW DO I FIND QUESTIONS TO ANSWER?

Here are just a few ways we search for question ideas:

1) Answer The Public – one of our favorites and easy to use. Simply enter a “broad” term – choose your country and watch it display lists and visualizations of questions asked about that term.
2) Quora – a great source for finding what people are asking in your industry. Just use the search for keywords in your niche and explore away – be sure to keep an eye on the auto-complete in the search box too!
3) Google – every time you search you will see a dropdown with suggested related terms, this is a great source for new ideas. Make sure you keep an eye on the bottom of the page for “related searches” and info boxes that show “people also ask”
4) Reddit – explore communities in your niche to see what people are talking about.

BUT WHY WILL THEY CLICK ON MY WEBSITE IF THE CONTENT IS RIGHT THERE FOR THEM?

There was a great analysis done by SearchEngine Land of what SEO’s thought about these snippets. Some of the comments were very interesting!

Personally we do not have any issues at all about snippets. The way we look at is if they are getting our content in a search and it is answering their question and they move on without clicking, that is OK. In this case they would not be a converting client and is probably not someone who wants any more information.

If they do click through – great, that is someone who cares a little more about our content and could potentially be a client or at least a reader.

For us, we like the authority rich snippets brings. When you see a rich snippet – it makes you more confident in the website.

FINAL THOUGHTS!

We are going to be running a few tests and will do an update on our results!

What do you think? Have you found yourself with a featured snippet? Is this something you are going to try to work into your SEO strategy?

UPDATE July 15, 2016 – We have been carefully monitoring our Featured Snippet box and what we are seeing is that Google does seem to rotate out who is being shown in the featured snippet. Checking daily we see our page rotating out with 2 other pages. We will continue to monitor this an see if we can make our featured snippet “stick”.

Jill Caren

Jill Caren brings over 12 years of WordPress and SEO experience to help you improve and grow your website. She has spoken at several events on SEO and has been published in several top SEO publications. You can learn more about her here.

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It seems like there was some shake-ups in the last week where a lot of fashion bloggers received the dreaded “unnatural links” warning in their Webmaster Tools.

While this is a scary thing to see – it is not the end of the world or your blogging career. There are things you can do to remove those links and be back in Google’s good graces.

The Linking Back Story

Links are a very sensitive subject these days. When we started working in SEO over 10 years ago – it was easy, get a bunch of backlinks and voila – you rank on page 1. Because of that there was of course those that chose to take advantage of various link strategies to rank money making sites and to run schemes. Of course Google had to take action to ensure that their search engine returned only the best results. So links then became the most feared thing in the world of SEO.

Spammy SEO groups tried to game the system by building “private blog networks” and by doing other “black hat” link techniques to game the system. So Google eventually implemented the Penguin Update to combat these link strategies. Their frequent updates continue to wreak havoc on the linking world and brings us to this unnatural link warning!

There was a rumor back in January that there would be a Penguin update – and we guess there was based on the amount of bloggers we are seeing with this issue.

Now it is important to note there are several manual actions that can be given

Do You Have An Unnatural Link Penalization?

1. If you have set your site up with Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) – then you will have either received an email or you can go into your account and see if you have a manual penalty in place. If you are not set up to get email notifications of website issues, we suggest you do so!
2. If you do not have this feature working with your website – we HIGHLY recommend you do it. It will give you an overview of how you are doing in Google and notify you if there are issues with your website so you can rectify them as soon as possible.
3. If you are logged into your Google Search Console account you will click on the website you want to check and click on the Search Traffic option on the left – under that you will see a menu item for MANUAL ACTIONS. that is where you will see any manual actions that have been taken on your website. You can also check your messages box as well.

I Do Not Have Google Search Console, Is There Another Way To Know If I Have A Penalty?

Without the search console letting you know there is no real way to know for sure, but here are a few other things you can keep an eye on to see if you may have a penalty. In the mean time – we highly recommend integrating the search console with your website!

• You may see a loss in traffic
• You may see your website not rank well for a phrase you have done well with in the past
• You may completely disappear from the search results – this is rare but can happen

If I Do Have A Link Penalty What Will I See?

Below is a sample of what you may see in your Google Search Console if you should have a violation. There are a few variations of this message -but all essentially say – your outbound links are hurting you.

I have A Manual Action But I Do Not Understand Why!

Basically what you are hearing is that Google is finding “paid links” on your website and they do not like it. If you are doing posts with affiliate links, using blog rolls, or doing guest posts with giveaways or for a cost – Google will hit you with a penalty unless you No Follow them!

So What Do I Need To Do To Remove The Penalty?

You MUST MAKE SURE you have a nofollow attribute on EVERY paid link on your website.

So if have a post that is linking out to a paid sponsor or affiliate link and it currently looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.thiswebsite.com”>Visit the ABC Widget Here</a>

You will want to make sure you edit it to look like this:

<a href=”http://www.thiswebsite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Visit the ABC Widget Here</a>

So I Have To Go Through Every Page On My Website?

Maybe not. You should start with your home page and see what links you need to fix there first. You can use a tool like SEO Quake which is an add-on available for most browsers. Here is a the Firefox add-on version and here is the Chrome add-on version. With this tool installed you can easily see what outbound links are on your page and which are dofollow versus no follow. Then you can begin to edit the links that are paid links that are missing the nofollow attribute.

If you have sponsors, advertisers or paid content from businesses – we recommend letting them know that you are making these changes to keep in line with Google’s Guidelines on links.

What Will Google Need To Remove My Penalty?

You will need to send them proof you have rectified the issues.

1. Create a Google doc (it must be Google doc they will not look at anything else)
2. List each of the URL’s that you have added the nofollow attribute to or removed
3. Go to the Request Reconsideration page in your webmaster tools and select the penalized site in the dropdown
4. Create a brief email and be sure to include a link to your Google document proving you have edited your links. (See sample email below)

Sample Google Reconsideration Request Email

Dear Google.

We received notification on “insert date” that we had a manual action for unnatural outbound links from our website. We have taken the time to review the guidelines from Google and reviewed all the links on our website and edited or removed any links we found that were violating your guidelines. We have nofollowed many of the links and you can find a Google Doc at “out link to doc here” outlining the links that were no followed or deleted.

We will ensure all future links will be within your guidelines.

Sincerely,

“your name here”

How Long Do I Need To Wait?

You should receive a confirmation that your request was received by Google within about 24 hours. So first, you do want to make sure you get this so you know it was received. From that point you should expect an answer to your request in about 1-2 weeks.

If you get the email that they removed the penalty – then you are GOLDEN! Just be sure to make sure all future links are correct!

They Denied My Request!

OK, it happens. But then you have to dig deeper.

1. Did you really nofollow all the paid links? At this point you may do a more in depth page by page review. You can use a tool like ScreamingFrog to do an even more in depth look at your site wide outbound links. (They offer a free version that will scan up to 500 URLs on your website).
2. Review links that may be irrelevant to your website. If you are a fashion blogger and you have posts about dog toys with outbound links to amazon – you should consider removing those links.
3. If you are on a CMS – consider adding a plugin that nofollows links for you so you can be sure it is getting done. This one for WordPress can help.
4. Make sure you review your sidebars and footers as well!

Once you have done the above – updated your Google Doc with your new information, then you can submit a new reconsideration request and in your email note that this is a follow up to a previous request that was denied.

I Was Declined Again – How Long Can This Go On For?

Unfortunately, you may have to go through this process several times before your website is given the A-OK. Some clients we have consulted with have had to do 5 or 6 requests before the penalty was removed.

Where Can I Learn More About Google Guidelines For Bloggers?

Visit this page: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/03/best-practices-for-bloggers-reviewing.html

This Is All Way Over My Head – Can You Help?

Sure, if you need help let us know. We can either offer consulting to help you get through the process or just handle it for you.

Should I Just No Follow All Outbound Links?

Absolutely not. While it may seem easier to handle your issues this way, it is not the correct way. Google relies on links to understand the web as well as your website. If you are putting a no-follow tag on every link you are basically saying “these links have no value” – and ultimately that is not a good thing. You should NEVER no follow internal page links and the only links that should be no-followed are those that are truly “paid or sponsored” links.

Jill Caren

Jill Caren brings over 12 years of WordPress and SEO experience to help you improve and grow your website. She has spoken at several events on SEO and has been published in several top SEO publications. You can learn more about her here.

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Whether you are looking for tools or tips for best practices, this guide to removing old or thin website content can help you improve your search visibility!

Google Remove Outdated Content Tool

If you are here looking for the Google Outdated Content tool then you can head on over there, but before you do – what we have for you below may help you more than that tool can! Once you input your URL that you want Google to remove you can then check it in the check Google removals page to see what the status is. 

If you use the tool it can take a few days to process, this is not an immediate function as Google needs to re-index and crawl the site before it can be removed.

How To Evaluate Your Content For Removal

OK – we know how it goes. You started your website years ago, and now you are looking back and cringing at what you are seeing. Did I really write that? Those spelling errors cannot be mine! Wait, those are not even sentences! YIKES! So you scramble to delete it all before someone actually sees it now that you have grown – but WAIT.

This post is relevant to bloggers, B-to-B websites as well as B-to-C websites.

How you delete your old content — or not delete that content can affect your readers experience and your organic traffic.

So hold your horses and let’s think about this strategically. (I know scary word – but we will try to make it easy – scouts honor!)

We are going to walk you through the process of how to safely remove outdated content from your website for quick SEO wins. 

Pros of Removing Content

• Up to date and relevant content
• Content will be more search friendly
• Improvement of organic rank

Cons of Removing Content

• May lose inbound links
• Possible loss of social signals
• Can affect usability if page not found

Should I Remove Old Content?

Maybe Yes. Maybe No.

Ok, not the answer you wanted – but really – it depends on a lot of factors. When you are considering removing content from your website – here are a few things to ask yourself about each page.

1) Is the content useful to your reader? If it is useful, educational or informational and just outdated – we say keep it and update it. If it is a contest, promotional or lacking in real value – it is probably safe to remove it.

2) Are there backlinks to the specific page? Good backlinks are hard to find and critical for SEO success – if your page has backlinks to it – we suggest keeping it and modifying the content to make it more useful and updated.

3) Is the page getting traffic? Checking analytics will give you this important information. If there is a decent amount of traffic – again, you may want to keep it and repurpose it somehow.

How Can I Analyze My Pages To Get The Data?

1. If you have analytics installed – our first recommendation would be to visit Panguin. This is a great tool that will look at your analytical data and will match your traffic against dates of various algorithm updates like Panda (which focuses on site quality) and Penguin (which focus on links). If you notice a big drop after a specific update – that will be the first step into better understanding what you need to do to improve your website. If you see a big drop in traffic after a Panda update – then you know you have work to do on your content!
2. Review your Google Analytics data. Find the pages that are drawing the least amount of visits. If you have specific pages you would like to remove – you can search for them in analytics to determine if they are receiving traffic. In analytics you will want to go to the BEHAVIOR area then SITE CONTENT and ALL PAGES. Then you can sort by Page Views to see how many views a page gets.
3. To see if your page has backlinks you can get a quick overview at Backlink Watch or Backlink Checker. Unfortunately, this is one area that is lacking in free services – so we would use both tools for each page just to double check. Enter the page you are considering removing – if there are links, and they are good ones – keep it! (Keep in mind different back link checkers return different results so if they vary that is OK!). Ahrefs would be a great investment if you are serious about SEO and improving your backlinks.

In the example below you can see we have many pages that get only a few hits a month. There is no “magic number” as to when to delete a page – it will be relative to the traffic you get. If you are getting 5K visits a month and your page only gets 3 hits and is old and out dated – then we would say it is safe to remove.

But if you get 100 visits a month and it gets 3 hits a month and is outdated – you may want to spend some time updating and improving the content and try to get more visits.

I am Getting Traffic & Have Backlinks To An Old Page – Now What?

Well, this is good news! If you have a page that makes you insane and you want to get rid of it because it annoys you with its bad outdated content – but you see it gets traffic and has backlinks it is time to put on your thinking cap.

Look at the content and see how you can repurpose it so it maintains a similar content type but in a way you can entertain, teach or inform.

It is was an old contest – what did you give away? Can you somehow take that prize and turn it into an educational post about something related to that prize.

If it was a blog crawl post (Wordless Wednesday for example) – can you remove the notations about the Wordless Wednesday and revise the content to be more useful to your reader?

There Are No Backlinks or Page Visits – What Are My Options For Page Removal?

1) DELETION

If you have a page that you are sure has no traffic, the content is poor and there are no backlinks- then delete it. If it is showing in the Google search results (which if you are not getting much content it probably isn’t) – eventually Google will see it is gone and will remove it from the search results.

If you just delete a page, then if someone should land on it the user will get the dreaded 404 error. Google will see this – and will come back and check a few times to make sure it is not coming back – but eventually remove it.

We highly recommend a custom 404 page be built for every website that helps users find the content they want if they should land on a page that no longer exists.

2) 301 REDIRECT

We recommend a 301 redirect if you want to delete a page that has some traffic, has backlinks or is in the search results. A 301 redirect will bring your users to a new page if they follow a link to the page you want to remove – so you want to make sure you bring them to a related post. If you had a post about a contest for a cooking tool – maybe link to a recipe that uses that cooking tool. A 301 redirect is typically done via your .htacess file but if you use Wordpress you can also use a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects.

Be sure to review this great post on properly using 301 redirects before you implement yours!

3) IMPROVE THE CONTENT

If you have a page that is getting traffic and has rank and has the potential to be “revived” – then this is the optimal option. Modify your content to be as in depth as possible – add strong images and rename the page title and you can reuse the post and offer your readers something great.

You can even change the date of the post and add a note that says “updated xx/xx/xxxx” – this will let readers now you keep this page updated. You can also change the actual “post date” of the post itself which can help Google see it as new content which can help you in the search results.

This should also include updating your title tag and meta descriptions! If you are wondering what a meta description is you can learn more here.

What Happens When You No-Index An Existing Post?

If you no-index a page that is already indexed – it should eventually be removed from the search engines. The search engines will need to re-crawl your page to be able to see the no-index code that has been applied. So, depending on your crawl rate – it could take a few days or a few weeks.

How Do I Know How Often Google Crawls My Website?

This is where Webmaster Tools comes in super handy! By visiting the Crawl section in your Webmaster Tools – you can find some very important information that will help you understand your site and may even find issues that you should be aware of.

In the example below you can see this website gets a visit from Google everyday – some days they crawl a lot more than others – and those spikes in the graph may reflect images, uploads as well as standard pages. You also want to keep an eye if Google Bots are coming too often and using too much bandwidth which can reflect on your site speed!

If you feel uncertain about when you page will be visited by Google and want to speed it up – you can visit the Fetch As Google link! This will send a gentle nudge to Google to come visit your website. You will want to put the actual page you want them to visit in this tool.

Remove Outdated Content: A Short Case Study

I recently bought a website as an investment property and the first thing we did was address the issues with the content that were preventing the site from doing well in the search engines. We began a plan of action to remove outdated content and over the course of 2 months were able to remove all the low quality content that we believed was hurting the website.

I wanted to share the details of the content aspect of this website to help you see just how much you can improve in even a short amount of time by purging content.

At the time I updated this post I am still working on the website so the numbers for the amount of content may even change more as we continue digging through everything.

WordPress Details (as of Jan 5, 2019 – the date I officially took it over)

• Categories: 73
• Tags: 158
• Posts: 4,216
• Pages: 7

WordPress Details (as of March 21, 2019 – the date I updated this post)

• Categories: 35
• Tags: 23
• Posts: 982
• Pages: 7

Below is a video that will show you what has happened since deleting this content.

Keep in mind content was deleting over the course of just over 2 months, so the improvement should be ongoing for a while.

Redirects: 301, 404 or Something Else?

Since I deleted well over 3,000 posts – doing a redirect for all of those would just be nuts. So, I did nothing. Nada. Zip.

There are 31 posts that I did 301 redirects for and that was because they had other posts that were similar in nature – so I sent the deleted posts there.

The rest I am just letting drop.

If you really want to be perfect you can do a 410 redirect which will tell Google directly that the page is gone and should be deleted. But if you are mass deleting, this could be tedious. Google will see the page gone even without the 410 and eventually drop it anyway – it just may take a little longer.

What Happened When I Deleted Over 3,000 Posts?

Since I took over a website the first week of January we have grown by just about 9K keywords – increased in positions 1-3 and 1-10 tremendously and are still on the upswing as of the time of writing this post.

Only a few new posts have been written – no onsite optimization has been started except for 12 of the top performing posts.

So, if you are on the fence about deleting content – don’t be!

Updated Friday May 11, 2019 – we are still gaining keywords and are now up to 23,200 keywords that we are ranking for with 274 of those being in positions 1 through 3. 

Questions?

While we hope this article will help you streamline your content and improve your website – we know it can still be confusing! If you have questions – just let us know and we will be glad to help!

Jill Caren

Jill Caren brings over 12 years of WordPress and SEO experience to help you improve and grow your website. She has spoken at several events on SEO and has been published in several top SEO publications. You can learn more about her here.

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Obtaining  a Google Analytics account and installing it in your website is not as complicated as it seems! There are also other alternatives to Google Analytics – and much of the information below can be used to install those as well.

Below is a simple tutorial written just for beginners on how to set-up and install Google Analytics on your websites.

CREATE ANALYTICS LOGIN OR SIGN IN
Go to https://www.google.com/analytics/

In the upper right you will see a dropdown labeled Sign In from there you will select click Google Analytics – you should then see the screenshot below if you are not logged into Google

If you have an existing Google account you can login – if you do not you will need to create a new one – then go to the link above to get to analytics

Once you login for the 1st time you should see a page that looks like this

 
SIGN UP FORM
Click the SIGN UP button to begin creating your account

The next screen should look like the one below and you will need to complete the necessary fields.

ACCOUNT NAME: Formal name of your business (we use 2 Dogs Media LLC)

WEBSITE NAME: Actual name of your website (we use 2 Dogs Design)

WEBSITE URL: your full url – you should use www if it is standard in your URL

INDUSTRY CATEGORY: You will want to choose the category that most closely resembles your industry – this is useful as it can provide you a baseline of how similar businesses in your segment are performing compared to you

TIME ZONE: Select your country and time zone

DATA SHARING SETTINGS: We uncheck them all – but this is a personal choice

CLICK GET TRACKING ID

Once you click the get tracking ID button you will see a service agreement that you will need to accept before moving on!

INSTALLING GOOGLE ANALYTICS TRACKING CODE
After accepting the terms, you should be sent to a page that looks like this:

In there you will see the area that says “This is your tracking code. Copy and past it into the code of every page you want to track.”

So you will copy and paste the exact code that is in the box from the starting < script > to the closing < /script >

INSTALLING ON WORDPRESS
On WordPress you can copy and paste the code in the footer.php file just before the < /body > tag. This will ensure that the code is implemented on EVERY page of the website. There are also plugins that you can use but we try to not use plug-ins for simple things like this!

In MOST WordPress installations you can do the following:

1) Go to APPEARANCE > EDITORS in the WordPress administrative area
2) In the right side you should see a file called footer.php – click on that (be sure you keep a copy of the code that is in there in case something goes wrong!)
3) You may see something like this at the bottom of that page:

If so you will copy and paste the code just above that tag so you should have something like this when you are done.

If you cannot access your footer.php file through your admin area as noted above – then you can also do it via FTP. If that is not an option, then you may be better installing a plugin where you can just enter your Google Analytics ID if you do not have a tech person to assist you.

Here is 1 plugin that can simplify your life – again, we do not use it, but it seems well maintained and has good reviews: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-dashboard-for-wp/

INSTALLING ON HTML WEBSITES
If your website is built on HTML – you will need to manually add the code on EVERY page manually.

INSTALLING ON DRUPAL WEBSITES
We do not work with Drupal – but it looks like you can go to HOME > ADMINISTRATION > CONFIGURATION > SYSTEM in your admin area and be able to add your Google Analytics account number for basic tracking. Your Google Analytics account number would be something that looks like this: UA-69964701-1

INSTALLING ON JOOMLA WEBSITES
We do not work with Joomla either, but it looks like it is similar to WordPress in that you will place the code before the < /body > tag in the default.php file.

CONFIRMING INSTALLATION
It may take some time for Google Analytics to begin showing results or even show that it is install properly.

When you go into the TRACKING CODE area – you will see a notice on top of the page that will give you a status. For example, below is a screenshot showing that my tracking is not installed – even though it is! So be patient. If in a day or so you are not seeing any data – or this message is still showing, then you should take a peak at your installation!

And that is all for this tutorial! If you found it helpful, please share it or let us know by leaving a comment below. If you have questions, you can leave those too – we will respond as quickly as we can!

Jill Caren

Jill Caren brings over 12 years of WordPress and SEO experience to help you improve and grow your website. She has spoken at several events on SEO and has been published in several top SEO publications. You can learn more about her here.

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Google Analytics is the standard for learning about the metrics and data that your website is producing and is the most popular option – but there are so many other options to be considered when you are trying to improve your web presence.

Here we will list some of the other options for you to consider with some general information about each.

Google Analytics
COST: Free
TYPE: Hosted
PROS: Free and immense amount of available features for dissecting and analyzing data, conversions, funnels and more
CONS: Bounce rate can be misleading, referral spam is a big issue as is privacy

Visit Google Analytics

Clicky
COST: Free – $37.99 per month
TYPE: Hosted
PROS: Free and immense amount of available features for dissecting and analyzing data, conversions, funnels and more
CONS: Cost for more advanced features

Visit Clicky

Open Web Analytics
COST: Free
TYPE: Open Source – self hosted with a WordPress plugin available
PROS: Free, real time statistics, conversion tracking, funnel data, heat maps,mouse tracking
CONS: Will use lots of resources for some features – may not play well with shared hosting environments and is not updated often since it is open source.

Visit Open Web Analytics

Heap
COST: Free – $599 per month (more for enterprise use)
TYPE: Hosted
PROS: Easy set up and ability to do all standard analytics reporting
CONS: Cost

Visit Heap Analytics

Mint
COST: $30 per site
TYPE: Self hosted
PROS: Visitor count, top referring websites, most popular pages
CONS: Lacks any real ability to create advanced reports

Visit Mint

W3 Counter
COST: Free – $29.99 per month
TYPE: Hosted
PROS: Real time stats, time on site tracking visitor data
CONS: Free version requires a badge on your website and is limited in features and logging

Visit W3 Counter

Statcounter
COST: Free – $399 per month
TYPE: Hosted
PROS: Get data regarding visitors, pages, entrance and exit pages etc.
CONS: No advanced reporting for funnels, conversions or even time on site – very limited functionality

Visit Statcounter

There are many other resources as well – including some that offer more advanced reporting like Woopra and more. We are not including these since most are cost prohibitive to non-profits and medium sized business owners. But if you are really looking to up your game these options can be worth their cost with the improvements you can make to your marketing based on the reports you can receive.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Personally we have been using a combination of Google Analytics and Clicky here at 2 Dogs Media – but have recently added Piwik to test it out and am really beginning to like that too.

While most analytics offer many pros and cons, we really do encourage every website to use Google Analytics at the least, it is fairly easy to setup and install – andalthough there are a few flaws with Google Analytics – it still serves us well for so many reasons.

Jill Caren

Jill Caren brings over 12 years of WordPress and SEO experience to help you improve and grow your website. She has spoken at several events on SEO and has been published in several top SEO publications. You can learn more about her here.

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